Commercial
VMware vSphere (Broadcom)
$8,400+/yr
vSphere Foundation starts at ~$8,400/yr for a 16-core kit. After Broadcom's acquisition, prices increased 300–500% for many customers. Perpetual licenses no longer sold — subscription only. Vendor lock-in is severe.
VS
HardenedHive Open Source
Proxmox VE
$0/yr*
Full-featured enterprise hypervisor. KVM + LXC, web cluster management, live migration, software-defined storage, HA clustering. Enterprise subscription available but completely optional — the free version is production-ready. ✓ Our Choice
Commercial
Okta Workforce Identity
$3,600+/yr
~$10/user/month for SSO. 30 users = $3,600/yr. Add MFA, adaptive auth, and lifecycle management and you're at $15+/user. Azure AD P1 runs $6/user/month — $2,160/yr for 30 users, and that's before the P2 features you actually want.
VS
HardenedHive Open Source
Authentik
$0/yr*
OIDC, SAML, LDAP, MFA, RBAC, user enrollment flows, and SSO for unlimited users. Docker-deployed in your environment. Integrates with virtually every application. No per-seat fees — ever. ✓ Our Choice
Commercial
Datadog
$2,400+/yr
~$15–23/host/month for infrastructure monitoring. 10 hosts = $1,800–2,760/yr. Log management and APM are billed separately. Bills grow quickly as your environment scales. Pricing is notoriously opaque.
VS
HardenedHive Open Source
Prometheus + Grafana + Netdata
$0/yr*
Full metrics pipeline — scraping, alerting, and dashboards — for unlimited hosts. Grafana dashboards rival commercial equivalents. Netdata adds real-time per-second granularity no commercial tool matches at any price. ✓ Our Choice
Commercial
Commercial IDS/IPS (Snort, commercial SIEM)
$2,000+/yr
Commercial IDS/IPS licensing ranges from $2,000 to $10,000+/yr depending on throughput and feature set. SIEM integration adds further cost. Many SMBs skip this entirely because of price — which is exactly what attackers count on.
VS
HardenedHive Open Source
CrowdSec
$0/yr*
Community-powered threat intelligence with active Traefik bouncer integration. Blocks malicious IPs before requests hit your application layer. Shares threat data globally — the more the community uses it, the smarter it gets. ✓ Our Choice
Commercial
Dropbox Business
$2,700+/yr
~$15/user/month for Business plan. 15 users = $2,700/yr. Box Business is similar. These services store your data on someone else's servers — which creates compliance exposure and removes control of your own data.
VS
HardenedHive Open Source
Nextcloud
$0/yr*
Self-hosted file sync, sharing, calendar, contacts, and collaborative document editing. Runs on your infrastructure. Your data never leaves your control. Scales to unlimited users. GDPR-compliant by design. ✓ Our Choice
Bottom Line
The Real Math
For a 25-person business using all five commercial platforms above, the annual licensing tab lands around $18,700+/year. With HardenedHive's open source stack, that cost drops to effectively $0 in licensing — replaced by a one-time build fee and an optional flat-rate maintenance retainer.
$18,700+
Commercial licensing / year
→
~$0
Open source licensing / year
Get Your Custom Assessment →
*Open source software licensing cost. Hardware costs, build/deployment fees, and optional managed maintenance retainer not included. Prices shown are approximate and may vary. Donations to OSS projects strongly encouraged.