Portainer vs Pulumi Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
Starter
- Community support
- Max of 16 vCPUs per node
- The Starter plan(s) are available via online purchases only. Purchases cannot be made through Resellers.
Scale
- 9x5 next business day support
- Max of 24 vCPUs per node
- Vendor onboarding
- Purchases via Resellers
Enterprise
- Prioritized 9x5 next business day support
- Choose from 32 vCPUs - Unlimited vCPUs per node
- Production and Non-Production Node Options
- Customizable License Agreement
- Assigned Support Engineer
- Security Assessment Report
- TAA Compliance Certificate
- Managed Platform Services Option
- 24/7 Support Option
IIoT Professional
- All Business Edition features
- Onboarding assistance included
- 9×5 support
- Click-through license agreement
- Professional Services available (add-on)
- Async edge agent: offline-safe operation
- Fleet grouping and staged rollouts
IIoT Enterprise
- Everything in Professional
- Industrial App Portal ; included
- Prioritized 9×5 support
- Assigned support engineer
- Customizable license agreement
- Vendor onboarding available
- Multi-instance (prod, dev, test)
- Security assessment report
- Professional Services available (add-on)
Home & Student
- All Portainer Business Edition features
- Up to 15 nodes
- Docker, Swarm, and Kubernetes support
- Full RBAC and access control
- GitOps and app templates
- Community support via GitHub Discussions
Individual
- 1 user
- IaC state management
- Unlimited projects, stacks, and environments
- Unlimited updates and history
- Up to 500 workflow minutes
- Pulumi Neo with 5M free tokens/month
Team
- Up to 10 users
- Secure collaboration and CI/CD
- Neo code reviews and Slack integration
- Resource search
- OIDC and org access tokens
- Webhooks
- Automatic secrets rotation
- Community support
Enterprise
Popular- Unlimited users
- SAML/SSO and RBAC
- Neo scheduled tasks
- Internal developer platform (IDP)
- Audit logs
- Drift detection and remediation
- Time-to-live stacks
- Customer-managed keys
- Priority feature requests
- 12x5 Enterprise Support available
Business Critical
- Self-hosting available
- Built-in compliance (NIST, PCI, and more)
- Automatic group & user sync (SCIM)
- Audit logs export
- Volume pricing and invoicing
- Private Slack and Professional Services
- 24x7 Enterprise Support available
Portainer vs Pulumi FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- Pulumi is the cheaper option, starting at $40/mo vs $105/mo for Portainer.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Both offer free plans, so you can try each without paying. Start with whichever fits your workflow better and upgrade when you hit the limits.
- How do they charge?
- Both use a hybrid model, so the comparison is straightforward — it comes down to features and limits at each price point.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Portainer: At ~$105-$209/mo for self-serve tiers, Portainer is positioned as an accessible mid-market option in the container management space — cheaper than enterprise Kubernetes platforms but priced above pure open-source alternatives. They're clearly targeting DevOps and infrastructure teams at growth-stage companies who've outgrown DIY but aren't ready for Rancher or OpenShift pricing. Pulumi: Pulumi is positioning as a premium alternative to Terraform — more developer-friendly, cloud-agnostic, and priced to reflect that. At $40/mo for Team they're accessible, but the per-resource-hour billing means costs can climb fast at scale, putting them closer to mid-market than budget territory.
Still deciding? See the best Portainer alternatives or the best Pulumi alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
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