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.
| Portainer pricing | Pulumi pricing | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $1045/mo | $40/mo |
| Number of plans | 3 | 4 |
| Free plan | — | |
| Free trial | — | |
| Pricing model | hybrid | hybrid |
Price is one row. To weigh the features too, use our feature comparison template →
Starter
- 5, 10, or 15 nodes
- Community support
- Up to 16 vCPUs per node
- Online purchase only, not via resellers
Scale
Popular- 5 to 25 nodes
- 9x5 next business day support
- Up to 24 vCPUs per node
- Vendor onboarding
- Available through resellers
Enterprise
- 32 to unlimited vCPUs per node
- Prioritized 9x5 support, 24/7 option
- Production and non-production nodes
- Customizable license agreement
- Assigned support engineer
- Security assessment report
- TAA compliance certificate
- Managed platform services option
Free
- 1 user
- IaC state management
- Pulumi Deployments
- Basic Pulumi ESC
- Unlimited projects, stacks, and environments
- Unlimited updates and history
- Up to 500 workflow minutes
Essentials
- Unlimited users
- Secure collaboration and CI/CD
- Neo code reviews and Slack integration
- Resource Search and Property Search
- OIDC and org access tokens
- Webhooks
- Automatic secrets rotation
- Policy results in advisory mode
- Service-level objectives, an uptime commitment, and support tickets
Pro
Popular- SAML/SSO and advanced RBAC
- Organization-managed policy enforcement
- Preventative policies
- Custom policy packs
- Neo scheduled tasks
- Internal developer platform (IDP)
- Automated audit log export
- Drift detection and remediation
- Time-to-live stacks
- Customer-managed keys
Enterprise
- Self-hosting available
- Conformance packs for CIS, CIS Kubernetes, CMMC, HITRUST, ISO 27001, NIST, and PCI DSS
- Automatic group & user sync (SCIM)
- Unlimited custom policy packs
- Policy remediation
- Contract pricing and invoicing
Portainer vs Pulumi FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- Pulumi is the cheaper option, starting at $40/mo vs $1045/mo for Portainer.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Pulumi has a free plan. Portainer doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
- 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 four-figures-a-month before you even hit Enterprise, Portainer is priced for infrastructure teams at mid-size to large companies, not solo devs or small startups — this isn't competing with free/cheap container UIs, it's going after teams who'll pay for a polished management layer across many nodes. The 15-node, 45-day extended trial for Enterprise signals they're chasing larger deployments where the sales cycle is longer and the node count matters more than feature checklists. Pulumi: Pulumi sits mid-to-premium in the IaC tooling space — free and open-source alternatives exist, but Pulumi's charging for the managed platform layer (state management, policy, collaboration) on top of the actual engine. They're not competing on being cheap; they're betting teams will pay for convenience and governance once infra complexity outpaces what a free tier or DIY state backend can handle.
Still deciding? See the best Portainer alternatives or the best Pulumi alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
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