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
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
- 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?
- Portainer starts lower at $12/mo, compared to $40/mo for Pulumi.
- 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: Portainer sits mid-market — not the cheapest way to slap a UI on Docker, but far more affordable than heavyweight platforms like Rancher or OpenShift once you factor in the free-forever 3-node tier. They're clearly courting small ops teams and homelabbers first, then trying to convert them into paying customers as node count grows organically. Pulumi: Pulumi sits mid-to-premium in the IaC space, especially compared to Terraform's open-source-first model — they're betting that usage-based credits plus a real enterprise tier will win teams who've outgrown DIY state management and want a vendor that scales pricing with actual cloud footprint. It's less about being the cheap option and more about capturing teams as their infrastructure complexity grows.
Still deciding? See the best Portainer alternatives or the best Pulumi alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
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