Portainer vs Unleash 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
Pay-As-You-Go
- Client side MAU
- Service connections
- API Traffic
- Feature flag metrics
- Support
- Response time SLA
- Uptime commitment
- Payment
- Unlimited feature flags
- Unlimited projects and environments
- Unlimited experiments
- A/B/n testing with flag variants
- Custom activation strategies and targeting
- User segmentation & stickiness
- Organize with tags & naming conventions
- Feature flags across multiple environments & projects
- Export/import feature flags for easy migration
- 25+ SDKs for your favorite language or framework
- Feature flags metrics retained for 90 days
- Impact metrics, automated progression, and safeguards
- Invite team members to collaborate
- Four-eyes approvals for flag changes
- Change request workflows with comments
- Notifications for flag updates
- Feature flag lifecycle management
- Categorize flags for better lifecycle tracking
- Track stale feature flags with a dedicated dashboard
- Mark feature flags as stale and remove unused flags
- Recive stale-on/stale-off event notifications
- Single Sign-On (SSO) with SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect (Azure AD, Okta)
- Role-based access control and custom project roles
- SOC2 Type II & GDPR compliance for enterprise-grade security
- Data residency options in the US or EU
- Login history tracking
- Audit logs with up to 2 years retention
- Admin, Frontend, and Client APIs
- Slack, Teams, Datadog, and Jira integrations
- Generic webhooks for automation
CUSTOM ENTERPRISE
- Client side MAU
- Service connections
- API Traffic
- Feature flag metrics
- Support
- Customer Success
- Response time SLA
- Uptime commitment
- Payment
- Unlimited feature flags
- Unlimited projects and environments
- Unlimited experiments
- A/B/n testing with flag variants
- Custom activation strategies and targeting
- User segmentation & stickiness
- Organize with tags & naming conventions
- Feature flags across multiple environments & projects
- Export/import feature flags for easy migration
- 25+ SDKs for your favorite language or framework
- Feature flags metrics retained for 90 days
- Impact metrics, automated progression, and safeguards
- Invite team members to collaborate
- Four-eyes approvals for flag changes
- Change request workflows with comments
- Notifications for flag updates
- Feature flag lifecycle management
- Categorize flags for better lifecycle tracking
- Track stale feature flags with a dedicated dashboard
- Mark feature flags as stale and remove unused flags
- Recive stale-on/stale-off event notifications
- Single Sign-On (SSO) with SAML 2.0 or OpenID Connect (Azure AD, Okta)
- Role-based access control and custom project roles
- SOC2 Type II & GDPR compliance for enterprise-grade security
- Data residency options in the US or EU
- Login history tracking
- Audit logs with up to 2 years retention
- Admin, Frontend, and Client APIs
- Slack, Teams, Datadog, and Jira integrations
- Generic webhooks for automation
- Hosted Private instance
- Multi-region Enterprise Edge
- Streaming (via Enterprise Edge)
- Access Logs
- IP-based restrictions
Portainer vs Unleash FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- Unleash is the cheaper option, starting at $75/mo vs $105/mo for Portainer.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Portainer has a free plan. Unleash doesn't — though they do offer a free trial.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. Portainer uses hybrid pricing, while Unleash goes with per-seat. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
- 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. Unleash: At $75/mo they're not trying to be the cheapest option in feature flagging — LaunchDarkly starts higher but has more transparent seat-level pricing, while open-source self-hosted Unleash is free, which creates an interesting internal competitor to their own paid tiers. They're positioning the paid cloud product at teams who want managed infrastructure without enterprise procurement overhead.
Still deciding? See the best Portainer alternatives or the best Unleash alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
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We'll monitor pricing changes for Portainer and Unleash and let you know when something moves.