OpenStack
The open-source cloud operating system behind most sovereign and telco clouds: unmatched breadth, but you are building a cloud, not installing a product.
OpenStack pools compute, storage and networking behind common APIs, with Keystone multi-tenancy, Horizon/Skyline dashboards, Heat orchestration, an official Terraform provider and Ansible collection, and telemetry/rating via Ceilometer, Gnocchi and CloudKitty. The 2026.1 "Gazpacho" release (April 2026) added parallel live migration and vTPM live migration aimed squarely at ex-VMware operators, and the OpenInfra Foundation's move into the Linux Foundation (July 2025) has stabilised governance.
The software is free; what you pay for is a distribution and support (Red Hat, Canonical, Mirantis, all quote-based) or the people to run it. For most SMB and mid-market buyers a packaged distribution is the practical way to consume it.
Pros
- +No licence cost; richest hypervisor, storage and networking driver ecosystem
- +Large multi-vendor community and sovereign-cloud momentum in Europe
- +Full multi-tenancy, quotas and rating/chargeback components available
Cons
- −Operational complexity and skills requirement far above any packaged platform here
- −Distribution support is expensive at scale; billing/invoicing needs add-ons
- −VMware driver deprecated; migration tooling is vendor- or third-party-supplied
Pricing
Software
$0/yr · annual commitment
Month-to-month: not published
- ✓Apache 2.0, free; distributions quote-based
Specifications
| Rating | 3.6 |
| Pricing and plans | |
|---|---|
| Licensing | Open source + paid support |
| Metering / billing | ✓ |
| Features | |
| Self-service | ✓ |
| VMware migration | No |
| Support | |
| Backends | KVM / QEMU, Ironic bare metal, LXC +1 |
| Multi-backend | ✓ |
| IaC | Terraform / OpenTofu (official), Ansible, Heat +1 |
Researched and drafted with AI assistance; reviewed and approved by Tim Meredith. How we use AI
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