Proxmox vs OpenStack
Proxmox VE and OpenStack compared on setup, multi-tenancy, networking, storage, upgrades and cost, and how to choose between them.
Updated
The short answer
Choose Proxmox VE if a small team of administrators runs the virtual machines for everyone else. Choose OpenStack if many teams or customers need their own isolated part of the cloud, and you can staff the engineers to run it.
They are not really the same kind of product. Proxmox VE manages hypervisors. OpenStack builds a cloud, with self-service as its starting point, and asks far more of the people operating it.
Side by side
| Proxmox VE | OpenStack | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A virtualization manager on Debian, with a built-in web UI | A set of cooperating cloud services: Nova, Neutron, Cinder, Keystone and others |
| Workloads | KVM virtual machines and LXC containers | Virtual machines, usually on KVM, and bare metal through Ironic |
| Installing it | An installer on each node, then join the nodes into a cluster | Deployment tooling such as Kolla-Ansible or OpenStack-Ansible, plus a design for the control services |
| Day-to-day users | Administrators | Tenants, through self-service projects with quotas |
| Multi-tenancy | Users, groups, resource pools and permissions | Projects with their own quotas, networks and routers |
| Networking | Linux bridges, SDN zones and VNets, built-in firewall | Per-project networks, routers and floating IPs through Neutron; load balancers through Octavia |
| Storage | ZFS, LVM, Ceph, NFS and more | Cinder block storage, Swift object storage and Manila file shares, often on Ceph |
| Kubernetes | Not included; you build it in VMs | Optional, through Magnum |
| Automation | REST API; Terraform through community-run providers | REST APIs, Heat templates and a long-established Terraform provider |
| Releases | Major versions follow Debian; 9.0 moved to Debian 13 | A release every six months; SLURP releases allow one upgrade a year |
| Licence | AGPLv3 | Apache 2.0 |
| Paid support | Optional subscription per CPU socket | From distribution vendors, or your own team |
What running each one is like
A Proxmox cluster can be running within a day. Every node carries the web interface, so there is no separate management appliance to deploy. High availability needs at least three votes, so three nodes or two plus a QDevice, and shared storage. Since December 2025, Proxmox Datacenter Manager gives one view across several clusters. The usual working model is that an administrator creates a VM and hands it over.
OpenStack is many services, plus the message queue and databases behind them, each with its own configuration. It takes real design work before the first VM runs, and upgrades have to be coordinated across all of it. SLURP releases let you upgrade once a year instead of every six months, which reduces how often you do that work but not the work itself. In return you get a true API-driven cloud, where each team gets its own networks and quotas.
What each one costs
Both are free to download, so the real comparison is support and staff.
Proxmox sells a yearly subscription for each occupied CPU socket, and core count does not change the price. In November 2026 its price list runs from €120 (Community) to €1,100 (Premium) per socket, before VAT, and every node in a cluster has to be on the same level. Ten dual-socket servers on the Standard level, at €550 per socket, come to €11,000 a year.
OpenStack has no licence fee. Its cost is the engineers who design, operate and upgrade it, or a vendor distribution that takes on part of that work. For a small environment, that staffing cost is usually what rules it out.
Choose Proxmox VE if
- A small team of administrators runs the VMs for everyone else.
- You want a working cluster quickly, on ordinary servers.
- You rely on live migration, high availability, LXC containers or built-in Ceph.
- You do not need each team to have its own isolated networks and quotas.
Choose OpenStack if
- Many teams or customers need isolated, self-service projects.
- You are building at a scale that justifies a dedicated platform team.
- You need its breadth: bare metal, file shares and custom drivers or services.
- You must run every part of the control plane inside your own network.
If you want a cloud without running OpenStack
CloudOps sits between the two. It gives servers you own self-service VMs, Kubernetes, private networks, load balancers and S3-compatible storage, from a console, an API and Terraform, and we run the control plane as a service.
It is not a like-for-like replacement for either product. CloudOps has no live migration between hosts, no automatic VM restart on another host, no LXC containers, no Ceph and no OpenStack API. It cannot import Proxmox VMs or OpenStack instances, so you rebuild them. You also cannot install the control plane yourself. If those matter to you, stay with the product that has them.
More detail: CloudOps as a Proxmox alternative and CloudOps as an OpenStack alternative.