Head-to-head · verified June 2026
Teleport vs StrongDM Pricing 2026
Teleport Community Edition is free under AGPL for orgs under 100 employees and under $10M revenue. StrongDM is SaaS-only with quote-only pricing. Both target engineering-led teams needing infrastructure access (SSH, Kubernetes, DB, RDP).
Direct Answer
Teleport or StrongDM: which is cheaper in 2026?
Teleport Community is free for qualifying small organisations. StrongDM is quote-only on every edition. Above the Teleport Community Edition cap (100 employees or $10M revenue), Teleport Enterprise is also quote-only and the comparison becomes vendor-to-vendor on quote, not on published rate.
Side by side
| Metric | Teleport | StrongDM |
|---|---|---|
| Cheapest published rate | Free (Community AGPL) | Quote only |
| Eligibility for free / trial | Community: under 100 emp, under $10M rev | 14-day trial, full features |
| Deployment | Self-hosted (Community), Cloud (Enterprise) | SaaS control plane + local relays |
| Access model | Ephemeral certificates (X.509, SSH) | Session-broker proxy |
| SSO on free tier | No (Enterprise-only) | Trial-only |
| Audit log forwarding | Enterprise-only | Platform tier and above |
| Session recording | Enterprise-only | Platform tier and above |
Worked example A: 60-engineer startup
Acme Startup Co. (illustrative example, not a real company) is 60 engineers, $5M revenue, wants infrastructure access for SSH and Kubernetes.
Teleport CommunityFree (qualifies)
StrongDM EssentialsQuote required
Teleport cheaper byEntire StrongDM Essentials quote
Worked example B: 300-engineer mid-market
Acme Mid-Cloud Co. (illustrative example, not a real company) is 300 engineers, $40M revenue, beyond Teleport Community Edition cap.
Teleport Enterprise / CloudQuote required (per-resource)
StrongDM PlatformQuote required (per-user)
ComparisonVendor-to-vendor on quote; run both demos in parallel
When to pick Teleport
- You qualify for Community Edition. Under 100 employees and under $10M revenue, no commercial conversation needed.
- You want self-hosted control plane. Community is fully self-hostable.
- You want ephemeral certificates rather than session proxy. Better fit for native SSH and Kubernetes operations.
When to pick StrongDM
- You want SaaS only. No control plane to operate yourself.
- You want query-level DB audit out of the box. Particularly strong for compliance reporting on database access.
- You are above the Teleport Community Edition cap and both vendors are quote-only anyway.
See also
- Teleport full dossier.
- StrongDM full dossier.
- HashiCorp Boundary: also open-source, paired with Vault.
Sources
Teleport verified at goteleport.com/pricing. StrongDM verified at strongdm.com/pricing. Both on 2026-06-17. Full source list at /sources.
Last verified June 2026 · Next refresh September 2026