Benchmarks / vs. SaaS
Pick the job you’re paying per seat for
Eight things teams buy software for. Choose one and you get the proprietary products in that category, the open-source software we would run instead, and what each costs — where a price exists that we can point at.
Nothing here is a performance measurement. We have measured nothing, so you will find no speed, latency, throughput or capacity figures on this page, and none will appear until we have run something real.
Eight categories we can actually serve
Each one has at least one real open-source project behind it in our catalog. Jobs we cannot cover today — hosted mail, spreadsheets, design tools, payroll — are not on this list, because putting them here would be a promise we could not keep.
Four of the vendors below publish a per-seat price we could read and cite, and those four are linked to the page we read it on with the date we read it. The rest either do not publish one, or publish one we cannot compare like-for-like — geolocated into another currency, annual-commitment only, or injected into the page after it loads. Where that is the case we say so and show nothing. We do not estimate somebody else’s price.
Chat
Team messaging — channels, threads, direct messages, file sharing, search and integrations.
What we would run instead
-
Mattermost
AGPL-3.0 (core; enterprise features commercially licensed)
Team messaging with channels, threads and integrations, plus mobile and desktop clients.
Our catalog’s starting point is the Sparta tier — $9.99/month flat, from our own published VPS pricing. The tier fit is a rough planning estimate, not a capacity guarantee.
-
Zulip
Apache-2.0
Team chat organized around topics inside channels, which keeps long-running discussions readable.
Our catalog’s starting point is the Sparta tier — $9.99/month flat, from our own published VPS pricing. The tier fit is a rough planning estimate, not a capacity guarantee.
The proprietary options — and what we can actually cite
-
SlackPro
US$8.75 per user / month
Slack Pro, billed monthly (US$7.25 per user / month on annual billing) Source: slack.com/pricing, checked September 6, 2026.
-
Microsoft Teamssold within Microsoft 365
No price published here
We could not read a per-user price off Microsoft’s own comparison pages — they did not return content we could parse on repeated attempts, and Microsoft 365 is sold through several plan families with different commitment terms. We are not going to reach for a third-party summary of somebody else’s price. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
Google Chatsold within Google Workspace
No price published here
Google Workspace’s pricing page geolocates and served us Australian-dollar rates with a time-limited promotional discount layered on top, so we have no clean US-dollar list price for a specific tier to cite. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
DiscordNitro / server subscriptions
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
OlympiaMattermost or Zulip on your own server
$9.99 / month, flat
The Sparta VPS tier, priced per server rather than per person: adding people does not change the price. How many people a given tier comfortably serves is a separate question, and we have not measured it. Source: our own published VPS pricing, configurator. Managed hosting, where we operate the application rather than just the machine, is quoted per engagement and has no published price.
The arithmetic. At list price, Slack Pro for 25 seats is US$218.75 a month (25 × US$8.75). One Sparta VPS is $9.99 a month, a price that does not move with headcount. That is arithmetic on two published prices and nothing else — it excludes your own administration time, the one-off migration and any storage you add, and it asserts nothing about whether that tier comfortably serves 25 people, which we have not measured.
Where the swap is weakest. Mattermost and Zulip are not Slack. The third-party app catalog is far smaller, Huddles and Clips have no like-for-like equivalent, and the desktop and mobile clients are less polished. Expect a period where people notice the difference.
Docs & wiki
Written knowledge — documents, a page tree, spaces, permissions and search over the lot.
What we would run instead
-
Wiki.js
AGPL-3.0
Wiki and documentation platform with Markdown and visual editors, page trees and pluggable authentication.
Our catalog’s starting point is the Ionia tier — $4.99/month flat, from our own published VPS pricing. The tier fit is a rough planning estimate, not a capacity guarantee.
The proprietary options — and what we can actually cite
-
NotionPlus / Business
No price published here
Notion’s pricing page renders one set of figures behind a “Pay monthly / Pay yearly” control, with no “billed monthly” or “billed annually” qualifier attached to either number, while the same page advertises a yearly saving. Both statements cannot be true of the same figure, so we cannot say what billing period it belongs to. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
ConfluenceStandard / Premium
No price published here
Atlassian prices Confluence through an interactive user-count estimator rather than a flat per-user list price, and the plan pricing did not render as static text we could read on the page itself. A per-user figure that changes with the tier band you land in is not something we can honestly reduce to one number. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
CodaPro / Team
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
Google Docssold within Google Workspace
No price published here
Google Workspace’s pricing page geolocates and served us Australian-dollar rates with a promotional discount layered on top. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
OlympiaWiki.js on your own server
$4.99 / month, flat
The Ionia VPS tier, priced per server rather than per person: adding people does not change the price. How many people a given tier comfortably serves is a separate question, and we have not measured it. Source: our own published VPS pricing, configurator. Managed hosting, where we operate the application rather than just the machine, is quoted per engagement and has no published price.
No arithmetic here. We have no sourced per-seat price for any vendor in this category, so there is no sum for us to show you. Our own figure stands on its own: a flat monthly server price that does not move with headcount.
Where the swap is weakest. Wiki.js has none of Notion’s databases, its template gallery or its AI features, and it edits a page at a time with version history rather than several people typing in the same document at once. If your team runs its actual work inside Notion databases rather than writing documents, this is a poor swap and you should not make it on price.
Drive & files
File sync and share — a shared drive, desktop and mobile clients, sharing links and permissions.
What we would run instead
-
Nextcloud
AGPL-3.0
File sync and share with collaborative editing, calendars, contacts and a large app ecosystem.
Our catalog’s starting point is the Sparta tier — $9.99/month flat, from our own published VPS pricing. The tier fit is a rough planning estimate, not a capacity guarantee.
-
Paperless-ngx
GPL-3.0
Document management for scanned paper — OCR, full-text search, tagging and correspondent tracking.
Our catalog’s starting point is the Sparta tier — $9.99/month flat, from our own published VPS pricing. The tier fit is a rough planning estimate, not a capacity guarantee.
-
Immich
AGPL-3.0
Photo and video backup with mobile apps, albums and machine-learning search.
Our catalog’s starting point is the Colossus tier — $18.99/month flat, from our own published VPS pricing. The tier fit is a rough planning estimate, not a capacity guarantee.
The proprietary options — and what we can actually cite
-
Google Drivesold within Google Workspace
No price published here
Google Workspace’s pricing page geolocates and served us Australian-dollar rates with a time-limited promotional discount layered on top, so we have no clean US-dollar list price for a specific tier to cite. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
DropboxStandard / Advanced
No price published here
Dropbox’s pricing page geolocates. From here it shows Australian-dollar annual pricing rather than a US-dollar monthly list price, so we have no like-for-like figure, and we will not convert or estimate one. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
BoxBusiness tiers
No price published here
Box’s public pricing page lists its plan tiers without a per-tier price on the page — it advertises a “from” figure and shows the rest during signup. With no published per-tier number to point at, there is nothing we can honestly cite. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
OneDrivesold within Microsoft 365
No price published here
We could not read a per-user price off Microsoft’s own comparison pages on repeated attempts, and Microsoft 365 is sold through several plan families with different commitment terms. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
iCloud DriveiCloud+ storage plans
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
OlympiaNextcloud or Paperless-ngx on your own server (Immich from $18.99)
$9.99 / month, flat
The Sparta VPS tier, priced per server rather than per person: adding people does not change the price. How many people a given tier comfortably serves is a separate question, and we have not measured it. Source: our own published VPS pricing, configurator. Managed hosting, where we operate the application rather than just the machine, is quoted per engagement and has no published price.
No arithmetic here. We have no sourced per-seat price for any vendor in this category, so there is no sum for us to show you. Our own figure stands on its own: a flat monthly server price that does not move with headcount.
Where the swap is weakest. Nextcloud does sync and share well. Real-time co-editing runs through a separate document server you also have to operate, desktop-client sync is less forgiving than Dropbox’s, and storage growth is yours to plan for — on this category it is the binding constraint, not CPU or memory. We publish no capacity figure because we have not measured one.
CRM
Contacts, companies, deals and a pipeline the sales team actually updates.
What we would run instead
-
EspoCRM
AGPL-3.0
Contacts, accounts, leads, opportunities and a sales pipeline, with email integration and custom fields.
Our catalog’s starting point is the Sparta tier — $9.99/month flat, from our own published VPS pricing. The tier fit is a rough planning estimate, not a capacity guarantee.
The proprietary options — and what we can actually cite
-
SalesforceSales Cloud Starter Suite
US$25 per user / month
Sales Cloud Starter Suite, billed monthly or annually. The next tier up, Pro Suite, is published at US$100 per user / month billed annually. Source: salesforce.com/sales/pricing, checked September 6, 2026.
-
HubSpotSales Hub Starter
US$20 per seat / month
Sales Hub Starter, billed monthly (US$7 per seat / month billed annually). Sales Hub Professional is published at US$100 per seat / month billed monthly, plus a one-off US$1,500 onboarding fee. Source: hubspot.com/pricing/sales, checked September 6, 2026.
-
PipedriveEssential / Advanced
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
Zoho CRMStandard / Professional
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
OlympiaEspoCRM on your own server
$9.99 / month, flat
The Sparta VPS tier, priced per server rather than per person: adding people does not change the price. How many people a given tier comfortably serves is a separate question, and we have not measured it. Source: our own published VPS pricing, configurator. Managed hosting, where we operate the application rather than just the machine, is quoted per engagement and has no published price.
The arithmetic. At list price, Salesforce Starter Suite for 10 seats is US$250 a month (10 × US$25) and HubSpot Sales Hub Starter for 10 seats is US$200 a month (10 × US$20). One Sparta VPS is $9.99 a month. Again: arithmetic on published prices, excluding your admin time and the one-off migration, and asserting nothing about what that tier comfortably serves.
Where the swap is weakest. EspoCRM is a CRM and nothing more. Reporting and forecasting are basic next to Sales Cloud, marketing automation is absent, EspoCRM’s advanced reporting and workflow packs are sold separately and are not in the open-source image we deploy, and there is nothing like the partner ecosystem around Salesforce and HubSpot. It suits a team tracking a pipeline. It does not suit a revenue-operations function, and if your CRM is wired into a dozen other systems this is the category where a migration hurts most.
Helpdesk
A shared inbox for customers — tickets, email, live chat, macros and agent assignment.
What we would run instead
-
Chatwoot
MIT (core; the enterprise directory is commercially licensed)
Omnichannel customer support — live chat, email and social inboxes in one shared agent view.
Our catalog’s starting point is the Sparta tier — $9.99/month flat, from our own published VPS pricing. The tier fit is a rough planning estimate, not a capacity guarantee.
-
Zammad
AGPL-3.0
Ticketing and helpdesk with email, chat and phone channels and a strong reporting module.
Our catalog’s starting point is the Colossus tier — $18.99/month flat, from our own published VPS pricing. The tier fit is a rough planning estimate, not a capacity guarantee.
The proprietary options — and what we can actually cite
-
ZendeskSuite tiers
No price published here
Zendesk publishes its per-agent rates on annual billing only — the pricing page shows no monthly-billing figure at all, and its own FAQ says monthly costs more without saying how much more. An annual-commitment rate is not like-for-like against a month-to-month server price. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
IntercomEssential / Advanced
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
FreshdeskGrowth / Pro
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
Help ScoutStandard / Plus
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
OlympiaChatwoot on your own server (Zammad from $18.99)
$9.99 / month, flat
The Sparta VPS tier, priced per server rather than per person: adding people does not change the price. How many people a given tier comfortably serves is a separate question, and we have not measured it. Source: our own published VPS pricing, configurator. Managed hosting, where we operate the application rather than just the machine, is quoted per engagement and has no published price.
No arithmetic here. We have no sourced per-seat price for any vendor in this category, so there is no sum for us to show you. Our own figure stands on its own: a flat monthly server price that does not move with headcount.
Where the swap is weakest. Not everything demoed as Chatwoot is in the free core — its enterprise directory is separately licensed. Zammad’s full-text search wants Elasticsearch alongside it, which is what pushes its tier up. Neither ships Zendesk’s reporting depth or its app marketplace, and neither comes with a contractual response time for you to point at when a customer escalates.
Work management
Projects, issues, cycles and roadmaps — the board the team works off.
What we would run instead
-
Plane
AGPL-3.0
Project and issue tracking with cycles, modules and roadmaps.
Our catalog’s starting point is the Sparta tier — $9.99/month flat, from our own published VPS pricing. The tier fit is a rough planning estimate, not a capacity guarantee.
The proprietary options — and what we can actually cite
-
AsanaStarter
US$13.49 per user / month
Asana Starter, billed monthly (US$10.99 per user / month billed annually). Asana Advanced is published at US$30.49 per user / month billed monthly. Source: asana.com/pricing, checked September 6, 2026.
-
monday.comBasic / Standard / Pro
No price published here
monday.com’s pricing page geolocates. From here it serves Australian-dollar per-seat rates on annual billing across four separate products with different rates. We do not convert currencies and we do not average across product lines. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
JiraStandard / Premium
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
LinearBasic / Business
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
TrelloStandard / Premium
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
OlympiaPlane on your own server
$9.99 / month, flat
The Sparta VPS tier, priced per server rather than per person: adding people does not change the price. How many people a given tier comfortably serves is a separate question, and we have not measured it. Source: our own published VPS pricing, configurator. Managed hosting, where we operate the application rather than just the machine, is quoted per engagement and has no published price.
The arithmetic. At list price, Asana Starter for 20 seats is US$269.80 a month (20 × US$13.49). One Sparta VPS is $9.99 a month. Arithmetic on published prices only — it excludes your admin time and the one-off migration, and asserts nothing about what that tier comfortably serves.
Where the swap is weakest. Plane covers issues, cycles and roadmaps. It does not have Jira’s workflow engine, Asana’s portfolio and goals layer, or the automation rules a lot of teams have quietly built their process around. Moving those rules is usually the expensive part of this migration, not moving the tickets.
Video calls
Meetings in the browser — audio, video, screen share, and recording where you need it.
What we would run instead
-
Jitsi Meet
Apache-2.0
Video conferencing that runs in the browser with no account required, including recording and streaming options.
Our catalog’s starting point is the Colossus tier — $18.99/month flat, from our own published VPS pricing. The tier fit is a rough planning estimate, not a capacity guarantee.
The proprietary options — and what we can actually cite
-
ZoomPro / Business
No price published here
Zoom injects its plan prices client-side, so the published figure is not present in the page we can read, and the rate visibly varies by region, by currency, and by whether you are a new or an existing signed-in customer. There is no single number we could put next to ours and defend. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
Google Meetsold within Google Workspace
No price published here
Google Workspace’s pricing page geolocates and served us Australian-dollar rates with a promotional discount layered on top. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
Microsoft Teamssold within Microsoft 365
No price published here
We could not read a per-user price off Microsoft’s own comparison pages on repeated attempts. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
WebexMeet / Suite
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
OlympiaJitsi Meet on your own server
$18.99 / month, flat
The Colossus VPS tier, priced per server rather than per person: adding people does not change the price. How many people a given tier comfortably serves is a separate question, and we have not measured it. Source: our own published VPS pricing, configurator. Managed hosting, where we operate the application rather than just the machine, is quoted per engagement and has no published price.
No arithmetic here. We have no sourced per-seat price for any vendor in this category, so there is no sum for us to show you. Our own figure stands on its own: a flat monthly server price that does not move with headcount.
Where the swap is weakest. This is the category where self-hosting is hardest, and we will say so plainly. The Jitsi video bridge is CPU- and bandwidth-bound, and call size rather than headcount decides the server — we publish no participant-count figure because we have not measured one. Large webinars, cloud recording at scale and telephone dial-in are where it stops being a fair swap.
Scheduling
Booking pages, availability rules, calendar sync and round-robin for a team.
What we would run instead
-
Cal.com
MIT
Scheduling and booking pages with calendar sync, routing forms and team round-robin.
Our catalog’s starting point is the Sparta tier — $9.99/month flat, from our own published VPS pricing. The tier fit is a rough planning estimate, not a capacity guarantee.
The proprietary options — and what we can actually cite
-
CalendlyStandard / Teams
No price published here
Calendly’s pricing page defaults to annual billing and shows only that rate per seat, with a percentage saving rather than a separate monthly-billing figure. Reading it twice produced two different answers about which billing period the displayed price belongs to. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
Acuity SchedulingEmerging / Growing
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
SavvyCalBasic / Premium
No price published here
We have not sourced this vendor’s price. No figure is shown rather than a guessed one.
-
Google Calendar appointment bookingsold within Google Workspace
No price published here
Google Workspace’s pricing page geolocates and served us Australian-dollar rates with a promotional discount layered on top. Checked September 6, 2026.
-
OlympiaCal.com on your own server
$9.99 / month, flat
The Sparta VPS tier, priced per server rather than per person: adding people does not change the price. How many people a given tier comfortably serves is a separate question, and we have not measured it. Source: our own published VPS pricing, configurator. Managed hosting, where we operate the application rather than just the machine, is quoted per engagement and has no published price.
No arithmetic here. We have no sourced per-seat price for any vendor in this category, so there is no sum for us to show you. Our own figure stands on its own: a flat monthly server price that does not move with headcount.
Where the swap is weakest. Cal.com replaces the booking page, not the calendar. It sits next to Google Calendar or Exchange and syncs with them — if what you actually want to stop paying for is the mail-and-calendar suite itself, this category does not do that.
Product names, logos and brands named on this page are the property of their respective owners and are used here only to identify the products being compared. Olympia is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a partner of any of them, and does not develop their software. Olympia hosts and customizes third-party open-source software; it does not develop it either.
Both sides of it
We sell the server, so the column on the left is the easy one to write. The column on the right is the one worth reading. If anything in it is a dealbreaker for you, it is a dealbreaker — we would rather you found out here than three weeks into a migration.
The case for
Why you’d pick us
- The bill stops tracking headcount. Per-seat pricing multiplies every time you hire. A server is priced per server: the Sparta tier is $9.99 a month, and that figure does not move when you hire. Our VPS tiers run from $4.99 to $89.99 a month, published and flat — those are our own prices, listed on our configurator.
- It is the real upstream project, not a fork of one. A one-click install puts the unmodified upstream release on your tier — same repository, same license, same community. There is nothing proprietary in the middle for you to become dependent on.
- You keep root, and you pick the region. Twelve regions across six continents, all offered on the same footing. The data sits on a machine you control, in a country you chose.
- Getting your data out is a route we support, not a threat we make. Standard open-source software in standard formats. Export it and host it elsewhere at any point, without asking us and without a retention call.
- We will do the move, and the quote costs nothing. Exports, mapping channels and permissions across, recreating accounts against your single sign-on, rebuilding the integrations, then a cutover window with both systems running. Scoped in a conversation and quoted in writing before you commit to anything.
- It can be changed. Custom fields, a workflow that matches how you actually work, the integration that would otherwise be a sixth subscription — built on top of the open-source project rather than bolted onto a black box.
- You can consolidate several tools onto one machine. Our catalog’s rough starting point for running a few of these applications side by side is the Colossus tier at $18.99 a month. That is a planning estimate from our own sizing notes, not a capacity guarantee, and we have not measured it.
- You do not have to move the whole company on day one. One team, a contractor group, or the internal-tools channel where per-seat pricing hurts most, while everyone else stays where they are.
The case against
Why you wouldn’t
- You are taking on an operations job. On the deploy-it-yourself track we look after the server — patching, backups, uptime. The application on top of it is yours: its version upgrades, its own backups, its configuration, its bad evenings. We do sell managed hosting where we operate the application too, but it is quoted per engagement and there is no published price for it you can read off a page today.
- We hold no compliance certification. No SOC 2, no ISO 27001, no completed third-party penetration test — our own security page says so in those words. If your procurement process needs a report, we cannot hand you one, and no amount of cost saving changes that.
- There is no uptime SLA and no uptime history. We do not run automated uptime monitoring yet, which is why our status page carries no percentage and no incident log. Most vendors listed above publish contractual availability terms and service credits. We do not.
- The feature gaps are real, and some of them are dealbreakers. Mattermost is not Slack. EspoCRM is not Salesforce. Jitsi is not Zoom. Integration catalogs are far smaller, the desktop and mobile clients are less polished, and the one feature holding your workflow together may simply not exist. Every category above carries a “where the swap is weakest” note for exactly this reason — read yours before you go any further.
- Somebody on your side has to be technical. A one-click install does not remove DNS, TLS certificates, outbound mail so the application can send anything, single sign-on, storage that grows, or periodically proving that a backup actually restores. If nobody on your team wants that job, buy the managed track or stay where you are — do not buy this and hope.
- Migration takes real time, and it is a cost the monthly figure does not contain. Exporting history, mapping channels and permissions, recreating accounts, rebuilding bots and integrations — usually the longest part — and running both systems in parallel through a cutover. It is one-off and it is real. So is the cost of moving back if it does not work out.
- Small teams are usually better off subscribing. Per-seat pricing is cheap at low headcount, and a server’s price does not shrink when your headcount does. Below a certain team size the subscription simply wins on price. Any comparison of ours that fails to say so is broken, so we are saying it here rather than at the bottom of a footnote.
- Provisioning is manual, within 24 hours. Orders are fulfilled by a person, not an API. If you need a server ninety seconds from now at three in the morning, that is not what we do.
- We are a party to this comparison. We sell the server on one side of it. Every price above is either linked to the vendor’s own page with the date we read it, or marked as not published. Check them, and substitute your own assumptions where ours do not fit.