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Comparison

Fabric vs Proxmox

Proxmox VE is the open-source workhorse of the post-VMware world, and it is genuinely cheaper on licence. Fabric is what you buy when you want the same freedom from per-core metering but as a supported appliance rather than a stack you assemble and operate yourself.

Comparing Fabric with Proxmox Virtual Environment (Proxmox VE) (Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH). Updated 2026-09-03. Fabric is in closed beta today. General availability is planned for Q1 2027. Competitor facts are drawn from public documentation and published or verified pricing; corrections welcome.

The short version
  • Proxmox VE is free software; the subscription buys the enterprise repository and a ticket allowance, per CPU socket. Fabric’s Community edition is also free and unlimited; paid classes add the production channel and support, per node.
  • Proxmox is a general-purpose Debian system you compose: storage, networking, backup and fencing are yours to design. Fabric is a read-only signed image with those decisions made — storage policies, per-tenant SDN, verified fencing.
  • Proxmox wins on snapshots, its backup server and the size of its community; Fabric wins on multitenancy, fleet-wide atomic updates and being a product rather than a platform kit.
Pricing at a glance

One dual-socket server, 32 physical cores, fully loaded with VMs (annual, list unless noted)

Fabric — Medium class
$1,800/ node / yr

Fabric Medium class: $1,800 per node per year including business-hours support; Community is free. Proxmox is cheaper on licence at the Standard tier; Fabric’s value is the integrated appliance and the tenant portal, not a lower list price.

Proxmox
~€1,100 (Standard) to ~€2,200 (Premium) / node / yr

Model: Free (AGPL). Optional subscription per CPU socket for the enterprise repository and support: Community €120, Basic €370, Standard €550, Premium €1,100 per socket per year; all nodes in a cluster on the same level.

Basis: two sockets, published subscription prices, 2026.

Dimension by dimension

Fabric vs Proxmox, honestly scored.

Where Proxmox is ahead we say so. Roadmap items are labelled and count against Fabric until they ship.

8 Fabric 2 Proxmox 4 Even 14 dimensions · roadmap items count against Fabric until they ship
Fabric compared with Proxmox, dimension by dimension
DimensionFabricProxmoxEdge
Licensing model Per physical node by node class (five core bands: ≤8 / 9–16 / 17–32 / 33–64 / 65+), every feature in every class, free unlimited Community edition. No per-core meter, no feature matrix.Free and open source. Subscriptions per CPU socket, with cores uncounted; support tiers differ in ticket count and response time.Even
What you install A signed, read-only firmware image per server plus one control-plane appliance. Every node is identical by construction.A Debian-based OS per host that you configure and keep consistent; the cluster is formed from the hosts themselves with no separate manager.Fabric
Storage Distributed block storage pooled across every node, driven by storage policies: ordered device tiers, copies and minimum copies, host- or rack-level failure domains, per-disk IOPS/bandwidth QoS and inline compression with in-place re-pack. No SAN and no storage licence.Bring your own: ZFS, LVM, NFS/iSCSI or its integrated distributed storage, each configured and tuned by the operator. Flexible, but there is no policy layer that tenants consume.Fabric
Networking Per-tenant SDN in the platform: overlay or VLAN-backed virtual networks, dual-stack IPv4/IPv6, built-in DHCP/DNS, micro-segmentation policies, distributed stateless gateways and ARP or BGP announcement of public prefixes. Not a separate SDN licence.Linux bridges and VLANs by default; an SDN feature adds VXLAN/EVPN zones. Firewalling per VM is available; tenant DHCP/DNS and gateways are operator-assembled.Fabric
High availability Acknowledged 10-second heartbeats, a liveness verdict in about 20 seconds, and no restart elsewhere until the failed node is verifiably fenced — powered off through its own BMC and blocked at the storage layer.HA manager restarts VMs after a node is lost, with self-fencing via watchdog. No out-of-band power verification by default, so shared-storage safety depends on the watchdog firing.Fabric
Live migration Live migration with pre-built tenant networking on the target; hibernate and resume on any node.Live migration with or without shared storage, including local-disk migration.Even
Updates and lifecycle One signed A/B firmware image per node carries the hypervisor, storage, networking and agent. A rolling update evacuates each node by live migration, flips its image slot and rolls back automatically if it does not come up healthy.Package updates per node from the enterprise repository, applied and rebooted by the operator; no image-level rollback if a node fails to come back.Fabric
Multitenancy Built in. Tenants, quotas, isolated per-tenant networks with their own DHCP/DNS, and a tenant self-service portal with browser consoles — the same product an MSP bills monthly per node.Users, groups, pools and fine-grained permissions on one management UI — enough for departments, not a tenant portal with isolated networks per customer.Fabric
Snapshots, backup and DRRoadmap Snapshots and cross-site replication are on the roadmap. Third-party backup integration is planned through standard interfaces.VM snapshots, scheduled replication between nodes, and Proxmox Backup Server with deduplication and verification — a real strength.Proxmox
Air-gapped operation Designed for it: local sign-in (password, TOTP, passkeys — never an emailed link), a control plane on your own appliance, signed updates imported and verified on site, no phone-home, no kill-switch.Runs fully offline; you mirror the repositories yourself. Subscription keys validate against Proxmox servers unless offline-activated.Even
Hardware Commodity x86-64, any drive mix, no restrictive compatibility list.Anything Debian runs on — the broadest hardware support of any platform here.Even
Support Business-hours support included in every paid class; 24×7 with 1-hour critical response at +30%; named engineer at +75%.Business-hours only (CET) at every tier; ticket-capped below Premium. 24×7 comes from third-party partners.Fabric
Ecosystem and community Young product; REST API and Prometheus metrics; backup-ISV interfaces on the roadmap.Very large community, extensive documentation, Terraform and Ansible providers, years of production use.Proxmox
Operational skill required Plain-language health (Healthy / Degraded / Critical), disks and control nodes; you do not learn the internals to run it.You are the storage, network and fencing architect. Excellent if you have that team; a liability if you do not.Fabric
Who should pick which

Choose Fabric if… Choose Proxmox if…

Fabric is the better fit for

  • Teams that want Proxmox-style pricing freedom without designing storage, fencing and networking themselves
  • MSPs and hosters who need a tenant portal and per-tenant networks out of the box
  • Fleets where one-click, rollback-safe updates across many sites matter
  • Buyers who need a 24×7 SLA from the vendor

Proxmox is the better fit for

  • Home labs, SMBs and teams with strong Linux skills and one or two clusters
  • Shops that need snapshots and Proxmox Backup Server today
  • Environments built on ZFS or local storage rather than a distributed pool

Moving from Proxmox to Fabric

Proxmox and Fabric both run standard disk-image formats, so VMs move by exporting a disk image and importing it as a Fabric volume. Many teams keep Proxmox for lab and dev and run production tenants on Fabric, where the tenant portal and verified fencing earn their keep.

See migration use cases
FAQ

Fabric vs Proxmox: common questions

On licence, usually yes: Proxmox VE is free and its Standard subscription for a dual-socket node is about €1,100 per year, versus $1,800 for a Fabric Medium node. Fabric’s free Community edition is also unlimited. The difference you pay for is the integrated appliance — storage policies, per-tenant SDN, verified fencing, atomic fleet updates and a 24×7 option.

More comparisons

How Fabric stacks up against the rest.

Fabric vs VMware VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF)Fabric vs Nutanix Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) with the AHV hypervisorFabric vs Scale Computing Scale Computing SC//Platform (HyperCore)Fabric vs VergeIO VergeOS by VergeIOFabric vs Harvester Harvester HCI (SUSE Virtualization)Fabric vs Azure Local Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure Local (formerly Azure Stack HCI)Fabric vs XCP-ng XCP-ng with Xen Orchestra (Vates) All comparisons → Methodology and the full list

Try the whole platform free.

Community is unlimited nodes, every feature, forever. Move to a paid class when you want the production update channel and a support contract.