How balena and Golioth differ on target hardware, rollback, deployment and cost.
| balena | Golioth | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Container fleet | MCU cloud |
| Targets | Embedded Linux | MCU (Zephyr-first) |
| Deployment | SaaS + self-hosted (openBalena) | SaaS |
| Rollback | Container-level: previous image kept, restarted on failure | Manual release targeting; rollback by publishing a prior artifact |
| How it works | balenaOS runs a container engine, so a release is a set of container images rather than a system image. Updates are pulled with binary deltas and applied per service, which makes them small and quick — at the cost of running a container runtime on every device. | One consumption meter instead of plans: $0.25 per connected device per month, $0.0095 per megabyte of OTA traffic, and separate rates for logs and streaming data. Every account gets the same features, which makes small fleets cheap and makes cost forecasting arithmetic rather than negotiation. |
| Pricing* | First 10 devices free; from $159/mo | $50 free credits; $0.25/device/mo + $0.0095/MB |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | openBalena (AGPL-3.0) | Device SDK (Apache-2.0) |
| Best for | Fleets whose teams already think in Docker | Zephyr projects that want predictable unit cost |
Choose balena for fleets whose teams already think in docker. Choose Golioth for zephyr projects that want predictable unit cost.
* Published list pricing (vendor pricing pages, August 2026).