How Foundries.io and balena differ on target hardware, rollback, deployment and cost.
| Foundries.io | balena | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | Managed Linux platform | Container fleet |
| Targets | Linux + Zephyr | Embedded Linux |
| Deployment | SaaS (FoundriesFactory) | SaaS + self-hosted (openBalena) |
| Rollback | OSTree-based atomic updates with rollback | Container-level: previous image kept, restarted on failure |
| How it works | FoundriesFactory gives you a per-customer Linux build with CI, signed OSTree updates, secure boot and a maintained CVE stream. You are buying ongoing platform maintenance — the part that quietly consumes an embedded team a year after launch — rather than an update tool. | 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. |
| Pricing* | Subscription, tiered by devices | First 10 devices free; from $159/mo |
| Free tier | No | Yes |
| Open source | Linux microPlatform (open) | openBalena (AGPL-3.0) |
| Best for | Teams who do not want to maintain a distro | Fleets whose teams already think in Docker |
Choose Foundries.io for teams who do not want to maintain a distro. Choose balena for fleets whose teams already think in docker.
* Published list pricing (vendor pricing pages, August 2026).