How Eclipse hawkBit and balena differ on target hardware, rollback, deployment and cost.
| Eclipse hawkBit | balena | |
|---|---|---|
| Type | OSS update server | Container fleet |
| Targets | Any (device-agnostic) | Embedded Linux |
| Deployment | Self-hosted | SaaS + self-hosted (openBalena) |
| Rollback | None built in — the device client decides | Container-level: previous image kept, restarted on failure |
| How it works | A rollout and artifact management server, deliberately not a device agent. It handles targets, distribution sets, staged rollouts and reporting over a plain HTTP protocol; how the device applies the update, and whether it can roll back, is entirely your side of the contract. | 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* | Free | First 10 devices free; from $159/mo |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | EPL-2.0 | openBalena (AGPL-3.0) |
| Best for | Full control with no per-device fee | Fleets whose teams already think in Docker |
Choose Eclipse hawkBit for full control with no per-device fee. Choose balena for fleets whose teams already think in docker.
* Published list pricing (vendor pricing pages, August 2026).