How Jallarhorn compares

Six decisions that shape what Jallarhorn is — and what it isn't. Each one is a deliberate trade-off against the way the incumbent tools work. We don't name names here on purpose: the point is the trade-off, not the dunk.

Flat per-device pricing, not per-sensor metering

The incumbent on-prem tool prices by sensor — every interface, every disk volume, every check is a billable unit. Auto-discovery makes the bill grow whether you watched or not. We price by device: a monitored host is a host, irrespective of how many things you check on it. Office is $29/mo for 100 devices, Business is $79/mo for 500 devices, Enterprise is negotiated for the MSPs running thousands of devices across many tenants.

The first commercial cloud-native tools price by host but include a usage envelope (custom metrics, log volume, container counts) that fills the bill out anyway. We don't have that envelope. The Business tier line item on your invoice next month is the same one you see today.

Trade-off: a few customers will use Jallarhorn lightly — five devices, a couple of sensors each — and the flat tier looks "expensive per check." The Free tier (10 devices, card-on-file) exists exactly for those customers; nothing is charged unless device count climbs past 10.

Self-hosted, single executable per platform

Most modern infrastructure-monitoring products are SaaS-only. That works for some teams; it doesn't work for air-gapped networks, regulated environments, or admins who simply prefer their data to stay inside their LAN. Jallarhorn ships native installers for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Same executable on each, same upgrade story, same data shape. The cloud-licensing handshake is one outbound HTTPS heartbeat per hour — no continuous tunnel, no telemetry pipe.

Some incumbent on-prem tools are also self-hosted, but couple their core to a single operating system, IIS, and a proprietary database. Jallarhorn runs on commodity open-source infrastructure that you can already operate.

17 native plugins + 5 custom-sensor frameworks

The incumbent tool ships ~330 named sensor types — most of which are protocol variants (SNMP for switch X, SNMP for switch Y) that collapse to a handful of underlying patterns. Jallarhorn ships 17 native plugins for the protocols that matter (ICMP, TCP, DNS, SSL, HTTP, SNMP v1/v2c/v3, SSH, WinRM, process, disk, database probes, cache probes), plus 5 custom-sensor frameworks (exec-script, http-json, webhook-push, prom-scrape, docker) that cover roughly 70% of the long tail without writing a bespoke plugin for each integration.

For the remaining few percent — vendor-specific binary protocols, niche industrial gear — Business and Enterprise tiers include bespoke-plugin assistance from us. The custom-script framework is good enough that this is rare.

SLA reports + SSO included, not add-ons

One incumbent ships SLA-report generation as a separately-licensed "enterprise monitor" add-on. Another quotes Active Directory integration as an enterprise-only feature. Jallarhorn includes SLA PDF rendering on the Business tier ($79/mo) and LDAP / SAML (Entra ID / Okta / Google Workspace / generic) / OIDC SSO on Business and Enterprise. You should not have to pay twice for the same number.

Signed releases + SPDX SBOMs from day one

Every Jallarhorn release artifact is Cosign-keyless-signed via GitHub OIDC and ships with an SPDX-JSON SBOM. Customers can verify the signature with one command (cosign verify-blob — see Downloads). The SBOM lists every direct dependency, its version, and its license — useful for procurement reviews and air-gap import paperwork. This is a basic supply-chain practice but is not yet universal among monitoring products.

Open standards on the wire

Every layer of the stack uses well-known open-source components you can already operate — or replace — without our help. The Jallarhorn-specific code is a thin layer on top of standard, replaceable building blocks.

Who Jallarhorn is for

• 1–5-technician MSPs running flat-priced retainers on managed networks, where per-sensor metering destroys the unit economics of a small contract.
• SMB sysadmins on Linux, Windows, or mixed networks who want a tool that doesn't require a Windows server, IIS, and an MSSQL license to start.
• Regulated / air-gapped environments where the monitoring data must not leave the network. The license check is a one-line outbound HTTPS heartbeat; everything else stays local.

Who Jallarhorn is NOT for

• Distributed-tracing-first teams. Jallarhorn is infrastructure monitoring (devices, sensors, thresholds, alerts), not APM. If you primarily need flame graphs and span correlation across a 200-service microservice mesh, the cloud APM tools are still the right answer.
• Hyperscale SaaS-only customers who specifically want zero infrastructure to operate. Jallarhorn is self-hosted by design; a hosted offering on jallarhorn.com may follow, but the product is built operations-first.

Migrating from another tool

A staged migration where the existing tool and Jallarhorn run side-by-side; sensors move group-by-group; the legacy install gets retired only after the new one is proven. The full procedure is at Migrate from per-sensor monitoring — auto-discovery sweep, sensor-type mapping, parallel alert evaluation, and a 30-day rollback window.

If a competitor's pricing or feature surface changes tomorrow, this page is unaffected because it makes claims about Jallarhorn, not about them.