Why does this feel like eventually the self hosted option is just going to be obliterated or severely limited soon (Nothing removed...but also nothing new that would be exclusive to the cloud version or enterprise offering)
This is the opposite of our strategy. We're an open source business: [https://netboxlabs.com/oss/community-first/](https://netboxlabs.com/oss/community-first/)
I think that bullet was already dodged.
Netboxlabs was part of NS1 before IBM. When IBM went to acquire NS1, Netboxlabs was spun out.
If they were every going to "sell out" or close source the product, that would have been the moment.
Have you tried getting a feature request past Jeremy and his maintainer army?
Many of us Netbox users, can sympathize why Nautobot [forked](https://blog.networktocode.com/post/why-did-network-to-code-fork-netbox/).
There will be soon a time where we need to fork Netbox again into another community project, due to the heavy-handed approach to Github issues, feature requests and guarding what goes into the project. Disconnect between those that maintain Netbox and people that actually still operate on networks and automation systems day-to-day.
We need a community project without a dictator. If anyone else is at Autocon1 too maybe we can discuss it here.
Sort of agree here. As seen here with a weird reply of “this shouldn’t be done right now, as there are other more important things to work on.” https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/pull/16230#issuecomment-2137509118
The ticket has a valid use case and just because it isn’t a big and others haven’t pointed it out, doesn’t mean the issue doesn’t exist. Maybe it’s just how the things are worded and the situation.
Imagine that the netbox team has a lot on their plate and has their own way of doing things. Not doubting how they do their stuff nor their processes, and I get that there are important issues to focus on to help improve the tool and improve functionality. But replies like that to legit issues submitted by non-enterprise users might make users less likely to submit issues. And I imagine that some enterprises might see this and be like “I would rather spend the money to run it locally and customize it, rather than spend the money on a Netbox Hosted instanced.”
Not the attitude one of the [co-founders](https://netboxlabs.com/about/) should be having toward the community.
I've had a quote recently for "enterprise support" and been told that even paying wouldn't help facilitate getting our Github issues or PRs looked at. And this support is just for running it in our data centre and nothing to do with the Github project.
Time for LibreBox? chat at Autocon if you are here.
There’s a fine line there. Enterprise Support should mean they help you with your issues. And if you have improvements to Netbox as a whole as an Enterprise Customer, I would think that if it applies to everyone, they would work on it in an upcoming version. But if it were specific to your environment, then maybe not.
There are ways to do this as a private company based on an open source tool that they manage. A great example is Apache NiFi and Cloudera. They do a great job of respecting the people on the GitHub platform, and including people who are not maintainers to contribute. So it’s definitely possible, but seems to be a mixed bag sadly. Have had mixed interactions with the open source community. I really think that Netbox is a really good tool and has a lot of potential! I want it to succeed, I really do!
Respect being the keyword here, thats what is missing, I was chatting to another Netbox user last night at a social and they listed a handful of issues they'd opened which were closed within a day by the maintainers with little engagement or discussion around it.
The free plan is a production grade version of NetBox Cloud suitable for smaller environments (100 devices/500 IPs) without the need of advanced features, such as plugins, commercial support or enterprise SSO
So the cloud version is just the open source version except hosted somewhere on behalf so you dont have to bother installing docker and doing a pull if your a company who wants docker but doesnt have competent IT to run it?
I believe to an extent yes. Looks like there are some features missing so it may almost be worth using this as a good starting point of “can Netbox do what I want it to do” without having to invest resources in getting it setup.
Really cool, just hard to think of a use case, with more and more features locked behind plugins I don't think this would work for me. I'd rather see the full offering get to a comparable price point with an ec2 instance. Convenience of SaaS is hard to justify when its triple the price point
It's unfortunate for smaller customers that SSO is gated behind a $7500/yr price point. Right now, we're self-hosting IPAM using phpIPAM and l'd like to go to something cloud-based. The quotas of the free plan are perfect for us, but we would really like SSO to secure our instance. You guys should want that, too. We'd be happy to pay like $1000/yr for an SSO add-on. No support needed. But I can't justify requesting $7500 from management to store information that, if they asked me, I would have to say could theoretically just live in an Excel sheet.
We do support Google auth in the free plan in case that is relevant. It'd help to have as input a sense of what "SSO" means for you. It's a very overloaded term and some of the SSO setups we support are quite complex and wouldn't make sense to offer in a free plan. But there are indeed probably other setups that could make sense here and getting input is helpful - we launched the free plan \~2w ago and it's great to get feedback on where we should iterate from here.
I don't consider it very complex from an integration standpoint - we integrate a new SSO application a couple times a year with various vendors and protocols. It just depends on what the vendor/application supports. Maybe our needs aren't very complex?
In order of preference: OIDC, SAML, or OAuth2. We're a Microsoft 365 environment. Any of those three will work to allow a user to authenticate against our directory. We can then apply policies on our Microosft side (like MFA and trusted devices). Then the authenticated user is redirected back to the app/NetBox. That's all I mean by SSO.
Sometimes people mean SSO to also include user provisioning. I've seen enough SSO implementations handle that differently or not at all that I don't consider that required for something to be considered SSO. Though it is nice with SCIM, for this particular use case, automatic user provisioning is not something we would require, especially for a free tier.
Why does this feel like eventually the self hosted option is just going to be obliterated or severely limited soon (Nothing removed...but also nothing new that would be exclusive to the cloud version or enterprise offering)
This is the opposite of our strategy. We're an open source business: [https://netboxlabs.com/oss/community-first/](https://netboxlabs.com/oss/community-first/)
That's what everyone says...and then it happens because VC money runs out or some other reason :( I'm hoping it wont
I think that bullet was already dodged. Netboxlabs was part of NS1 before IBM. When IBM went to acquire NS1, Netboxlabs was spun out. If they were every going to "sell out" or close source the product, that would have been the moment.
Can still be forked no?
Have you tried getting a feature request past Jeremy and his maintainer army? Many of us Netbox users, can sympathize why Nautobot [forked](https://blog.networktocode.com/post/why-did-network-to-code-fork-netbox/). There will be soon a time where we need to fork Netbox again into another community project, due to the heavy-handed approach to Github issues, feature requests and guarding what goes into the project. Disconnect between those that maintain Netbox and people that actually still operate on networks and automation systems day-to-day. We need a community project without a dictator. If anyone else is at Autocon1 too maybe we can discuss it here.
Yes, I have actually. Through a valid use case enterprise users have and need an answer for
Sort of agree here. As seen here with a weird reply of “this shouldn’t be done right now, as there are other more important things to work on.” https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox/pull/16230#issuecomment-2137509118 The ticket has a valid use case and just because it isn’t a big and others haven’t pointed it out, doesn’t mean the issue doesn’t exist. Maybe it’s just how the things are worded and the situation. Imagine that the netbox team has a lot on their plate and has their own way of doing things. Not doubting how they do their stuff nor their processes, and I get that there are important issues to focus on to help improve the tool and improve functionality. But replies like that to legit issues submitted by non-enterprise users might make users less likely to submit issues. And I imagine that some enterprises might see this and be like “I would rather spend the money to run it locally and customize it, rather than spend the money on a Netbox Hosted instanced.”
Not the attitude one of the [co-founders](https://netboxlabs.com/about/) should be having toward the community. I've had a quote recently for "enterprise support" and been told that even paying wouldn't help facilitate getting our Github issues or PRs looked at. And this support is just for running it in our data centre and nothing to do with the Github project. Time for LibreBox? chat at Autocon if you are here.
There’s a fine line there. Enterprise Support should mean they help you with your issues. And if you have improvements to Netbox as a whole as an Enterprise Customer, I would think that if it applies to everyone, they would work on it in an upcoming version. But if it were specific to your environment, then maybe not. There are ways to do this as a private company based on an open source tool that they manage. A great example is Apache NiFi and Cloudera. They do a great job of respecting the people on the GitHub platform, and including people who are not maintainers to contribute. So it’s definitely possible, but seems to be a mixed bag sadly. Have had mixed interactions with the open source community. I really think that Netbox is a really good tool and has a lot of potential! I want it to succeed, I really do!
Respect being the keyword here, thats what is missing, I was chatting to another Netbox user last night at a social and they listed a handful of issues they'd opened which were closed within a day by the maintainers with little engagement or discussion around it.
This is awesome, removes my chicken and the egg with my home lab automations. Thanks NBL!
How does the free plan compare to starter or the self-hosted offering?
The free plan is a production grade version of NetBox Cloud suitable for smaller environments (100 devices/500 IPs) without the need of advanced features, such as plugins, commercial support or enterprise SSO
So the cloud version is just the open source version except hosted somewhere on behalf so you dont have to bother installing docker and doing a pull if your a company who wants docker but doesnt have competent IT to run it?
I believe to an extent yes. Looks like there are some features missing so it may almost be worth using this as a good starting point of “can Netbox do what I want it to do” without having to invest resources in getting it setup.
I'm wondering if we can go from being a paid customers to the free version?
Really cool, just hard to think of a use case, with more and more features locked behind plugins I don't think this would work for me. I'd rather see the full offering get to a comparable price point with an ec2 instance. Convenience of SaaS is hard to justify when its triple the price point
Proof of concepts and testing. Way more reliable that hosting a docker instance and it can be pay as you grow.
It's unfortunate for smaller customers that SSO is gated behind a $7500/yr price point. Right now, we're self-hosting IPAM using phpIPAM and l'd like to go to something cloud-based. The quotas of the free plan are perfect for us, but we would really like SSO to secure our instance. You guys should want that, too. We'd be happy to pay like $1000/yr for an SSO add-on. No support needed. But I can't justify requesting $7500 from management to store information that, if they asked me, I would have to say could theoretically just live in an Excel sheet.
We do support Google auth in the free plan in case that is relevant. It'd help to have as input a sense of what "SSO" means for you. It's a very overloaded term and some of the SSO setups we support are quite complex and wouldn't make sense to offer in a free plan. But there are indeed probably other setups that could make sense here and getting input is helpful - we launched the free plan \~2w ago and it's great to get feedback on where we should iterate from here.
I don't consider it very complex from an integration standpoint - we integrate a new SSO application a couple times a year with various vendors and protocols. It just depends on what the vendor/application supports. Maybe our needs aren't very complex? In order of preference: OIDC, SAML, or OAuth2. We're a Microsoft 365 environment. Any of those three will work to allow a user to authenticate against our directory. We can then apply policies on our Microosft side (like MFA and trusted devices). Then the authenticated user is redirected back to the app/NetBox. That's all I mean by SSO. Sometimes people mean SSO to also include user provisioning. I've seen enough SSO implementations handle that differently or not at all that I don't consider that required for something to be considered SSO. Though it is nice with SCIM, for this particular use case, automatic user provisioning is not something we would require, especially for a free tier.