StrongDM is excellent at proxy-based access for databases, Kubernetes, and cloud infrastructure — and excellent at making that bill grow with your headcount. Innovexus is free and open source — no per-user pricing because there's no pricing at all. It bundles NOC and SOC alongside privileged access and is built for teams that need traditional network-device PAM as much as cloud infrastructure access. Here's the honest comparison.
StrongDM publishes per-user pricing at roughly $1,200 per user per year. That's competitive at a 5–10 person team and compounds sharply at a 30+ person team. Innovexus has no licence line at all: the platform is free, self-hosted, with no seat count. Your only cost is the infrastructure you run the appliance on.
StrongDM list pricing is published at $1,200 per user per year for the standard tier. Volume discounts are available through enterprise contracts; actual prices depend on negotiation. Innovexus is free — no licence key, no seat count, no feature gates. You self-host the appliance, so your real cost is your own virtualisation infrastructure and the time to run it.
StrongDM and Innovexus solve overlapping problems differently. StrongDM is built for engineers accessing databases, Kubernetes, SSH, RDP, and cloud APIs. Innovexus is built for NOC and SOC teams managing network devices and security workflows. The honest read: pick the tool whose default workflow matches your team's default workflow.
StrongDM customers usually don't switch because the product failed — they switch because their team grew, their workflow changed, or they realised they were paying for two tools when one would do.
A 30-person engineering team paying $36K/yr to StrongDM is a procurement event. Switching to Innovexus removes the licence line entirely — the platform is free, this year and every year, at any headcount. The savings compound every time you hire.
StrongDM gives you access; it doesn't give you network monitoring, alert triage, or threat detection. Once a security incident reveals you also need a SOC workspace, and a network outage reveals you also need NOC monitoring, you're shopping for two more tools. Innovexus puts those in the same console.
StrongDM is built for cloud-native infrastructure. If your environment is dominated by routers, switches, firewalls, and console servers — and your team is mostly NOC engineers, not platform engineers — Innovexus's default workflows fit that environment in ways StrongDM's do not.
Both platforms have strong audit, but compliance frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA increasingly require unified audit across PAM, network operations, and security events. One audit trail is materially less work than three. Innovexus consolidates that surface; StrongDM doesn't.
StrongDM does what it does extraordinarily well. Here's when we'd send a prospect their way without trying to win the deal.
We'd rather lose your evaluation honestly than win it on a sales pitch you'll regret. If any of the above describes you, we genuinely think StrongDM is the better pick — and we'll say so on a call.
Direct, sourced answers to the questions teams ask when evaluating Innovexus as a StrongDM alternative.
Innovexus is free — there is no licence, no seat count, and no subscription, so on licensing alone it is cheaper at every team size: StrongDM is ~$6K/yr at 5 users, ~$30K/yr at 25, ~$60K/yr at 50, and Innovexus is $0 at all of them. The honest caveat is that Innovexus is self-hosted: you supply the virtual infrastructure the appliance runs on and your team operates it, where StrongDM runs the control plane for you. We'd rather you weigh that operational cost honestly than trust a marketing claim.
No. Innovexus uses a credential-broker model: the vault holds device passwords, sessions are mediated through the self-hosted appliance, and the user never sees credentials. This works well for SSH, RDP, console, and any device that accepts vaulted credentials. StrongDM's proxy model intercepts and audits at the protocol level for databases (query-by-query) and Kubernetes (kubectl exec), which is materially more granular for those specific resources. If granular DB query audit is the must-have, StrongDM is the better tool.
Yes, for kubeconfig-based access secured through the Innovexus credential vault. Engineers authenticate to Innovexus with FIDO2, the vault provides a kubeconfig with rotated short-lived credentials, and audit captures the session entry/exit. We do not currently audit individual kubectl commands at the protocol level the way StrongDM does. If kubectl-level command audit is a procurement requirement, StrongDM is the better fit.
Innovexus integrates with cloud IAM via the credential vault for service account credentials and short-lived API tokens. We do not currently provide just-in-time cloud entitlement workflows or query-level audit for cloud APIs the way StrongDM does for some resources. If your primary workload is auditing every cloud API call your engineers make, evaluate StrongDM, Britive, or Apono for those specific workflows.
Yes. Both platforms support SSH and RDP. Innovexus pioneered IP-locked appliance sessions for these protocols — devices accept connections only from the customer's dedicated Innovexus appliance IP, which is a stronger network-level isolation than client-cert-only SSH. Session recording, role-based device discovery, and credential rotation are first-class for both protocols. Engineers report Innovexus feels closer to a traditional jump-host workflow; StrongDM feels closer to a proxy.
Both platforms record full sessions and produce searchable, exportable audit logs. Differences: StrongDM records protocol-level events for DBs and K8s (every query, every exec). Innovexus records full session video plus command-level audit for SSH/RDP, plus all credential vault access events, plus NOC and SOC events in the same audit stream. If your audit need is "every database query is traceable to a user," StrongDM has the edge. If it's "every privileged action across PAM, NOC, and SOC is in one place," Innovexus does that natively.
If you're dealing with network devices as much as cloud, or starting to need NOC and SOC alongside access — download the appliance from innovexus.io/downloads (a free account is all it takes). It boots in minutes, and the whole platform is free.