Hello everyone,
I've been evaluating VPN solutions for my team's remote access needs, and like many of you, I did a double-take when comparing the pricing of Absolute Secure Access with something like OpenVPN. It's a common point of discussion, especially for those of us managing budgets for small to medium-sized teams. On the surface, it seems like you're paying a significant premium for what appears to be a similar core function: creating a secure tunnel. But after digging into the specifications and running some pilot tests, I believe the cost difference boils down to a fundamental distinction between a managed enterprise service and a foundational toolkit.
OpenVPN provides the excellent open-source protocol and software, which is fantastic. However, deploying it securely at scale is a project in itself. You are responsible for:
* **Server provisioning, maintenance, and security patching.**
* **User lifecycle management** (onboarding, offboarding, credential rotation).
* **Building and monitoring a high-availability infrastructure** to ensure uptime.
* **Integrating it with your existing identity providers** (like Okta or Azure AD).
* **Creating and enforcing access policies** tailored to different user roles.
Absolute Secure Access, on the other hand, is a fully-managed SaaS platform. You're not just buying software; you're buying a complete operational service and a specific set of enterprise-grade features that are either built-in or significantly simplified. The premium covers:
* **The elimination of infrastructure overhead.** No servers for you to manage.
* **A centralized dashboard** for immediate user access control and visibility.
* **Out-of-the-box integrations** with major identity and device management systems.
* **Granular, policy-based access controls** (think "this group can only access this specific application, not the whole network").
* **Dedicated support, SLAs, and compliance assurances** that are critical for business continuity.
For a small team with in-house technical expertise, the DIY route with OpenVPN can be very cost-effective. But for a growing organization where IT time is a precious commodity, and where security, compliance, and ease of management are paramount, the operational cost savings of a managed solution like Absolute can quickly justify the subscription fee. It shifts the burden from your team to their specialists.
I'm curious to hear from others who have made this comparison. For those who chose Absolute, what was the deciding factor that tipped the scales? For those who went with a self-hosted OpenVPN solution, how are you managing the ongoing maintenance and security monitoring?
grace
The right tool saves a thousand meetings.
I'm a community manager for a 500-person fintech, and we switched from a self-hosted OpenVPN setup to Absolute Secure Access last year when our team went fully remote.
1. **Target market and team overhead** - OpenVPN is a toolkit for teams with dedicated networking staff, while Absolute is a managed service for companies that need IT to focus on applications, not tunnels. Our two network engineers spent roughly 20% of their time maintaining OpenVPN; that dropped to near-zero after migrating. Without in-house expertise, the real cost of OpenVPN isn't the license, it's the salary of the person who keeps it running.
2. **Real total cost for 100 users** - OpenVPN Access Server lists at about $15/user/year, but that's just the software. You need servers, load balancers, and monitoring. Our cloud infra costs for a HA pair were ~$350/month. Absolute came in around $7/user/month on an enterprise agreement. For us, the managed service was about 15% cheaper when we factored in engineering time.
3. **Identity and access management integration** - With OpenVPN, we manually scripted SCIM provisioning to Azure AD, which broke during MFA policy changes. Absolute had a pre-built connector that worked in an afternoon. If you need to sync with an IdP and manage dynamic groups, the integration effort is weeks versus hours.
4. **Support and troubleshooting** - With our OpenVPN setup, we were on our own for deep packet inspection issues. With Absolute, we had a support engineer on a screenshare within 30 minutes when we had a routing problem, and they fixed it on their end. The support SLA and vendor accountability is a core part of the premium.
I'd recommend Absolute Secure Access for any team over 50 people without dedicated networking staff who need reliable, auditable access. If you have a skilled network engineer and a simple, static user base, OpenVPN can save money. Tell us your team size and whether you have a network admin on staff, and the choice gets much clearer.
No receipts, no trust.