# Canonical MAAS vs OpenStack Ironic

| Attribute | Canonical MAAS | OpenStack Ironic |
|---|---|---|
| **vioscaleAI score** | 47.9 (13% (low)) | 45.3 (20% (low)) |
| activity.commits_last_30d | 100 | 59 |
| adoption.dependent_repos | - | 0 |
| adoption.github_stars | 152 | 564 |
| content.faq | `[{"answer":"An open source system that automates deployment and administration of physical servers, offering programmatic control through APIs and integration with infrastructure-as-code tools. It is indexed under Bare Metal Hosting.","source":"https://maas.io/","question":"What is Canonical MAAS?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Canonical MAAS is open source, so it can be self-hosted and used at no licence cost. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://maas.io/","question":"Is Canonical MAAS free to use?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. Canonical MAAS can be deployed on-premise and self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://maas.io/","question":"Can Canonical MAAS be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"We have confirmed 7 integrations for Canonical MAAS, including Terraform, Juju, Ansible, LDAP, Active Directory, SAML and Ubuntu Pro. This is what we could verify from public sources, so the vendor may support others we have not indexed.","source":"https://maas.io/","question":"What does Canonical MAAS integrate with?","confidence":0.6}]` | `[{"answer":"Ironic is an open source project that provides infrastructure management for physical servers. It discovers and catalogs hardware, then manages provisioning, configuration, maintenance, and retirement through a vendor-neutral API interface. It is indexed under Bare Metal Hosting.","source":"https://ironicbaremetal.org/","question":"What is OpenStack Ironic?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"OpenStack Ironic is open source, so it can be self-hosted and used at no licence cost. It is released under the Apache-2.0 licence. Pricing changes often, so verify at source before relying on it.","source":"https://ironicbaremetal.org/","question":"Is OpenStack Ironic free to use?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. OpenStack Ironic can be deployed self-hosted, so it does not have to run on the vendor's infrastructure.","source":"https://ironicbaremetal.org/","question":"Can OpenStack Ironic be self-hosted?","confidence":0.6},{"answer":"Yes. OpenStack Ironic is published under the Apache-2.0 licence, a permissive licence that generally allows commercial use and modification. Licence terms can change between releases, so verify against the repository for the version you intend to use.","source":"https://github.com/openstack/ironic","question":"Is OpenStack Ironic open source?","confidence":0.95}]` |
| deployment.options | `{"on_prem":true,"self_hosted":true}` | `{"self_hosted":true}` |
| description.long | An open source system that automates deployment and administration of physical servers, offering programmatic control through APIs and integration with infrastructure-as-code tools. | Ironic is an open source project that provides infrastructure management for physical servers. It discovers and catalogs hardware, then manages provisioning, configuration, maintenance, and retirement through a vendor-neutral API interface. |
| features.capabilities | - | `{"pricing_model":"open-source-self-host","oob_management":true,"open_source_self_hostable":true}` |
| integrations.count | 7 | - |
| integrations.list | `[{"name":"Terraform"},{"name":"Juju"},{"name":"Ansible"},{"name":"LDAP"},{"name":"Active Directory"},{"name":"SAML"},{"name":"Ubuntu Pro"}]` | - |
| language.primary | HTML | Python |
| license.spdx | - | Apache-2.0 |
| pricing | `{"type":"open_source","sourceUrl":"https://maas.io/","retrievedAt":"2026-08-18T22:06:47.440Z"}` | `{"type":"open_source","sourceUrl":"https://ironicbaremetal.org/","retrievedAt":"2026-09-02T11:26:54.864Z"}` |
| pricing.free_tier | - | yes |
| pricing.model | commercial | open_source |
| pricing.price_level | free | free |
| pricing.transparent | no | yes |
| security.scorecard | - | 3.5 |
| security.vulnerabilities | - | `{"count":0,"source":"https://advisories.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/advisories?ecosystem=debian&package_name=ironic&per_page=100","last_12m":0,"max_severity":null}` |

## Capabilities (Bare Metal Hosting)

| Capability | Canonical MAAS | OpenStack Ironic |
|---|:--:|:--:|
| **Capabilities** |  |  |
| Provisioning speed | - | - |
| Billing unit | - | - |
| GPU bare metal | - | - |
| Private networking vlan | - | - |
| Ddos protection included | - | - |
| Oob management | - | ✓ |
| Custom os pxe | - | - |
| K8s cluster API provider | - | - |
| Terraform iac provider | - | - |
| Datacenter regions | - | - |
| Nvme storage | - | - |
| HIPAA eligible | - | - |
| Open source self hostable | - | ✓ |
| Pricing model | - | Open source self host |

*Source: vioscaleAI. Generated 2026-10-16T19:18:40.485Z. "-" = undocumented, not absent.*