Osie vs. Fleio: An OpenStack Billing System Comparison

Poor OpenStack billing for your cloud solution costs you more than revenue. It costs you customers. With the right OpenStack billing solution, you can build customer trust, as you can provide flexible and transparent billing.

Osie and Fleio are leading OpenStack billing services in Europe. In this article, we explore their key differences, helping you choose the better option for your OpenStack deployment. It’s important to note that we’ll be comparing Osie and the Fleio OpenStack Edition.

Table of contents

• General Facts
• Features/Functionalities
• Integrations
• Installation and self-hosting
• Costs and pricing
• Data control and privacy
• Community and Support/Developer experience
• OpenStack billing FAQs

1. General Facts

Both Osie and Fleio provide robust OpenStack billing dashboards. Both options can help your customers track their resources and generate invoices based on various pricing rules, like GB/hour or vCPU/minute.

Osie is, however, more suitable for Kubernetes deployments, while Fleio is better suited for Docker deployments.

Osie

• Category: OpenStack dashboard and billing system
• Open Source: No
• Self-hosting available: Yes
• GitHub repo: https://github.com/osie-io
• Demo: Yes
• Description: Osie provides a robust administrative panel and a stylish OpenStack dashboard for your clients.

Fleio

• Category: OpenStack dashboard and billing system
• Open Source: No
• Self-hosting available: Yes
• GitHub repo: https://fleio.com/
• Demo: Yes
• Description: The Fleio OpenStack Edition provides a client billing dashboard and an admin control panel.

2. Features/Functionalities

Both OpenStack billing services have outstanding features and functionalities, ranging from white-label capabilities, customer invoice generation, access control, and API authentication.

Modern tech stack

Osie’s modern tech stack ensures fast page loading times and pleasant customer experiences away from legacy portals.

Fleio implements a Single Page Application (SPA). It includes extensive API tools for developers and third-party integrations.

White label

The Osie free trial includes white-label capabilities. You can upload your company logo and switch between dark and light mode.

By default, the Fleio web application footer contains a small link with the text, “Powered by Fleio v. 2025.01.0 beta.” The White Label option entitles you to remove the Fleio mention. White label incurs an additional 20% of the base license cost.

Tax calculations

You can set up tax rules for countries where Osie operates. Additionally, administrators can configure scoped tax rates. These can be manually assigned to billing profiles to allow for more complex tax rules where country-specific ones are inadequate.

With Fleio, you can define tax rules for services that are taxable when generating invoices.

Notifications

To generate notifications, you can install the osie-notifier container that listens to OpenStack’s RabbitMQ.

You need to enable notifications for the various OpenStack services that you use on Fleio, as they may not be enabled by default.

Pricing rules for cloud resources

Osie pricing rules are based on a Pay-as-You-Grow (PAYG) model and can be defined per hour, per minute, monthly, or even based on storage, depending on the resource.

You can define Fleio pricing rules for your resources per minute, hour, or even based on storage.

Billing models

Osie uses a PAYG model. You can, however, set up savings plans where your customers commit to a certain usage. You can also give them discounts. The Osie dashboard also comes with promotional credits for your customers.

Fleio offers both pre-paid and post-paid billing models. Customers on the pre-paid model add credits to allow them to use cloud resources.

Dunning (automated suspension)

Osie’s system automatically suspends a customer’s account if they have an overdue invoice or a negative balance. You can, however, overwrite this behaviour for individual billing profiles.

Fleio allows you to filter invoicing based on status, for example, paid, unpaid, or cancelled. You have the option to suspend cloud resources for pre-paid customers once the credits reach the set threshold.

Multi-currency support

Osie supports multiple currencies. You, however, need to ensure that your currency of choice works with the supported payment and invoicing gateways on Osie.

Fleio supports multiple currencies. A customer, however, can only make purchases with their default currency.

Invoicing

You can create PDF invoices on Osie. You can also use a third-party tool to generate them.

Fleio generates PDF invoices that are downloadable.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

You can define RBAC using scoped tokens. There are also separate admin and end-user dashboards.

Fleio uses OpenStack role differentiation (admin and standard users), and ensures granular control over user access and permissions within OpenStack projects. There are separate admin and end-user dashboards.

Public APIs

Osie has an Admin API that helps build automations and integrations with Osie’s RESTful API.

The Fleio API helps with automation and integration.

API authentication

Osie authenticates all API requests via a third-party identity provider. The Osie Helm Chart sets up Keycloak as the default OpenID provider.

Fleio authenticates API requests using Django Rest Framework auth tokens or internal Fleio tokens.

3. Integrations

Both Osie and Fleio have several integrations to help you expand the capabilities of the two OpenStack billing solutions—authentication, payment gateways, and plugins.

OpenStack integrations

Osie integrates with numerous OpenStack services – Keystone, Nova, Neutron, Heat, Cinder, Octavia, Glance, Swift, Designate, Magnum, Manila, and Ironic Bare Metal.

Fleio integrates with many OpenStack Services. Mandatory: Keystone, Nova, Neutron, Glance; Optional: Gnocchi, Ceilometer, Cinder, Designate, Magnum, Heat, Swift, Octavia, Barbican, and Trove.

Authentication

Osie uses SSO to ensure seamless customer login. It supports several OpenID providers. The official Osie Helm Chart includes Keycloak, which easily integrates with Active Directory and LDAP. With Keycloak, you can also easily provide social logins for your customers. Osie also supports WHMCS via OpenID Connect.

Fleio uses 2FA. The plugins and features are usually added and enabled in settings.py by default. You can use SSO with the SAML 2 protocol for staff and end-users. You also need an identity provider.

Payment gateway integrations

Osie currently supports Stripe, PayPal, RazorPay, Xendit, BankTransfer, HyperPay and IPay.

Fleio supports several payment gateways—PayPal, Romcard, Stripe, PayU, PayURO, and iPay. You, however, need to do additional configurations to get them working.

Invoicing gateway integrations

Osie provides a built-in and customizable PDF gateway and invoicing system that you can use to generate PDF invoices. You can also create invoices via a third-party tool. Supported invoicing gateways include Stripe, WHMCS, and Smartbill.

Fleio supports PayPal, Stripe, Romcard, and PayU. You need to configure each gateway to get it working.

Plugins

Fleio has the TODO plugin, which helps you generate and manage tasks. You can configure it via the UI or do further configurations programmatically.

Marketing integrations

Osie can track events triggered by the client portal and set them as goals in your Google Ad campaigns.

4. Installation and self-hosting

Both Osie and Fleio have self-hosting options. You can install Osie within your Kubernetes environment and Fleio within your Docker environment.

Kubernetes Deployment

You can install Osie within your Kubernetes environment with just a few commands using the official Osie Helm Chart. You can run Osie on your server with just a virtual machine, Ubuntu, and MicroK8s.

Helm Chart

You can install Osie using the official Helm Chart.

Docker Deployment

You can install Fleio with Docker with just a single command and run it via Docker Compose.

Backups

Osie supports backups through Velero and backs up to S3-compatible storage locations.

Fleio has backups for selective aspects, such as backup schedules for database instances.

5. Costs and pricing

Osie and Fleio have different pricing structures.

Free Tier/Free Trial

Osie comes with a free 14-day trial with a free license that allows you to serve 100 customers, have 200 active VMs, and have white label functionality. You don’t need a credit card to sign up.

Paid tiers

There’s also an enterprise tier that can be customized for your business needs. It allows you to serve unlimited customers and run unlimited active VMs. You get premium support from Osie experts and a dedicated account manager.

Fleio has three tiers with RAM licenses, access to all OpenStack Edition features, technical support, and a Fleio remote installation.

Free Tier/Free Trial

Osie has a free 14-day trial. It comes with a free license, up to 100 active customers, up to 200 active VMs, and white label functionality. You don’t need a credit card to sign up.

Paid tiers

Osie has an enterprise tier. It allows for unlimited active customers, unlimited active VMs, premium support from our experts, and a dedicated account manager.

Fleio has paid tiers. The first tier is 200 euros per month for the OpenStack Edition, 2 TB RAM license. The second tier comes with a 3TB RAM license for 300 euros per month. The third tier comes with a 4 TB license for 400 euros per month.

6. Data Control and privacy

Osie takes personal data seriously. We are General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) compliant. We adhere to GDPR and CCPA guidelines in the collection, processing, and storage of your personal data. You can request the deletion of personal data as well.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance

Osie complies with GDPR. GDPR guidelines govern all data collection, processing, and retrieval for customers in the EU and beyond.

California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) compliance

Osie is CCPA compliant. CCPA principles guide all data collection, processing, and retrieval for California customers.

Personal data deletion

Since Osie is both GDPR and CCPA compliant, you can request for deletion of your personal data.

7. Community & Support/Developer Experience

Both Osie and Fleio are built on OpenStack, which is an open-source project. This means that both products have access to a community of OpenStack experts who ensure frequent code updates and bug fixes.

Additionally, Osie customers can get more support via Slack, or live chat. You can interact with Osie via GitHub, LinkedIn, and email. Fleio has communities on GitHub, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram. You can also reach them via email.

Both Osie and Fleio have easy-to-understand documentation, code snippets, and example projects. Their docs are written for different audiences with varying levels of technical knowledge. They include starter guides and documentation exists for different software versions/releases.

8. Final thoughts

Osie and Fleio are noteworthy OpenStack billing solutions. We have compared them based on aspects like their features and functionalities, integrations, installation, costs, data privacy and community support.

We hope that this in-depth comparison will be ample to help you choose the best one for your use case. Osie comes with a Helm Chart for easy installation in Kubernetes deployments. Start your free trial, check out our demo, or contact us today.

OpenStack billing FAQs

How different are Fleio and Osie from Ceilometer or CloudKitty?

Ceilometer is an OpenStack project. It helps you collect, normalize, and transform data from core OpenStack components.

CloudKitty is also an OpenStack project that was built to work with Ceilometer to help with billing aspects, like pricing rules and tracking resource usage.

Osie and Fleio are fully-fledged OpenStack billing solutions with features like pricing rules, automated suspension of unpaid invoices, PDF invoices, multi-currency support, and more. You can install Osie within your K8s environment. You can install Fleio with Docker.

Are Osie and Fleio open source?

No, Osie and Fleio are not open source. They are, however, built on OpenStack, which is open source. Osie also comes with a free license during the 14-day trial.