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Compare every alternative, model your real 3-year cost, and generate a tailored migration plan with automation, for any source-to-target path.
This week in vendor lock-in
All entries →Turn a vendor renewal shock into a costed exit plan
A wave of licensing changes has made "should we migrate off this?" one of the most common questions in enterprise IT. Broadcom moved VMware to subscription-only, per-core bundles. HashiCorp relicensed Terraform, Vault, and Consul under the BSL, and the community forked them into OpenTofu and OpenBao. CentOS Linux reached end of life. Monitoring, identity, and database bills keep climbing with usage and headcount. In almost every case there is a credible open-source or lower-cost destination, but the decision hinges on numbers that are hard to pull together: the real three-year cost of staying, the cost of moving, and the engineering effort in between.
OffVendor structures that decision the same way for every migration path. Each guide sets out why teams re-evaluate the incumbent, how the leading alternatives compare on cost model and lock-in, a phase-by-phase plan with the tooling that fits each step, and an interactive calculator you drive with your own sizing. Nothing here is a vendor quote, the figures are editable starting points, but they are enough to know whether a migration is worth scoping in earnest before you spend a meeting on it.
Start with the free tools
A migration decision runs through the same five questions whatever you are leaving, and each one has a free tool behind it. Which alternative even belongs on the shortlist? The Alternative Finder asks about your hosting, support, compliance, skills, scale, and timeline, then ranks every product in the relevant category against those constraints and shows why each one placed where it did. How hard is the incumbent to leave? The Lock-in Index is our published research scoring commercial products across five lock-in dimensions. What does leaving cost? The switching cost calculator derives a one-time figure from that vendor's own lock-in profile, and the 3-year TCO calculator compares staying against moving. Does it fit before the contract renews? The renewal planner back-schedules every phase from your renewal date and gives a verdict. And when the renewal actually lands, the Exit Toolkit scans the contract for lock-in clauses, scores your readiness, prices the egress, and checks whether your data can leave at all.
Two more are worth a bookmark rather than a single visit: the price hike tracker is a dated, sourced record of the licensing moves that change your exit maths, and Vendor Watch follows them week by week. If your estate is VMware specifically, the RVTools analyzer reads an inventory export in the browser and flags what will fight the migration. Everything is free, needs no signup, and runs entirely in your browser; unfamiliar terminology is defined in the migration glossary.
Where teams are moving right now
The busiest paths reflect the licensing news: VMware vSphere to Proxmox VE, XCP-ng, or Nutanix AHV; Oracle Database to PostgreSQL; end-of-life CentOS to Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux; Terraform to OpenTofu; and Datadog to a Grafana or Prometheus stack. Browse by category below, or search for the product you are trying to leave.