OpenFaaS vs OpenFaaS Pro: What's the Difference?

Updated

OpenFaaS is an open-source serverless platform that runs on Kubernetes, letting you deploy functions written in any language as portable OCI images. OpenFaaS Pro is the commercial edition that adds production-grade features on top of the same core: autoscaling, event connectors, monitoring dashboards, SSO, RBAC, and direct engineering support. Choose the open-source version if you're evaluating the model, running small or internal workloads, or building your own operational tooling. Choose Pro if you need those specific capabilities and commercial support for production systems.

The shared foundation

Both editions run on the same platform, so the core experience doesn't change when you move between them:

  • Deploy to any Kubernetes cluster — on-premises or in the cloud, with the same unified workflow.
  • Any language — write functions in whatever language you use, and bring existing microservices along too.
  • Portable OCI images — functions are packaged as standard container images, so they aren't locked to a proprietary format.
  • Templates — get code into production within minutes using provided templates, or create your own.
  • Basic scaling — functions can scale to match traffic, including down to zero when idle to save on costs.

The website describes this as "serverless on your terms — stable, portable, built for production," and the open-source project has a substantial community (the site shows 31.1k GitHub stars).

What OpenFaaS Pro adds

The Pro edition layers commercial features onto that base. According to the site, OpenFaaS Pro adds:

Capability What it covers
Autoscaling Fine-tuned scaling to match the type of traffic your functions receive
Event connectors Invoke functions through events from Apache Kafka, AWS SQS/SNS, GCP Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Cron, and MQTT
Monitoring dashboards Operational visibility into your functions
SSO Single sign-on for access control
RBAC Role-based access control
Direct-to-engineering support Commercial support from the engineering team

These are the differences that matter most for production decisions: the event connectors turn OpenFaaS into an event-driven workload platform rather than just an HTTP function host, and SSO/RBAC matter as soon as more than a couple of people need access.

How to decide

Stay on open source if:

  • You're learning the platform or running a proof of concept.
  • Your workloads are small, internal, or you're comfortable wiring up your own scaling, queuing, retries, and event triggers.
  • You don't need commercial support or enterprise access controls.

Move to Pro if:

  • You need autoscaling tuned to your traffic patterns, or event-driven invocation from Kafka, SQS/SNS, Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ, PostgreSQL, Cron, or MQTT.
  • You need SSO and RBAC for team or tenant access.
  • You want monitoring dashboards and direct access to the engineering team when something breaks in production.

The site frames the trade-off directly: Kubernetes has the building blocks, but "wiring up auto-scaling, queuing, retries, and event triggers from scratch takes months of work." Pro is aimed at teams that would rather buy that work than build it.

Common production patterns

The site lists several ways teams use OpenFaaS, which can help you judge whether Pro's features are relevant to you:

  • A sandbox for customer code — turn code snippets into isolated functions built and deployed through a REST API, with each tenant in its own namespace and security boundaries enforced at every layer. Used in production by Waylay (IoT), LivePerson, Cognite (ML/data science), and RudderStack.
  • ETL and data pipelines — fan out to thousands of parallel function executions that scale automatically, with batch jobs and ML models running as functions with built-in retries, whether they take milliseconds or hours.
  • Kubernetes made usable — avoid building auto-scaling, queuing, retries, and event triggers from scratch.

If your use case looks like the customer-code sandbox or large-scale parallel pipelines, the Pro features (RBAC, SSO, autoscaling, event connectors) are likely the ones you'd otherwise have to build yourself.

Pricing and trial

The site links to a pricing page and offers a "Request a free trial" option for OpenFaaS Pro. Pricing details and trial terms aren't specified in the available material — check the pricing page for current figures and conditions before committing.