What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops?

In the past, the prices of the product were great. With the acquisition of Citrix by your company, the prices have drastically increased. For my company, it has become a bit of a problem to sell products from Citrix.

We recently received the product’s renewal quote, three times the last price. It is an expensive solution. I rate its pricing a nine out of ten.

It's costly in the market. But it is not expensive for the company. For the company, it's relatively inexpensive because the core of the work is compensated with the price. Secondly, the price is included in the cost of the business.

The solution is affordable.

Their licensing model used to be on a per-year basis, where you would negotiate the cost per user for a year. For instance, if you had 25,000 users, you could negotiate the cost accordingly. However, they are transitioning to a subscription-based model where the cost is incurred monthly. They argue that this model allows companies to switch from a capital expense to an operational expense, making budgeting easier. However, I am not a fan of this model. I prefer paying only for the number of licenses that I need based on the number of concurrent users, like the previous model.

The solution is expensive and I give the cost a four out of ten.

We're paying for a standard license and, in my view, the price is too high. I would be satisfied with it if it were reduced by about 20-30%. Right now, I would rate the pricing a five out of ten.

We'd like the solution to be less expensive and are looking for alternative options. The cost is on the higher side. We pay for the licensing on an annual basis. The technical support costs depend on the contract. We have separate contracts that are different based on the customer. If the contract covers technical support, that is fine, however, if it's a basic contract, then we have to pay for the technical support. I cannot speak to the exact amount the company pays at this time.

I'm the operator for a customer, so I'm not really aware of the licenses. They do the deal with Citrix and we just operate the infrastructure or the VDI. I don't really know how much it costs in reality.

The licensing is $125 USD per user. The cost needs to come down substantially.

The Citrix license model has changed. It costs around $240 per user for a single username, but a concurrent license costs double.

The price of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops is approximately $300 for the new version called Dash and the license is approximately $900 annually.

The pricing is a little bit high, but it's good value for the product's stability and efficiency. You need to choose the right licensing, whether it is the Advanced or Premium Edition.

Citrix solutions cost a lot in comparison with competitors, like Azure Virtual Desktop or VMware Horizon. Those solutions cost around 50 to 60 percent less, per month per user, than Citrix. The leadership of Citrix should really consider the pricing factor. Apart from that, they are the leader in the virtualization of desktop applications.

You can buy an on-cloud or on-prem license. You can switch between on-cloud users and on-prem users. Its licensing is cheap. It is from $8 to $15 per user. It is not that expensive when you compare the cost of buying new hardware with the cost of the license. For example, at $15 per user, it costs around $180 for a year, which is cheaper than buying a $600 PC that at a certain stage, you will again have to change because its hardware is not supported. It may also get damaged or stolen. So, you can compare the cost of the actual hardware that you have to buy and the time spent in supporting the clients with the cost of its license.

We had a yearly license and we did named instances which I didn't like, due to the fact that they took away the concurrent. I tend to prefer concurrent as you don't get duplications. The purchase price was around $300,000 USD and then the maintenance fees were 20%. There are no other additional fees.

The prices quoted initially were on the very high side, and there was room for negotiations, considering the competition and the options that are available directly from Microsoft now. The Microsoft options were not that mature at the time we were looking for a solution.

My pricing advice would be to watch your Azure costs. If you're not used to it, like I wasn't last year, they can get very high very quickly and you can go upside down on your agreement very easily.

Where Citrix really needs to improve is in their support and in the way that they manage their licenses. Everything else comes second because if I'm not in a position where I can get proper support or manage my own licenses in an easy way, then it is pointless. Today, I am at a point where I may not be able to use Citrix anymore because they want to take away some of the licenses that I bought, pretending they are not valid anymore. That is frankly unacceptable. If they don't solve this, everything comes second because I cannot use my product. On a scale from zero to 10, I would rate pricing a zero. They are trying to take away licenses that I bought because they say they are not valid anymore, even if they are stated as permanent. On the site, they are characterized as permanent. They insist this is an evaluation version that I'm not allowed to use as permanent, which means I will probably be in a position where I can't work anymore. So, their licensing system is bad. The fact that I cannot relocate my licenses alone, but I have to go through and use their support center makes it even worse.

In terms of pricing with the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops, I think it has gotten better over the years. Citrix has found more dynamic ways to be able to revive licensing models that fit many different scenarios that organizations have. We have been able to evolve our own licensing over the years to accommodate our situations between concurrent versus user device licenses. Now, when we move into the Citrix Workspace realm, we definitely have some awesome options there. I think Citrix is always willing to negotiate different models. They try to offer their clients flexible options to license their products. We have been very happy with the way that our licensing has worked out with Citrix.

If you look at cost, then you must look at the number of users that you are covering. If you are only using it for some users, then it is very expensive. However, if you have a massive amount of users, then it begins to be interesting to use Citrix. Because once you are managing thousands of servers with one guy, your maintenance costs decrease per user. Another major cost is Microsoft because Microsoft Windows costs them. We also need a license for SQL server, Windows Server, and Citrix Remote PC. These are extra costs for the solution that are not covered by the license.

The licensing, in general, is expensive. A lot of customers battle to pay the amount. It's very difficult to ensure that your solution provides the business value that the customer is after. In addition to the standard licensing fees you need to pay Microsoft licensing as well.

Based not only on the cost of Citrix, but additional costs like firewalls, IPS, and other solutions, the total cost of switching users from using normal laptops with VPNs to connection via Citrix were so huge that the CEO of our company decided to postpone the deployment process. Because we are at the beginning and have started from scratch we are, on the one hand, in a very convenient situation. But on the other hand, we must spend a certain amount of money for infrastructure on things like routers, connections, etc. Building a real farm of VDIs could improve the work for users, but this is a strategic decision for our company. We are reviewing technologies like VMware Horizon and others. In each case, the cost is high and in the current pandemic/financial situation, our company has decided to postpone plans to move until next year or later. I would like them to make the licensing easier to understand. Licensing is quite complicated for apps or processors or servers. When you try to adopt a solution, licensing is per bundle. But for a regular user, from a business point of view, there is no strict license: For example, access to VDI will cost X, and that is all. Instead, in each case, there is a license for access costs, while per-server the cost is that, and to another type of server it costs that. No vendor will tell you, "This is the cost per user." In each case, the answer is, "It depends."

Citrix is competitive, however, at the same time, they give great service. VMware, Horizon, or other VDI solutions may be cheaper. That said, they do not have the same capability that Citrix has. We offer other VDI solutions like Microsoft WVDs and the VMware's Horizon, that are on the cheaper side. It's up to the customer, what they want to do. If they want to have premium services, we will host their VDIs on Citrix system components only. That will give them better features and better capabilities or maybe less frustration on the user experience side. We offer cloud and managed services offerings as well as environments hosted on our data center. We have a variety of options and therefore can offer a variety of prices according to what they need/want.

I'm happy with the pricing. The cost of the Citrix software reflects what I would expect a product of that nature, in that market, to be. Understanding the licensing is quite a bit more complicated, because one of the things about Citrix is that you can buy licensing at different levels. You can buy a basic license, which will give you the core functionality. You can buy an advanced license that will give you the core plus another layer, or you can buy a premium license, which provides a much wider set of functionalities. In truth I still struggle with some of the variations but with the aid of our reseller we usually find what we are looking for. Yet I still like the idea because it means that if all you need is a basic load balancing solution, then you don't need to buy an advanced or premium license. On the other hand, if you want to use the extra features that come with those higher-grade licenses, you can choose to do so, but you only pay for what you need.

The Citrix licensing scheme is really straightforward and simple. It doesn't have hidden costs. You get what you pay for. It is easy to understand what is on the product, so it's simple to get a clear idea of how much it costs. Licensing is not an issue.

A perpetual enterprise license costs approximately $300 USD.

I suggest using the concurrent user licensing scheme.