[nicknick]

Apologies for dragging up an old thread but this is top of google for "zimbra pricing".

I felt I had to reply as this thread does zimbra little credit. They should concentrate on their strengths not use FUD arguments against microsoft. Time and again as I am searching for the relative merits of the two products the argument for zimbra boils down to "you should use it because we aren't microsoft". That might hold water on slashdot but in the real world money talks and zimbra, in the real world, costs more than exchange over a 5 year lifetime. I've no doubt it's a better product in most respects but most users have done without the extra features to date and so will put little value on them.

I hope that Zimbra understand their target market better than the posters here. *No-one* pays full retail price for MS licenses. MS realise that the 5-10 employee SMEs who are a large wedge of their customers cannot afford to pay thousands of dollars for software and have some not-so-visible schemes for locking them in at much lower prices: $299 for an action pack gets you ALL of MS's software with 10 cals. Zimbra's equivalent to the action pack is the OS version I guess (as $299 probably doesn't cover MS's costs) but there is nothing between it and paying $7-8k over 5 years.

I am evaluating zimbra (as itself, not as an alternative to exchange) and am generally pretty impressed. Having set up postfix/cyrus-sasl/SA/mysql systems in the past I'm impressed to see it done in one command and 10 minutes. I expected to have to spend a day solving dependencies. I will probably end up using the OS version and forgo the luxury of isync and iphone functionality. It is not worth $1500 a year to me. Were that a one off fee I probably would have got my wallet out already but $7k over 5 years does not sound so attractive.

I hope that vmware will reconsider the licensing strategy. I understand that any corp likes the easy recurring income annual licensing brings but it is not so attractive to customers. Perhaps an upfront fee plus a small service fee for updates etc plus then paid add-ons like mobile is a better model.