ControlUp Pricing and ControlUp Cost per Device, From Its Own Marketplace Listing

ControlUp does not print a price on controlup.com, but its own AWS Marketplace listing does. ControlUp for VDI Advanced is $10,000 a year for 100 devices, which is $100 per device per year or about $8.33 a month. ControlUp for Desktops Advanced is $9,200 for 100 devices ($92 each), and the Advanced bundle covering VDI, DaaS and physical endpoints is $12,500 for 100 devices ($125 each). Two and three year terms are exactly two and three times the annual price.

Every product on the ControlUp pricing page, from ControlUp ONE down to the new DaaS IQ for Azure Virtual Desktop, carries a "Try for Free" and a "Talk to Sales" button and no number. That is why most search results for this query end at "contact the vendor". ControlUp, the seller, also lists ControlUp ONE Platform on AWS Marketplace, and that listing carries a public offer with a full rate card. We read the listing, the pricing page and ControlUp's licensing documentation on 29 September 2026. The arithmetic below is ours, shown so you can redo it for your own estate.

How much does ControlUp cost?

Three details on that offer matter more than the headline numbers. First, it sells one pack of 100 devices per package, and the quantity cannot be changed on the public offer, so a 400-device estate is bought through a private offer rather than by clicking. Second, the multi-year terms carry no discount at all: 24 months is exactly twice 12 months. Any multi-year saving you get is negotiated, not listed. Third, the offer is marked auto-renew, and the refund policy line reads "Please contact your local sales representative for ControlUp's refund policy." Put the renewal date somewhere your team will see it; if you already track software agreements in a contract management tool, that is where this one belongs, with a reminder 90 days before the term ends.

The Essential tiers, ControlUp ONE and DaaS IQ have no public figure anywhere we could find. ControlUp's Azure Marketplace listing for ControlUp for VDI has a single public plan described as "MSRP for an annual ControlUp for VDI Advanced license (named user)", with private offers for one, two or three year terms, but the Azure catalog does not expose the figure the way AWS does. So the three Advanced packs above are the only ControlUp list prices a buyer can quote today.

Is ControlUp licensed per named user, per concurrent user or per device?

ControlUp counts either named users or concurrent licenses, and the difference can move your bill by a third or more. Its support documentation, updated June 2026, defines concurrent licenses as "number of daily managed single user workstations + peak number of concurrent RDS/multi-user sessions", measured as the highest peak in any single calendar day. Named user licenses count every unique user seen on managed machines.

For a pooled Azure Virtual Desktop estate that gap is large. Take 500 named users, of whom 300 are signed in at the busiest moment of the day on multi-session hosts. On a named basis you license 500. On a concurrent basis you license 300. At the VDI Advanced list rate of $100 per year, that is $50,000 against $30,000. ControlUp also notes what it does not count: agentless unmanaged VMs, agentless cloud instances and general-purpose servers. Ask which basis your quote uses before you compare it with anything else.

What does ControlUp cost for 250, 500 and 1,000 devices?

Here is the annual cost if every device were billed at the public 100-pack rate. Larger estates buy through private offers, so treat these as the ceiling you negotiate down from, not the price you will pay.

The bundle only pays off if you would otherwise buy both products. At 100 devices, VDI Advanced plus Desktops Advanced bought separately comes to $19,200. The bundle is $12,500, but it covers 100 devices in total, not 100 of each, so price it against your real split of virtual and physical machines before you assume it is the cheaper path.

What is the difference between ControlUp Essential and Advanced?

Advanced is the tier with the cost features. On the ControlUp for VDI line, Essential covers real-time EUC monitoring, troubleshooting and root cause analysis, remediation scripts, dashboards, automated optimization, remote assist and one month of historical reporting. Advanced adds VDI and DaaS sizing and cost optimization, remote office visibility, unified communications monitoring, synthetic testing, NetScaler ADC monitoring, a low-code workflow builder and one year of history instead of one month.

If your reason for buying is to cut Azure Virtual Desktop spend, Essential does not include the sizing and cost optimization module at all, and a month of history is too short to size host pools against a quarter-end peak. That is why the priced packs on the Marketplace are all Advanced.

ControlUp vs Nerdio vs Hydra cost for Azure Virtual Desktop

These tools overlap less than their marketing suggests. ControlUp for VDI measures the user experience and finds the process or host that is slow. Nerdio and Hydra manage and autoscale the AVD estate. ControlUp's own AVD management product, DaaS IQ, launched on 31 March 2026 with schedule-based autoscaling, scale profiles, spend intelligence and image management, which puts it in Nerdio's lane, but it has no published price.

Nerdio and ControlUp sell an integration, and plenty of estates run both, one to manage and one to watch. The full Nerdio rate card, including the MSP edition, is in our breakdown of Nerdio pricing, and the wider field of AVD management and cost tools is compared in AVD cost management tools.

Is ControlUp worth the cost?

ControlUp is worth it when the hours it saves your EUC and help desk team are worth more than the license, because compute savings alone rarely cover it. Here is the arithmetic on the density argument, which is the one vendors lead with.

Take 500 users with 300 signed in at peak on Standard_D8s_v5 session hosts, about $280 a month each in East US if they never switch off. At 22 users per host you need 14 hosts. If ControlUp's data lets you safely run 28 users per host, you need 11. Three fewer hosts save about $840 a month, roughly $10,000 a year always on, and less than half that once autoscale already switches hosts off at night. ControlUp VDI Advanced for those 300 concurrent licenses lists at $30,000 a year.

So the case is operational. If your EUC engineers cost $75 an hour loaded (use your own figure), $30,000 buys 400 hours a year, about eight hours a week. Teams that spend that long chasing slow logons and "my desktop is frozen" tickets tend to find ControlUp pays back. A small, stable pool with few complaints usually does better with AVD Insights and autoscale. For the capacity side of the decision, our guide to AVD capacity management tools puts the tool fee next to the compute bill for ten options.

Does ControlUp offer a free trial?

Yes. Every product on the ControlUp pricing page, including ControlUp ONE, ControlUp for VDI, ControlUp for Desktops and DaaS IQ, has a "Try for Free" option. The page does not state the trial length or device limit, so ask for both in writing, along with whether trial data carries over when you convert.

Five questions to ask before you sign

• Is the quote on named users or concurrent licenses, and what was our daily peak last month?
• Which tier is it? Sizing and cost optimization, one year of history and synthetic testing are Advanced only.
• What is the per-device rate beyond 100, and does it beat the $100, $92 and $125 public pack rates?
• If we prepay two or three years, what is the discount? The public offer has none.
• When does it auto-renew, and what notice ends it?

How to check whether ControlUp paid for itself

Measure it outside the tool. Record 30 days of AVD compute and storage cost per host pool before rollout and the same 30 days after, next to the ControlUp invoice and your ticket volume. CostAnalyst reads Azure billing data read-only and shows AVD cost per host pool and per team on one dashboard, next to your AWS, Google Cloud and SaaS spend, with daily anomaly alerts. For per-department splits of the same bill, see VDI cost allocation tools, and you can compare what each CostAnalyst plan covers on the pricing page.

The short version

• ControlUp publishes no price on its website. Its AWS Marketplace public offer lists VDI Advanced at $10,000, Desktops Advanced at $9,200 and Bundle Advanced at $12,500, each for 100 devices for 12 months.
• That is $100, $92 and $125 per device per year. Two and three year terms are straight multiples with no discount.
• Concurrent licensing can cut the count well below named users on pooled AVD. Ask which basis your quote uses.
• Essential, ControlUp ONE and DaaS IQ have no public figure.
• The license pays back through EUC and help desk time more than through compute density.