Payara Enterprise is now an Azul product, after Azul acquired Payara last year. Azul does not publish a price list for it so the only way to find out what you would pay is to go through a sales conversation. We researched public procurement records to get a clearer picture of what organisations actually pay, and in this article we share what we found and compare it with a more affordable OmniFish Build of Payara.
OmniFish provides commercially supported builds of Payara Community, a true drop-in alternative to Payara Enterprise, with no application changes needed. In many real-world deployments, the cost of OmniFish Build of Payara halves what Azul charges for Payara Enterprise. OmniFish Build of Payara strictly focuses on security and stability, therefore new versions are often much more stable than new versions of Payara Enterprise and provide the same or even more CVE fixes. The quality of support is also likely higher, because OmniFish engineers, including 2 Java Champions and the GlassFish project lead, are at the core of Eclipse GlassFish development and understand the internals of both GlassFish and Payara very well.
What Azul charges for Payara Enterprise
Azul prices Payara Enterprise per CPU core, and every installation counts — production, test, staging, and development alike. There is no published price list; you need to contact their sales team to get a quote.
Since Azul does not publish prices, we went through public procurement records to find out what organisations actually pay. Here are two real examples.
A US Coast Guard contract covers 28 CPU cores and 30 hours of consultancy, at $46,210 per year (around €40,000). That is roughly the scale of a single small production cluster with one or two test environments. In OmniFish terms, this would very likely be classified as a single project. OmniFish support for a single project starts at €12,500 per year — about three times less. That also includes 20 consultancy hours per year, which is similar to the 30 consultancy hours in the US Coast Guard contract with Azul.
A UK NHS contract comes in at £178,563 per year (around €210,000). This is a much larger deployment, almost certainly covering many separate applications and teams. Without knowing the exact breakdown, we estimate that OmniFish pricing for an equivalent setup would be roughly half of that price. OmniFish doesn’t charge for test and staging environments, and pricing scales more favourably across multiple projects.
Both contracts were fulfilled through resellers, which typically adds a margin on top of Azul’s own prices.
A few things can push the cost of Payara Enterprise higher than the base subscription:
All environments count. Test and staging CPU cores are charged too. For teams with several test environments, this can be a significant part of the total bill.
Consultancy and migration support is not included. Azul sells it separately through “Accelerator Units,” purchased on top of the subscription.
Legacy version premiums apply if you are still on an older release. For Payara Platform 4, Payara officially charges a 25% surcharge on top of the standard annual cost.
The per-core model is also simply hard to manage in practice. Core counts change as you scale, move to the cloud, or spin up new environments. Estimating your annual cost in advance is genuinely difficult.
What OmniFish offers instead
OmniFish provides commercially supported builds of Payara Community called OmniFish Build of Payara, with prompt CVE fixes and critical patches. The OmniFish Build of Payara is a true drop-in alternative to Payara Community and Payara Enterprise. It’s based on the same codebase as Payara Community, no application changes needed. OmniFish is aware that OmniFish Build of Payara doesn’t include some monitoring and management features specific to Payara Enterprise which aren’t available in Payara Community and we are ready to supply a compatible solution within our Payara build or help migrate to an alternative solution. Additionally, OmniFish is leading Eclipse GlassFish development and provides full support for GlassFish as a strong modernized option to upgrade to from Payara .
Pricing is structured around projects, not core counts. A project is a single production installation maintained by a single engineering team. Non-production environments (test, staging, development) are included at no extra charge. This fits how real projects actually work much better than a per-core model, and it makes your annual cost straightforward to estimate and budget for.
One important difference from both Payara Enterprise and plain Payara Community: OmniFish backports CVE fixes and critical patches to older versions without incompatible changes or risky updates. You do not need to upgrade to the latest version to stay secure. With plain Payara Community, the only way to get security fixes is to upgrade, which may involve breaking or behavioural changes. With Payara Enterprise, new versions with patches often introduce unexpected changes that may suddenly break your application and prevent you from upgrading to the patched version easily.
You are never locked into OmniFish. Customers receive the full source code of each Payara build under an open source licence, along with instructions to reproduce the exact same binaries independently. The subscription covers the binaries and support — but if you ever stop, the source code stays with you and you can continue building, patching, and running it yourself.
For a typical deployment with several production instances and a handful of test environments, OmniFish support can cost half what Azul charges for Payara Enterprise. The exact saving depends on how many non-production environments you run, but the gap is real and consistent. OmniFish Build of Payara is already significantly more affordable than Payara Enterprise. Support for Eclipse GlassFish is more affordable still, and with more benefits and further improvements. It’s 20% less than the price of OmniFish Build of Payara, making it the best long-term choice provided by OmniFish for teams willing to migrate.
OmniFish engineers are at the core of Eclipse GlassFish development. Our team includes Java Champions and active contributors to Jakarta EE specifications. We understand the internals of both GlassFish and Payara very well — GlassFish is the upstream project that Payara was originally based on. When you raise a support ticket with OmniFish, you are talking to people who know the codebase deeply, not a support desk working from documentation.
This means issues get resolved faster and fixes go deeper. We contribute all fixes back to the open-source Eclipse GlassFish project, so you are never dependent on a proprietary patch that only exists in a commercial distribution.
Your options if you are on Payara Enterprise
There are two practical paths, and OmniFish supports both.
Option 1: Move to OmniFish build of Payara. Your application stack stays the same — same codebase, no application changes needed. OmniFish backports CVE fixes and critical patches to your current version, so you do not need to upgrade to stay secure. Your license costs go down significantly, and you get full source code under an open source licence so you are not locked in. This is the lowest-friction path.
Option 2: Migrate to Eclipse GlassFish. Eclipse GlassFish is actively developed, production-ready, and commercially supported by OmniFish. OmniFish provides full migration support to help you make the move. And your cost drops even lower. This is the best long-term option for both cost and platform quality.
You can take either path directly, or start with Option 1 and move to Option 2 when you are ready.
Do you seek support but the price of Payara Enterprise is too high for you or you seek an alternative, more hands-on team to get support from?
Then you have basically the same 2 options with OmniFish:
Option 1: Migrate to OmniFish build of Payara, which is a drop-in replacement for Payara Community, strictly compatible, only with CVE fixes and necessary critical fixes. Your application stack stays the same — same codebase, no application changes needed. The license costs are significantly lower than for Payara Enterprise, and you get full source code under an open source licence so you are not locked in. This is the lowest-friction path.
Option 2: Migrate to Eclipse GlassFish. Eclipse GlassFish is actively developed, production-ready, and commercially supported by OmniFish. OmniFish provides full migration support to help you make the move, at a lower price. This is the best long-term option for both cost and platform quality.
If you have heard that GlassFish is not production-ready or not supported, that information is outdated. It was accurate before 2022, when GlassFish was effectively dormant. Since then, OmniFish has taken over active development and commercial support. Eclipse GlassFish now has a regular release cadence, a growing community, and a team of experts behind it. It is used in production by organizations around the world.
That’s why we recommend migrating from Payara to Eclipse GlassFish in the longer run. We are directly involved in the Eclipse GlassFish project and contribute improvements and new features to it. Compared to our build of Payara, which only contains urgent fixes on top of Payara Community, we’re putting a lot of effort into making GlassFish better and more powerful with every new release.
If you want to understand what your specific deployment would cost with OmniFish, contact us. We will walk through your setup and give you a clear picture of your options.
