NetBox review 2026: the free, open-source IPAM and DCIM source of truth for network automation. Compare NetBox Community, Cloud and Enterprise pricing and…
NetBox is an open-source platform that serves as a network source of truth, combining IP address management (IPAM) and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) into one structured, API-driven data model. It was created in 2016 by Jeremy Stretch while working at DigitalOcean and released as free, open-source software on GitHub.
Since 2023, a dedicated company, NetBox Labs, has stewarded the open-source project and sells commercial NetBox Cloud and NetBox Enterprise offerings on top of the free core. NetBox Labs was co-founded by Stretch and former NS1 CEO Kris Beevers after spinning out of NS1 following its acquisition by IBM, and it raised a 20 million dollar Series A round in 2023.
NetBox's data model covers IP prefixes, addresses, VRFs and VLANs for IPAM, and racks, devices, cabling, power, and circuits for DCIM, all searchable and filterable through a Django-based web UI. The model is highly extensible through custom fields, tags, and custom object types, and it can be extended further through a large community plugin ecosystem.
REST and GraphQL APIs give NetBox its central role in network automation and infrastructure-as-code pipelines, letting tools like Ansible, Terraform, and Nornir treat NetBox as the canonical inventory. Built-in change logging and journaling track the history of every object for auditing and troubleshooting.
NetBox Community, the open-source core, is completely free to self-host under the Apache 2.0 license, with support coming from the community and documentation. Organizations that want NetBox without operating the underlying infrastructure can choose NetBox Cloud, a managed SaaS offering from NetBox Labs.
Both NetBox Cloud and the self-hosted commercial edition, NetBox Enterprise, are sold on custom, quote-based pricing that requires contacting NetBox Labs sales, since costs scale with the number of devices, users, and support requirements.
Yes, the core NetBox platform is free and open source under the Apache 2.0 license; NetBox Labs also sells commercial NetBox Cloud and NetBox Enterprise offerings.
NetBox was created by Jeremy Stretch in 2016 while he worked at DigitalOcean, to serve as a network source of truth.
NetBox Labs is the company founded in 2023 by Kris Beevers and Jeremy Stretch, spun out of NS1 after its acquisition by IBM, to commercialize and steward the NetBox open-source project.
NetBox Community is the free self-hosted open-source version; NetBox Cloud is a managed SaaS offering; NetBox Enterprise is a self-hosted commercial edition with added support and features.
NetBox is built with Python and the Django web framework, using PostgreSQL as its database.
Yes, NetBox exposes REST and GraphQL APIs used widely in network automation and infrastructure-as-code pipelines alongside tools like Ansible and Terraform.
Yes, NetBox has a large community plugin ecosystem that adds functionality such as circuit management, wireless, and topology visualization.