ColdAisle vs Danbyte

ColdAisle is free, MIT-licensed, on-premise software for managing data center infrastructure. It runs on Windows using IIS, PHP, and SQL Server, and the marketing site does not host customer inventory. Its floor planner supports 2D layouts and interactive 3D views with cabinets, row PDUs, and raceways. Power tools cover A/B zones, panels, single-, dual-, and three-phase PDUs, outlet inventory, history charts, and overload alerts. Cooling features include CRAC and CRAH equipment, environmental sensors, and 3D airflow visualization. Device monitoring supports SNMPv2c and SNMPv3, MIB uploads, discovery, OID templates, and scheduled polling; SNMP secrets are encrypted at rest with the application key. Authentication options include local accounts, LDAPS with Active Directory group mapping, and Microsoft Entra ID OIDC single sign-on. ColdAisle can import openDCIM data through a live API or offline JSON dumps, with a preview before migration. Its IPAM feature does not provide IPv6, DNS, or a DHCP server.

Danbyte is an open-source IP address management, data-center infrastructure management and network source-of-truth platform. It tracks IP space, hardware, cabling, power, virtualization, monitoring and automation in one system. For IPAM, it calculates prefix containment, available space and utilization per VRF, and handles VLANs, DHCP ranges, DNS zones and route targets. Its DCIM tools model rack elevations, device faceplates, ports, power and virtual chassis. Network views include cable and fibre tracing, floor plans, circuits, VPN tunnels and wireless SSIDs. Proxmox VE and VMware vCenter imports cover virtual machines and related infrastructure, with drift reconciliation; active checks, SNMP and nmap discovery help maintain an observed layer. Automation options include Ansible and Terraform inventories, Jinja templates, signed webhooks and scoped APIs. Danbyte can run on user hardware, including fully air-gapped deployments, without telemetry or an expiring license. The free, self-hosted offer includes all features without seat licensing. The Linux quick installer bundles Python, Node and dependencies but requires PostgreSQL 15+ and Redis.