Lago vs Sentinel EMS

Lago is an open-source billing platform that connects product usage and commercial terms with customer invoices. It supports usage-based, subscription, prepaid, and hybrid pricing, plus quotes, order forms, prepaid credits, entitlements, quotas, subscription and usage charges, and itemized invoices. For AI products, Lago can meter input, output, and cached tokens separately and assign usage to customers for billing. Applications can connect through a REST API, official JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and Go SDKs, or signed webhooks. Listed AI integrations include OpenAI, Anthropic, AWS Bedrock, Google Gemini, and Mistral; payment and finance integrations include Adyen, Stripe, NetSuite, and Xero. The Open source plan is free, licensed under AGPLv3 and self-hosted. Lago Premium is available as cloud or self-hosted deployment, including on-premises or in a VPC, but pricing is provided after contacting Lago. Lago states it is SOC 2 Type II certified and describes single sign-on, role-based access controls, and audit logs. Premium includes platform support, business-hours incident management, and implementation guidance.

Sentinel EMS is a licensing and entitlement management system for software and hardware device vendors. Its feature-centric catalog supports product packaging and licensing models such as perpetual, term subscription, device-based, usage-based, feature-based, trial, and offline or air-gapped licenses. Vendors can change packages and licensing models without depending on Operations, and automate provisioning and approvals using activation, entitlement, product, and order information. Customers can activate software on demand and use customizable customer or partner portals from any device or location. EMS can incorporate on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployments and work with Sentinel or other license enforcement technologies. Integrations include back-office systems, a no-code Salesforce connection, REST APIs, event-driven webhooks, and MCP. Entitlement information can show deployment and usage trends, customer compliance, and contract or service agreement status. Thales positions the system for businesses selling software, especially those with complex product environments. Pricing is on request, and a free trial is available by request; no trial duration is stated.