CentOS Linux 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

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Overview
Pricing and Plans
Features
User Reviews

Overview

CentOS Linux

4.6

(34)

Pricing

Pricing available upon request

About CentOS Linux

CentOS Linux is an operating system (OS) that helps professionals streamline processes related to partition backups, data security management, spam filtering, kernel building, and more on a centralized platform. It enables users to eliminate bare-metal attacks against hard drives by encrypting files, archiving data and managing user passwords using the dm-crypt tool.

CentOS Linux enables businesses to set up public mirror sites and create schedules for data synchronization with mirror networks. With the virtual mail backend system, users can store domain and user configurations, including LDAP, PostgreSQL and My SQL. Additionally, it lets administrators configure full-virtualization and paravirtualization utilizing KVM and Xen technologies.

CentOS Linux allows individuals to migrate the system from older CentOS versions or third-party Linux distributors, such as Scientific Linux, WhiteBox and TaoLinux. It is an open-source platform that is available for free. It extends support via documentation, FAQs, discussion forums, video tutorials, email and other online measures.

CentOS Linux Screenshots

CentOS Linux Pricing and Plans

Starting price: Pricing available upon request

Free Trial

Free Version

Basic

Pricing available upon request

No plan information available

CentOS Linux Features

Popular features found in Operating Systems
App Management
Data Security
Kernels
System Updates
More features of CentOS Linux
User Interface

CentOS Linux User Reviews

Overall Rating

4.6

Ratings Breakdown

71%

24%

Secondary Ratings

Ease of Use

4.2

Value for money

4.8

Customer support

4.1

Functionality

4.6

Angus M.

Verified reviewer

Logistics and Supply Chain

2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed August 2022

My Favourite Linux Distro Great Security And Great For Web Hosting

CentOS has improved my knowledge of Linux greatly and helps me in my day to day business life whether it's for web hosting, or getting a new project set up online.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

My favourite thing about CentOS is how great the security is. There is barely ever any exploits for CentOS compared to other operating systems, the firewall is great and new patches are always secure.

Cons:

The only slight gripe that I have with CentOS is that not all packages which you can get on other distros are available out of the box.

Verified

Reviewer

Hospital & Health Care

10000+ employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed July 2021

Open source version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

We use CentOS in mostly three environments: 1) application test environments where we don't need 24/7 support and can afford to do things ourselves; 2) internal IT utilities like firewalls, DNS, backup proxies, management servers where we have multiple servers doing the same job or doing things that only affect IT admins and don't require 24/7 support; 3) embedded in supported vendor turnkey solutions. If we need to run Linux in a production application/database environment, we run Red Hat and pay for support.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

It is free. You get the same binaries as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, except for the Red Hat Network portion, and it is usually available a few weeks after a given Red Hat release. It is more secure and stable than Windows. Since it is widely adopted, there are lots of web sites for software and knowledge bases.

Cons:

It is an unsupported release, although you can buy third-party support. I have not done this. It is less widely adopted and somewhat more difficult to use than Windows, but is not a problem for a skilled Unix administrator.

Emiliano Ariel V.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed June 2021

CentOS Linux now is a rolling relaase

It's one of the most used OS in servers arround the world. The free version of REHL. Great community support. Now some users move to Rocky Linux the fork of this.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

This is a great software for most of uses. I use this on several servers. Has a lot of documentation, great comunity support.

Cons:

This OS change your release type. Will be a rolling release and i don't like it. You need to move to RedHat Enterprise o another distro like Debian or Ubuntu if you need stability in your environment.

Reasons for choosing CentOS Linux

Some features on CentOS are very robust.

Verified

Reviewer

Information Technology and Services

10000+ employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed November 2022

CentOS Honest Review

When I started my career as infrastructure engineer, my almost work is related to Linux, at my early stage it was difficult for me to learn and understand Linux but centOS solves the problem to learn linux. Now I can easily understand Linux and can do my daily tasks more efficiently and perfectly. Also almost every organisation has adapted cloud so it is easy to move from CentOS to Amazon cloud Linux. I would say if you are at your learning phase then CentOS is the best. Also if have small or medium enterprise then there is nothing better than CentOS.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

CentOS is an open source operating system, it's easy to use and features are awesome.i like the security feature the most.CentOS graphical user interface is fantastic, nowadays every organisation needs Linux at any point of time, I would say CentOS is best OS for beginners you can easily learn and understand Linux .

Cons:

CentOS is little bit outdated than other OS like windows and Mac. I would if UI of CentOS can be enhanced and some new features will be added then it will be great.Installing the new packages is not easy in CentOS as compare to other OS.

Reasons for switching to CentOS Linux

Installing the packages easier on windows than CentOS. Windows UI is better than centOS.

Nishant K.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

10000+ employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed October 2022

CentOS user review

Overall, it has been a good experience along with working on ubuntu, fedora, suse for different work purpose

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Centos runs only the most stable version of codes and integrates it as well.The CLI works buttery smooth and is superfast

Cons:

CentOS has a small database and still emerging and developing.So not much updates.. Overall its great.

Ian B.

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services

11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed June 2023

A Great Alternative to Windows

We have had a very reliable experience with CentOS. Applications run well on it and we are able to secure our backups more using that operating system. We have had some difficulty getting users up to speed on how to properly navigate the OS.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Have a Linux based operating system has made it helpful for our engineers to use for certain projects. User interface for CentOS is setup for administrators to access tools efficiently. The applications in CentOS are more secure than our Windows machines.

Cons:

There are only specific application that are compatible with CentOS. The support for Linux is hard to find that is able to resolve issues at a good price. There are less engineers that are able to use and manage CentOS.

Verified

Reviewer

Libraries

2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed November 2021

CentOS is an excellent Linux OS for servers but its future is now very unsure

My overall experience with CentOS is good, it was a very reliable and stable distribution, it was free and yet it contained everything you would get with the paid RHEL version.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

CentOS is a very stable and reliable Linux distribution that I have used in various organisations as a server OS. It works well, has good package management and can be quite easily secured. Works well with products like cPanel.

Cons:

The problem with CentOS now is that its future is unknown. Red Hat has stated it won't be continuing this distribution - which is probably related to the acquisition of Red Hat by Big Blue (IBM). It's a real shame to see such a monument of open-source like CentOS being discontinued. I only hope this is not the first nail in the coffin for open-source as a whole.

Armando I.

Verified reviewer

Computer Software

11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed December 2021

Security, scalability and speed for your networks.

In General CentOS it allows me to optimize my hardware resources, deploy through enbedded tools, virtual machines and containers. Segment my services. If you are an advanced Linux user, there are few limits that you will find.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

CentOS is my preferred distro for servers. From application services to virtualizations. It is very stable, weekly updates, a well documented CLI easy to use.

Cons:

I have no problems with CentOS, if something doesn't work, searching the community for the answer is likely to be solved.

Jose J G.

Verified reviewer

Market Research

2-10 employees

Used weekly for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed November 2022

Strong Linux Operating System for Business Servers

It has been a great operating system for our cloud server and containers.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

I like that CentOS doesn't use a lot of memory resources to run fast our server.

Cons:

I don't like the recent changes and discontinuity of CentOS 7 and 8. It's confusing how to upgrade to CentOS RHEL version without affecting our actual server functions.