PatchPilot · Comparisons
A Canonical Landscape alternative for small Debian and Ubuntu fleets
Landscape is Canonical's systems management for Ubuntu, and it is good at it. It is also built and priced for organisations that employ somebody to run it. If you have a handful to a few dozen servers and nobody whose job this is, here is where the two differ — including where Landscape is simply the better choice.
Side by side
| Canonical Landscape | PatchPilot | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Managing an Ubuntu estate: desktops, servers, cloud instances, IoT devices | Knowing the patch status of every server you run, in one table |
| Distributions | Ubuntu | Debian, Ubuntu and apt-based derivatives, Raspberry Pi OS among them. No RHEL family |
| Scope | Updates and packages, monitoring and alerts, remote scripts, repository management, user management with role-based access, compliance and hardening | Installed and pending updates, security fixes with their CVEs, reboots waiting, release support, maintenance windows. Nothing else |
| How it runs | SaaS run by Canonical, managed by Canonical on your infrastructure, or self-hosted — including without internet access | A hosted dashboard. The agent talks outbound only; no inbound port on your server |
| Release support | With Ubuntu Pro, an LTS release gets up to ten years of security maintenance | Flags a release months before it stops getting updates, and keeps it flagged afterwards |
| Reboots | Alerts when a machine needs one | Flags the machine on the dashboard. Never reboots anything |
| Price | Landscape SaaS comes with an Ubuntu Pro subscription, priced per machine per year. A Canonical-managed Landscape server is an add-on from $3,099 a year | Free during the beta. After it, priced per server in euros |
| Getting started | Sign up for SaaS, or install Landscape Server with PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ and a web front end | One command on the first server; the first answer in under five minutes |
Landscape details as published by Canonical on 25 September 2026. Ubuntu Pro itself is free for personal use on up to five physical machines; Canonical's terms say what that includes.
When Landscape is the better choice
- You need compliance. Hardening profiles and compliance reporting are part of Landscape. PatchPilot has neither.
- You need to act on machines, not just see them. Remote scripts, package and user management, your own repositories — Landscape does all of it. PatchPilot is not a configuration management tool.
- Nothing may leave your network. Self-hosted Landscape runs air-gapped. PatchPilot is a hosted service.
- You want to stay on a release longer. Ubuntu Pro's extended security maintenance keeps an LTS release patched long after standard support ends. PatchPilot can tell you the date is coming; it cannot move it.
- Your fleet is Ubuntu and large, and somebody's job is to run it.
When PatchPilot is
- Your fleet is mixed Debian and Ubuntu, or has a Raspberry Pi in it. Landscape manages Ubuntu.
- What you are missing is the overview.
unattended-upgradesalready installs your security updates; you want to know what it did on each machine, what is still pending, what is waiting for a reboot and what has run out of support. - Nobody is going to operate a management server. There is nothing to install but the agent, and nothing of ours your servers depend on.
- The price has to make sense for a small team. Free during the beta; after it, priced per server in euros.
The short version
Landscape manages Ubuntu machines. PatchPilot tells you where each of your Debian and Ubuntu servers stands on updates, and installs them in a window you choose. If the second sentence is the one you were looking for, PatchPilot is free during the beta. More on the PatchPilot home page.