Canvex vs VMware Horizon
Your workstations shouldn't depend on a licensing negotiation.
Horizon (now Omnissa) is a strong product attached to a turbulent story: a Broadcom divestiture, repackaged licensing, and a stack that assumes you already run a virtualization estate. Canvex assumes you have a browser.
The honest version
Horizon made sense as the default choice when it shipped with the vSphere estate you already owned. Post-divestiture, it's a standalone bet: connection servers, Unified Access Gateways, golden-image pipelines, and per-CCU licensing conversations, all for the privilege of running desktop infrastructure yourself. Blast Extreme is a good protocol and the vSphere integration runs deep. But if you're not already committed to that estate, you're signing up to operate one so that your users can open a desktop. Canvex skips the estate: we run the compute, you create workstations, your users open a tab.
| Horizon | Canvex | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first desktop | Weeks: vSphere prerequisites, connection servers, UAG, golden images, entitlements. | About five minutes from signup, in a browser tab. |
| Infrastructure you operate | The full estate: hypervisor hosts, connection servers, gateways, image pipeline, profile management. | None. Canvex runs the control plane and the compute. |
| Vendor stability | Divested from VMware to Omnissa (2024) amid the Broadcom acquisition; licensing and roadmap have been moving targets. | Independent and small. No acquisition drama, but also no 20-year enterprise track record. Our Trust Center doesn't pretend otherwise. |
| Pricing model | Per-user/per-CCU subscriptions, quote-based, typically annual. | Platform plan from $9/mo plus per-workstation compute billed daily. |
| GPU workstations | vGPU via NVIDIA GRID licensing on your own hardware: capable, and a licensing project of its own. | Real NVIDIA and Intel GPUs as a daily-priced add-on. The vGPU licensing is our problem, not yours. |
| Protocol | Blast Extreme: excellent, H.264/HEVC-based, well-tuned clients. | RDP via the browser or direct connect. Comparable for office and development work; we publish our latency numbers. |
| vSphere integration | Native and deep: if your world is vCenter, Horizon lives in it. | None. Canvex is its own platform, not a vSphere add-on. |
| Directory requirements | Active Directory required. | None required. SSO (SAML/OIDC) and SCIM on Enterprise. |
Where Horizon is the right call
- You already run a healthy vSphere estate with capacity to spare and staff who know it.
- You're deep in the Omnissa/Workspace ONE ecosystem and want unified endpoint + desktop management.
- You need offline or air-gapped VDI on hardware you physically control.
- Your compliance program requires certifications Canvex hasn't earned yet (SOC 2 on the roadmap; see the Trust Center).
Where Canvex is the right call
- You don't own a virtualization estate and have no desire to acquire one.
- You'd rather spend the licensing-negotiation weeks shipping actual work.
- You need GPU workstations without an NVIDIA GRID licensing project.
- Your headcount is elastic: contractors, seasonal ramps, classrooms. Daily billing follows it down as well as up.
If the phrase "our vCenter" shows up naturally when you talk about infrastructure, Horizon is worth a look. If your reaction was "our what," the estate it assumes would exist only to serve desktops. That is the tax Canvex removes.
Try it before you commit.
3-day free trial, your first desktop streaming in about five minutes. No Horizon sizing call required.