A dollar a month separates them on price, so the decision is licensing terms. Blesta will sell you the licence outright; Clientexec will let you try it first. What else differs, and what neither one does.
Ilinca Bostan7 min readBlesta and Clientexec occupy the same slot on a shortlist: a self-hosted hosting billing platform with unlimited clients, priced under $25 a month. Providers who have decided WHMCS's per-client ladder does not suit them usually end up comparing these two, and the published prices are close enough that the decision comes down to licensing terms rather than headline cost.
Here is what each vendor publishes, read on 18 August 2026.
How this was sourced. FluxBilling publishes this comparison and sells a competing product. Every Blesta and Clientexec figure below was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 18 August 2026, and both sources are linked at the end. Prices change, so check the source before you buy. Figures are in the currency each vendor publishes and no exchange rate is applied.
Clientexec sells two leased plans, both with unlimited clients: Branded Leased at $1.00 for the first month and $16.95/month thereafter, and Unbranded Leased at $1.00 for the first month and $19.95/month thereafter. Both include unlimited products, servers, tickets and orders, lifetime updates, unlimited support, a 30-day free trial, and a complimentary $12 eNom domain reseller account. The pricing page advertises no perpetual or owned licence.
Blesta sells both. Monthly licences are $17.95 Branded, $20.95 Unbranded and $23.95 Flex. Owned licences are one-time: $350 Branded, $425 Unbranded, $500 Flex, $1,295 Lifetime and $1,495 Lifetime Flex. Owned Branded, Unbranded and Flex include one year of support; the two Lifetime tiers include updates forever and three years of support. After the included period, support and updates renewal is $62/year and is optional.
| Plan | Price | Model | Branding |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clientexec Branded Leased | $16.95/mo | Leased subscription | Vendor branding retained |
| Clientexec Unbranded Leased | $19.95/mo | Leased subscription | Removed |
| Blesta Monthly Branded | $17.95/mo | Licence subscription | Footer link retained |
| Blesta Monthly Unbranded | $20.95/mo | Licence subscription | Removed |
| Blesta Monthly Flex | $23.95/mo | Licence subscription | Removed, not IP-locked |
| Blesta Owned Branded | $350 once | Perpetual | Footer link retained |
| Blesta Owned Unbranded | $425 once | Perpetual | Removed |
| Blesta Owned Flex | $500 once | Perpetual | Removed, not IP-locked |
| Blesta Owned Lifetime | $1,295 once | Perpetual, updates forever | Removed |
| Blesta Owned Lifetime Flex | $1,495 once | Perpetual, updates forever | Removed, not IP-locked |
All figures in USD as published on 18 August 2026. Both vendors offer unlimited clients on every plan listed.
$16.95 against $17.95 branded, and $19.95 against $20.95 unbranded, is a dollar a month. Over three years that is $36. Nobody should choose a billing platform on a $36 difference, and any comparison that leads with it is padding.
The real divergence is that Blesta will sell you the licence outright and Clientexec, on its published plans, will not. Blesta Owned Branded at $350 is under 21 months of Clientexec Branded Leased. If you intend to run the same platform for five years, that is a genuinely different financial commitment, and it is the single strongest reason to pick Blesta over Clientexec.
The counter-argument is equally real: a perpetual licence you stop paying support on is a perpetual licence you stop getting updates for, unless you are on a Lifetime tier. Blesta's $62/year renewal is the price of staying current on the cheaper owned tiers, and skipping it on a system that stores payment data and tax records is a decision with a security dimension, not just a cost one.
IP locking. Blesta's "Flex" plans exist because the standard licences are tied to a single IP address. If you run a warm standby, move between providers, or keep a staging environment, Flex is the tier you need — $23.95/month or $500 one-time rather than $20.95 or $425. Budget for it up front if your architecture has more than one host.
Trials. Clientexec advertises a 30-day free trial and a $1 first month. Blesta's pricing page does not advertise an equivalent trial. If evaluating on live data before committing matters to you, that difference is worth more than the dollar-a-month price gap.
Support model. Clientexec advertises unlimited support and lifetime updates included in the lease. Blesta's support window depends on the tier you buy and then renews annually at $62. Neither is better in the abstract; they suit different appetites for ongoing cost.
Extras. Clientexec bundles a $12 eNom domain reseller account with each plan. It is a small thing, but it is a real thing, and it is the sort of detail that vanishes from comparison tables.
Neither Blesta nor Clientexec publishes a built-in datacenter infrastructure management layer. There is no rack elevation view, no hardware inventory with IPMI credentials, no IP address management with automatic allocation on provisioning, no switch or PDU tracking. For a shared-hosting or reseller business that is irrelevant. For anyone racking physical machines it is the largest unpriced item in this comparison, because the usual answer is a second subscription — EasyDCIM's colocation ladder starts at $49/month for 25 services and its dedicated-server ladder at $69/month for 50 devices — plus the integration work to keep two systems agreeing about the same server.
That is worth pricing before you choose, not after. We laid the options out in which platforms include DCIM, IPAM and colocation.
Both of these platforms are usually bought by someone leaving something else, most often WHMCS, and both ship a built-in importer for exactly that move. Blesta's Import Manager plugin imports from WHMCS 5.2 to 8.2 and covers clients, contacts, invoices, services, products, taxes, currencies, tickets and the knowledge base. Clientexec's WHMCS Importer plugin imports clients, packages, invoices, tickets and servers, and runs from the admin interface or the command line; its documentation states it has been tested against WHMCS 8.x. Neither publishes an importer for the other, so a Blesta-to-Clientexec move in either direction is a services exercise rather than a feature. We went through every vendor's tooling and its documented limits in which billing platforms ship an importer.
FluxBilling is a subscription platform: Lite €4.95/month (10 clients), Starter €24.95/month (250 clients), Professional €34.95/month (500 clients), Business €44.95/month (unlimited clients). White-label branding removal is a €50/month add-on available on every tier. Self-hosting is Business-tier only, at a €500 one-time fee on top of the subscription. There is no free trial; every plan carries a 14-day money-back guarantee.
Being straight about the comparison: on unlimited-client monthly price, both Blesta at $17.95 and Clientexec at $16.95 come in below FluxBilling Business at €44.95, and neither figure needs a currency conversion to make that point. Blesta also offers something FluxBilling does not offer at all — a licence you own outright. If your decision criterion is the lowest monthly price for unlimited clients, or ownership of the licence, this post has already given you the answer and it is not us.
Where FluxBilling is different is the bundle. Rack management, hardware inventory, IPAM, network device tracking and bare-metal provisioning are on every tier including Lite, and the WHMCS and EasyDCIM importers ship on every tier as well. That matters if you rack hardware and it does not matter at all if you resell shared hosting. See Blesta comparison, Clientexec comparison, and current pricing.
Pick Clientexec if you want to try before you commit, prefer unlimited support folded into a flat monthly fee, and have no interest in owning a licence.
Pick Blesta if you plan to run the platform for years and want the option to buy it outright, or if you need a licence that is not pinned to one IP address.
Look further if physical infrastructure is part of your business, because on that axis these two are the same platform.
Blesta, Clientexec and EasyDCIM are trademarks of their respective owners. This comparison is published by FluxBilling for evaluation purposes and is not endorsed by, affiliated with, or reviewed by any of them.
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