A hosted CTFd alternative with event operations included
CTF7 vs CTFd, side by side: hosting model, pricing (USD per month vs INR per event), participant and page-view limits, formats, dynamic flags, anti-cheat and support. Every CTFd fact is sourced and dated, and we say plainly when CTFd is the better pick.
Green marks the side with the capability or advantage in each row; pricing is neutral because the cheaper option depends on your event. Details and sources below.
The best CTFd alternative depends on what you are missing. Tired of running servers? Use a hosted platform billed per event. Need ticketing and registration fees next to the scoreboard, or report-based bug hunting? CTF7 covers those in one place. Attack-defense and King of the Hill are a sales conversation on both sides: CTF7 runs them as quoted managed events, CTFd puts KotH on Enterprise. Want free, open-source code you fully control? Stay with CTFd.
TL;DR verdict
- Choose CTF7 if you run discrete events (tech fests, conference CTFs, hiring drives), want INR per-event pricing, dynamic flags and anti-cheat on a ₹9,999 plan, or need formats beyond jeopardy with managed operations.
- Choose CTFd if you want to self-host for free under Apache-2.0, want to try a public demo and read detailed docs before you talk to anyone, need its plugin and theme ecosystem, run a year-round always-on CTF, or qualify for its 80% education discount on a small monthly plan.
- Cost reality: CTFd Basic is $60 month-to-month ($50/month billed annually) as of October 2026, which can undercut CTF7 Standard for a single small jeopardy event. Watch CTFd's meters, though: page views (auto-upgrade past 1.25x the limit), emails ($1.80 per 1,000 over the allowance) and container servers are capped per tier. CTF7 Standard is a flat ₹9,999 per event and includes dynamic flags, anti-cheat and email and WhatsApp support.
- Formats: CTFd's docs say King of the Hill is only on Enterprise instances, and its per-player Application Target is Enterprise-only and "heavily beta". On CTF7, Raw Ops is self-serve; King of the Hill, attack-defense and SOC simulation are managed events our team runs, scoped on a call and quoted per event. Neither side offers them off the shelf on a self-serve plan.
Disclosure: CTF7 publishes this page, so every CTFd claim below links to CTFd's own pricing page, docs or blog. Our other CTF platform comparisons follow the same sourcing rules. Pricing changes; check CTFd's pricing page and our CTF7 pricing before you decide.
CTF7 vs CTFd: the full comparison table
CTFd facts verified on October 1, 2026 from CTFd's pricing page, Enterprise page, docs and pricing blog. CTF7 facts come from our published plans. Swipe the table sideways on mobile.
| Capability | CTF7 | CTFd (hosted & open source) |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting model | Every plan hosted on CTF7, Free included; Standard adds your container challenges and Premium has our team run them | Hosted SaaS (CTFd Cloud) or free self-hosting of the open-source core |
| Pricing model | Per event, in INR: Free ₹0, Standard ₹9,999 per event, Premium custom | Per month, in USD: Basic $50, Plus $100, Professional $300 (billed annually) or $60 / $120 / $360 month-to-month; Enterprise listed as "Contact us" (about $500 / $600 per month in CTFd's 2025 pricing post). Current prices took effect March 15, 2025 |
| Billing currency | INR (₹) | USD only |
| Minimum commitment | One event | One month per instance |
| Discounts & sponsorship | No published discounts; the Free plan covers one small practice CTF a year (up to 50 participants) | 80% education, 50% non-profit, plus a sponsored self-hosted Enterprise license for free educational CTFs in the US and EU only (per CTFd's 2025 pricing post) |
| Participant limits | 50 (Free), 500 (Standard), unlimited (Premium) | No user cap on hosted plans; metered by monthly page views: 250k (Basic), 750k (Plus), 3M (Professional). Going past 1.25x the limit auto-upgrades the instance to the next tier (CTFd docs) |
| Email allowance | No email allowance listed on CTF7's published plans | 2,000 (Basic), 5,000 (Plus), 15,000 (Professional), 25,000 (Enterprise) emails per month; overage $1.80 per 1,000 |
| Container challenges | Bring-your-own Docker images on Standard; managed container deployment on Premium | Container servers per plan: 5 (Basic), 10 (Plus), 30 (Professional). Per-account "Application Target" instances are Enterprise-only and described in CTFd's docs as "heavily beta" |
| Jeopardy CTF | All plans, static or dynamic scoring, hints | Core strength, dynamic value challenges from Basic |
| Extra challenge types | Jeopardy challenges with attachments, links, hints and Docker targets | Programming, multiple choice and manual verification from Plus |
| King of the Hill | Managed event on request, quoted per event; our team runs the game infrastructure | Enterprise instances only, "Contact us" pricing (CTFd docs) |
| Attack-defense | Managed event on request, quoted per event; our team runs the game infrastructure | Not documented as a native game type at the time of writing |
| Raw Ops (report-based, CVSS 4.0 scored) | Self-serve event format | Not offered |
| SOC / blue-team simulation | Managed event on request, quoted per event (newer offering) | Not a built-in mode |
| Dynamic flags (unique per team) | Standard and Premium | Not a headline feature. CTFd supports static, regex, programmable and HTTP flags, and its NYU case study describes per-student unique challenges built with custom work |
| Anti-cheat & monitoring | IP and browser tracking, alerts, submission logs (Standard); advanced analytics and logs (Premium) | Not described on CTFd's features page; IP restrictions on Professional. CTFd's NYU case study describes a custom anti-cheat plugin |
| RSVP, ticketing & registration fees | Built in (open, invite-only or paid; digital passes; check-in) | No event-operations layer: no RSVP, ticketing or payments; use separate tools |
| Hackathons, conferences & meetups | Built in | Not offered |
| SSO / SAML | Not listed on CTF7's published plans; talk to us about your requirements | SAML on Professional; LDAP, SAML and SSO on Enterprise |
| Branding & custom domain | Custom branding on Standard; custom domain and managed SSL on Premium | Themes on all tiers; custom theme and plugin upload on Professional |
| Certificates | Participant certificates on paid plans; branded certificates on Premium | Not listed on CTFd's pricing page; some CTFd-based events show a Certificates section |
| Custom challenge development | CTF7 team designs, builds and tests challenges; included in a package or priced by complexity | Offered as professional services |
| Support | Email & WhatsApp (Standard); dedicated technical support (Premium) | Support 9 AM to 5 PM ET, Monday to Friday, per CTFd's contact page; on-call support on Enterprise |
| Open source | No, CTF7 is a proprietary platform | Yes, Apache-2.0, about 6.9k GitHub stars and 2.8k forks (Oct 2026) |
| Public demo & docs | No public demo or docs site; an API reference exists. Talk to our team about your event | Public demo instance with published logins (resets every 30 minutes) and a large docs site at docs.ctfd.io |
| Maturity & ecosystem | Newer; built for Indian colleges, communities and conferences | Mature (open source since 2015, hosted since 2017), CTFd says 50k+ installations, large plugin and theme ecosystem, about 35 UI languages |
CTFd data as of October 2026 from ctfd.io/pricing, ctfd.io/enterprise, ctfd.io/contact, demo.ctfd.io, docs.ctfd.io and blog.ctfd.io. Check their site for current details. CTF7 data from /pricing/. Full source list at the end of this page.
CTFd pricing in 2026, explained
CTFd's hosted plans are monthly subscriptions in US dollars, with a monthly/yearly toggle that saves about 17% on annual billing. As of October 2026, the public pricing page lists these tiers (per month, billed yearly / billed monthly):
- Basic: $50 / $60. 250k monthly page views, 5 container servers, 2,000 emails, unlimited users, subdomain or your own domain with TLS, themes, unlockable and dynamic value challenges.
- Plus: $100 / $120. 750k page views, 10 container servers, 5,000 emails, plus programming, multiple-choice and manual-verification challenges, an event statistics report and Slack/Discord webhooks.
- Professional: $300 / $360. 3M page views, 30 container servers, 15,000 emails, SAML, IP restrictions and custom theme/plugin upload.
- Enterprise: "Contact us" on the pricing page; CTFd's 2025 pricing post lists it at about $500 / $600. It adds new game types such as King of the Hill, individualized infrastructure, workspaces/web shells, advanced authentication, on-call support, professional services and 25,000 emails, plus 5,760 GB-hours of Application Target compute (then $25 per 1,440 GB-hours).
- Custom: quoted, with unlimited page views and container servers, custom theme, plugin and challenge development and concierge onboarding.
These prices come from a price change CTFd announced in January 2025 that took effect on March 15, 2025. The same post kept the education discount at 80% and the non-profit discount at 50% (on request, and the organization and its parent must be fully educational or non-profit), and described a sponsored self-hosted Enterprise license for free educational CTFs, available in the US and EU only. Self-hosting the open-source CTFd from GitHub is free. If you would rather have CTFd's own team run the event, its workshops are listed at $4,000 to $8,000 per workshop.
CTFd's meters and limits to plan around
A hosted CTFd plan has no user cap, but several things are metered. For a one-off event these matter more than the headline price:
| Meter | How it works on CTFd (as of Oct 2026) | What it means for an event |
|---|---|---|
| Page views | 250k / 750k / 3M per month on Basic / Plus / Professional. Unused views roll over for up to 2 months. An instance that goes past 1.25x its limit is automatically upgraded to the next tier (CTFd docs, instance limits) | A busy 24-hour scoreboard refreshed by hundreds of players can use views quickly. Estimate traffic before you pick a tier. |
| Emails | 2,000 / 5,000 / 15,000 / 25,000 per month (Basic to Enterprise); overage $1.80 per 1,000 | Registration confirmations, password resets and announcements all count. |
| Container servers | 5 / 10 / 30 on Basic / Plus / Professional | Caps how many Docker-based challenges you can run at once below Enterprise. |
| Billing period | Minimum one month per instance; USD only | A weekend CTF still buys a month, billed in dollars. |
| Game types | King of the Hill and Application Target are Enterprise-only; Application Target is "heavily beta" in CTFd's docs | Anything beyond jeopardy means an Enterprise conversation. |
CTF7 works differently: you pay per event, in rupees. The Free plan runs a jeopardy CTF for up to 50 participants with static flags and attachments. Standard is ₹9,999 per event for up to 500 participants, with custom branding, static and dynamic flags, anti-cheat, hints, bring-your-own Docker images and email and WhatsApp support. Premium is custom-quoted for hiring programs and large multi-day events, with unlimited participants, managed containers, custom domain and managed SSL, advanced anti-cheat analytics and dedicated support. See CTF7 pricing for the full list.
What one CTF actually costs on each platform
Scenario: a college tech fest runs a 24-hour jeopardy CTF for about 300 players, with a few Docker challenges. Prices as of October 2026; USD figures are list prices before tax and discounts.
| Option | Platform cost | What you still handle | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| CTFd self-hosted | $0 software + your cloud bill | Servers, scaling, TLS, backups, container isolation, monitoring, on-call during the event | Cheapest in cash, most expensive in people-time. Needs someone comfortable with Docker and Linux. |
| CTFd Basic, month-to-month | $60 for the month | Challenge authoring, registration and fees (separate tool), anti-cheat review | Check that expected traffic fits 250k page views (past 1.25x, the instance auto-upgrades to Plus), 2,000 emails and 5 container servers. With the 80% education discount the list price drops sharply. |
| CTFd Plus / Professional | $120 / $360 for the month | Same as above | Upgrade path for more traffic, containers, SAML or custom plugins. |
| CTF7 Standard | ₹9,999 per event | Challenge authoring (or add CTF7 challenge development) | Flat price for up to 500 players: dynamic flags, anti-cheat, hints, bring-your-own Docker images, custom branding, email and WhatsApp support. The published plan lists no page-view or email meter. |
| CTF7 Premium | Custom quote | Very little: full setup and challenge hosting included | For multi-day, unlimited-participant or hiring events, with managed container deployment, custom domain and managed SSL. |
Our honest read: for a single, small jeopardy CTF where you only need a scoreboard, CTFd Basic (especially with the education discount) or self-hosted CTFd can cost less than CTF7 Standard. CTF7 becomes the better value when you would otherwise pay separately for ticketing and fee collection, need per-team dynamic flags and anti-cheat, want to pay in rupees per event, or need formats CTFd doesn't offer below Enterprise. Try the numbers yourself with our CTF cost calculator.
Formats beyond jeopardy: where CTF7 and CTFd differ most
CTFd is built around jeopardy challenges and does it well. The gap appears when your event needs something other than a challenge board.
CTFd Enterprise also adds per-account Application Target instances (app environments launched from docker-compose, labeled "heavily beta" in CTFd's docs) and browser-based workspaces/web shells. If you need those today, that is a CTFd Enterprise conversation. CTF7 handles container challenges as bring-your-own Docker challenge images on Standard and managed container deployment on Premium.
If your event is a straightforward jeopardy CTF, both platforms will serve you. CTFd has more niche challenge types out of the box on Plus and above (programming challenges, multiple choice, manual verification). CTF7 focuses its Standard plan on the things that keep a public jeopardy leaderboard fair: per-team dynamic flags and anti-cheat signals, plus static or dynamic scoring and paid hints. Read our jeopardy CTF guide for format details, or attack-defense vs jeopardy if you are choosing a format.
Hosting and event operations
Organizers searching for a "hosted CTFd alternative" usually have a working scoreboard and need help with everything around it.
Self-hosting CTFd is free, but on event day you own scaling, TLS, backups, container isolation for pwn and web challenges, and incident response when a challenge falls over at 2 a.m. CTFd Enterprise's own container tooling runs on Docker Swarm, so self-hosters need real DevOps skill. CTFd Cloud removes most of the server work for a monthly fee.
What CTFd doesn't cover is the rest of the event. As of October 2026, ctfd.io lists no RSVP, ticketing, payments, hackathon, conference or public event-discovery features; MajorLeagueCyber, an event tracker built by CTFd's developers, lives on a separate site. Indian organizers in particular tend to stitch together a registration site, a payment link, a ticketing tool, a Discord server and the scoreboard. On CTF7 these live together:
- Registration, RSVP and passes: open, invite-only or paid entry, digital passes, attendance tracking and check-in.
- Fee collection and certificates for participants.
- Teams and roles: team-size limits, mentors and judges with limited permissions.
- Admin controls: upload challenges, pause rounds and track submissions live, with announcements and a real-time scoreboard.
- Post-event analytics: solve trends, leaderboard insights and report quality.
If your event also includes a hackathon, a conference track or a meetup, see event hosting and hackathons. For a full planning checklist, read how to host a CTF.
What CTFd does well, and when it is the better choice
We would rather you pick the right tool than the wrong one from us. CTFd has real strengths, and it is the better fit if any of these describe you.
CTFd is the reference CTF scoreboard. It started in 2014, went open source on January 1, 2015 and launched hosting in January 2017. Its core is Apache-2.0 with about 6.9k GitHub stars and 2.8k forks as of October 2026, and CTFd's own site cites 50k+ installations. You will find it behind many well-known events:
- FIRST CTF: the permanent, always-on CTF of FIRST (the global forum of incident response teams) runs on CTFd Cloud with a custom theme and FIRST single sign-on.
- Hackerverse: EC-Council's free monthly CTF league runs its challenge platform on CTFd.
- CSAW CTF and Flare-On: CTFd grew out of running NYU's CSAW CTF (per CTFd's About page), and its published case studies cover FireEye's Flare-On, an NYU Tandon offensive-security course and Toyota Hack Festa 2022.
CTFd also makes evaluation easy. A public demo at demo.ctfd.io publishes admin and player logins, resets every 30 minutes and runs with Plus features, so you can click through the admin panel in seconds. Its documentation at docs.ctfd.io covers challenge types, flags, scoring, settings, the REST API and ctfcli in well over a hundred pages. The UI ships in about 35 languages, and features like brackets, user or team mode, unlockable challenges and challenge ratings and solutions (added in CTFd 3.8, September 2025) are well developed.
You want full self-hosted control
You can run CTFd on your own infrastructure, air-gapped if needed, and inspect or change every line. CTF7 is not open source.
You rely on the plugin ecosystem
CTFd's themes, plugins, API and tools like ctfcli have years of community work behind them. If your workflow depends on a specific plugin, keep it.
You need Apache-2.0 licensing
A permissive open-source license matters for some universities, governments and researchers. CTFd's core is Apache-2.0.
You run an always-on CTF
A year-round practice board with steady traffic fits a monthly subscription (or a free self-hosted instance) better than per-event pricing.
You qualify for 80% off
With CTFd's education discount, a small hosted jeopardy CTF can be very cheap. US and EU educators running a free CTF can also ask about its sponsored Enterprise license. If you only need the scoreboard, that is hard to beat.
You need niche challenge types
Programming challenges, multiple choice and manual verification ship with CTFd Plus. If those are core to your event, CTFd has them today.
You want to try before you talk
CTFd's public demo lets you log in as an admin or a player right away, with no sales call. If hands-on self-evaluation is how your team buys, CTFd makes it easy.
You prefer self-serve docs
docs.ctfd.io documents settings, challenge types, flag types, the API and challenges-as-code with ctfcli. Teams that like to configure everything themselves will feel at home.
You want the widely adopted default
FIRST and EC-Council's Hackerverse run on CTFd, and CTFd itself grew out of CSAW CTF. Many players already know its interface, and the community knowledge around it is deep.
Choose CTF7 when…
- You run discrete events and want to pay per event, in INR, not a monthly USD subscription.
- You want dynamic flags and anti-cheat on a ₹9,999 plan instead of assembling plugins.
- You need King of the Hill, attack-defense or SOC simulation and would rather get a per-event quote for a managed event, run by our team, than a CTFd Enterprise subscription. Ask us for a quote.
- You want Raw Ops without a sales call: it is self-serve on Standard and Premium events, or the Pro and Enterprise organization plans.
- You want registration fees, RSVPs, passes and certificates in the same platform as the scoreboard.
- You want someone to build challenges for you through our challenge development service.
Other CTFd alternatives worth knowing
CTF7 isn't right for everyone. A quick map of the others (details as of October 2026; check each vendor's site for current information), covered in more detail in our best CTF platforms guide and open-source platforms comparison:
- Other open-source scoreboards: rCTF (the redpwn repo was archived in February 2025; development continues in the otter-sec fork), RootTheBox (Apache-2.0, gamified mechanics) and GZCTF (AGPLv3 core, per-team containers). All self-hosted.
- Content-first managed events: Hack The Box's CTF Marketplace (credit-based, ready-made content) and TryHackMe corporate CTFs (from $5,000 per one-day event).
- Other managed platforms: CTFLAB (EU-hosted, quote-based), Simulations Labs (per-participant monthly plans) and US Cyber Range CloudCTF (US education focus). In India, Traboda Arena and Com Olho offer managed CTFs; neither publishes full pricing.
How to migrate from CTFd to CTF7
Your challenge content carries over by hand, and CTFd's export makes the inventory easy. Small boards go quickly; boards with containers take longer.
Talk to the event teamExport your CTFd instance
In CTFd, go to Admin Panel → Config → Backup → Export. You get a zip of JSON files (challenges, flags, hints, tags, files and more) plus uploaded attachments. If you manage challenges as code with ctfcli, your challenge folders and challenge.yml files are already the cleanest source.
Inventory challenges and flags
List every challenge with its category, points, description, flag(s), hints and attachments. Note which flags are static strings and which are regex. Decide which challenges should move to dynamic flags on CTF7 so each team gets a unique value.
Re-create categories and scoring
Set up your categories (web, crypto, pwn, reversing, forensics, OSINT, misc) in the CTF7 admin panel, then choose static or dynamic scoring per challenge. If you used CTFd's dynamic value challenges, mirror the initial value, decay and minimum.
Upload challenges, files and hints
Add each challenge with its description, attachments or external links, and hints (optionally costing points). Re-point Docker-based challenges to your images: bring your own on Standard, or let CTF7 deploy managed containers on Premium.
Rebuild branding and pages
Recreate your rules, prizes and sponsor pages, and apply your logo and theme colors. CTFd themes won't carry over; on Premium you can also use a custom domain with managed SSL.
Dry-run before launch
Play the event as a test team: solve a challenge in each category, confirm dynamic flags differ per team, check hint costs and verify the scoreboard. Then open registration.
User accounts and past scoreboards don't need to move: invite last year's players to register for the new event. Keep the CTFd export archived as your historical record. On Premium events, the CTF7 team handles the full setup, including challenge hosting.
Sources
Competitor facts verified on October 1, 2026. Prices and features change, so check each vendor's site for current details. Competitor names are used for identification only; CTF7 is not affiliated with CTFd.
- CTFd: Pricing
- CTFd blog: Updated pricing plans (January 2025, effective March 15, 2025)
- CTFd docs: King of the Hill challenges
- CTFd: Enterprise
- CTFd: Features
- CTFd docs: Hosted instance limits (page views, 1.25x auto-upgrade)
- CTFd docs: Application Target challenges
- CTFd: Workshops
- CTFd: Case studies
- CTFd: About (timeline, installations)
- CTFd: Contact (support hours)
- CTFd: Public demo instance
- FIRST CTF (runs on CTFd Cloud)
- Hackerverse CTF platform (runs on CTFd)
- CTFd docs: Exports
- GitHub: CTFd/CTFd (license, stars)
- GitHub: CTFd/ctfcli
- CTF7: Pricing
Try it on a free event, or talk to us
A jeopardy event for up to 50 players is free and goes live when you publish it. If you are weighing CTFd for a bigger event, tell us the size and formats and we will say which plan fits, including when CTFd is the better choice.
Read how we protect accounts and event data on the security page, or contact us with questions.
