Is There a Free Version of Kiwi CatTools?

Yes, but not the one most people are expecting, and SolarWinds has stopped publishing what it actually includes. This comes up often enough that it is worth answering properly. If you are looking at Kiwi CatTools to back up switch and router configurations without spending anything, here is what you get, where the edges are, and what else you can run for free. ## What you get when you download it Kiwi CatTools installs with a fully functional 14 day trial. Every feature is available for those two weeks: scheduled backups, change detection, bulk command execution over Telnet or SSH, reporting, the built-in TFTP server, the lot. When the trial expires, the software does not stop. It drops to a limited free edition and keeps running. That is the good news. The complication is the word "limited". ## Get it from SolarWinds, not a download site Worth a word of warning first. Search for a free Kiwi CatTools download and a good part of page one is third party download aggregators rather than SolarWinds. One of them currently describes the software as running on "Windows 98 or later", which tells you how closely those listings are maintained. For anything that holds device credentials and pushes configuration to production kit, take the installer from SolarWinds directly or from the customer portal. The same applies to rConfig Core, or any other tool in this category. ## The limits are no longer published For the current product line, Kiwi CatTools NG, SolarWinds documents that a limited free edition continues after the trial but does not say what the limits are. There is no device count and no feature list in the public documentation. Older community threads from the 3.7 era cite 20 devices and 20 scheduled activities. In the same thread, a SolarWinds staff member says the freeware version was no longer being actively distributed and that the trial had shifted to a modified build supporting a single device. Those two answers contradict each other, and both are more than a decade old. So the honest position is this: there is a free edition, nobody outside SolarWinds can currently tell you what it covers, and you should install it and check before you plan anything around it. If you are sizing for more than a handful of devices, get that confirmed by SolarWinds or a reseller in writing. ## What the paid version costs, roughly SolarWinds does not publish a list price for Kiwi CatTools either. The product page shows "Starts at" with no figure and routes you to a quote form. Third party listings fill some of the gap. TrustRadius shows 852 USD as a one time, perpetual price per instance. Channel partners such as CDW and SHI resell a Full Install Licence for one seat bundled with twelve months of maintenance, renewable annually. Those figures were checked on 13 September 2026 and they are third party listings, not a SolarWinds quote, so treat them as a ballpark. And the third party numbers do not agree with each other. On the same day, SoftwareAdvice listed Kiwi CatTools as starting at 100 USD per month while TrustRadius listed 852 USD as a one time perpetual price. Those are two completely different commercial models. That is not a dig at either directory, it is simply what happens when a vendor publishes no price and everyone downstream fills the gap with something. Get a quote before you budget. It is worth knowing the shape of it either way. A perpetual licence plus annual maintenance behaves very differently on a three year budget than a subscription does. ## What else runs for free If the free edition turns out to be too small, there are three broad routes. **Open source tooling.** RANCID and Oxidized are the two names that come up most often, and both have been backing up network configurations for a long time. They are free, they work, and they are scripts and config files rather than an application. You will spend time on them, and you will own the result. We have written that comparison up separately in [open source network configuration management tools](/blog/open-source-network-configuration-management-tools-rancid-oxidized-and-modern-alternatives), with practical write-ups on [moving off RANCID](/rancid-alternative) and [moving off Oxidized](/solutions/seamlessly-migrate-from-oxidized-ncm-to-rconfig). **Whatever your monitoring platform already does.** PRTG, Zabbix, Checkmk and others have configuration backup in some form. It is usually a module rather than the main event, which is fine until you need change approval or compliance evidence out of it. **rConfig Core.** Free, self-hosted on Linux, and with no device limit. It covers configuration backup, search, comparison and change tracking, with community support. The no device limit part is the bit worth pausing on, because it is the constraint that usually bites on a free tier. If what you need is scheduled backups across a few hundred devices and the ability to see what changed, Core does that without a licence conversation. Core deliberately stops short of restore and deploy, policy checks, compliance reporting and automation. Those are on the paid tiers, and [the pricing is published](/pricing) rather than quoted. ## Picking between them A rough rule of thumb. If you have twenty devices, one engineer, and you want something running this afternoon, the Kiwi CatTools free edition or rConfig Core will both do the job, and the choice is mostly about whether you would rather run Windows or Linux. If you have a few hundred devices, a device limit is what will stop you, so check the Kiwi CatTools limit before you commit to it. If you already know you need restore, policy checking or an audit trail someone else can read, no free tier is going to carry you, and it is better to work that out now than six months in. And if you are currently on Kiwi CatTools and hitting its edges rather than shopping for something free, that is a different question. We have set out [how rConfig and Kiwi CatTools compare](/kiwi-cattools-alternative), using SolarWinds' own published comparison as the reference.