Cisco CML Price 2026: Tiers, Node Limits, License Terms

Cisco Modeling Labs starts at no cost for five simultaneously running nodes. CML-Personal costs $199 or two Cisco Learning Credits for 20 nodes, and CML-Personal Plus costs $349 or four credits for 40. Neither personal tier expands. Enterprise and Education are quote-only. Cisco classes every paid tier as a subscription.

• Cisco CML pricing at a glance
• Where you actually buy it
• How the five-node limit works
• Personal or Personal Plus: pick the ceiling once
• What the personal tiers are licensed for
• The bill the license does not cover

Cisco CML pricing at a glance

Prices and node counts above come from Cisco's own CML page. The table leaves out three things worth knowing.

Cisco publishes an amount without a renewal cadence. Its Offer Description lists Personal, Personal Plus, Education and Enterprise with a license duration of "Subscription", and the public product pages state no term at all, so anyone quoting you "$199 per year" is adding a term Cisco does not state publicly. Cisco is equally quiet about what happens at the end of a subscription, so ask whether the lab stops, drops to five nodes, or carries a grace period before you commit budget to it.

An Enterprise quote has a documented shape even though it has no public price: a 20-node base license, per-node expansion up to another 300 nodes, multi-user access, and Basic TAC support. Education is priced differently again, on named users and servers rather than nodes, which is why it sits awkwardly in a node column.

Where you actually buy it

Cisco has moved the purchase path. CML-Personal and CML-Personal Plus are now bought through Cisco U., and the Cisco Learning Network Store that older guides still point to returns "Site Offline". Enterprise and Education go through Cisco sales or a partner, which is what "Contact us" means in practice.

Two things are worth checking before you pay list price. Unused Cisco Learning Credits are a documented payment path for both personal tiers. Cisco also runs occasional flash sales on CML, announced through its @LearningatCisco account rather than on the product page, and they have not required a discount code.

How the five-node limit works

CML-Free has no expiration date. It is not a trial.

The limit applies to nodes running at once, not to what you can build. A lab may hold more than five nodes, but only five may be started. Unmanaged switches and external connectors are exempt, because Cisco counts a node as a device simulated using one of its Virtualization Reference Platforms, and those two are not. So a three-router, two-switch OSPF lab fits if the switches are unmanaged, and breaks the limit if you use IOL-L2 switches and add a host VM.

The image set is the more expensive constraint. CML-Free ships IOL, IOL-L2 and ASAv plus Linux host images, while IOS-XE, IOS-XR and NX-OS arrive with a paid tier. If you are weighing Free against Personal, that is the difference that matters, not the fifteen extra nodes. For how CML compares with the other emulators rather than with itself, see EVE-NG vs CML.

Personal or Personal Plus: pick the ceiling once

Neither tier expands. Cisco states that Personal ships with 20 Cisco nodes and cannot expand, and that Personal Plus ships with 40 on the same terms. You are choosing a ceiling at purchase rather than a starting point.

Size it against the largest topology you expect to run simultaneously. Twenty nodes is generous for the OSPF lab above and for most certification practice; it is tight once you run several heavy nodes together, since Cisco's own example has eight NX-OS 9000 nodes consuming 16 vCPUs and 64 GB of memory. Cisco does not publish an upgrade path between the personal tiers either, which is another reason to size once rather than plan to grow.

What the personal tiers are licensed for

Cisco's Offer Description for CML permits Personal and Personal Plus "for non-commercial use (including evaluation use by a commercial entity employee) by a single named individual User on a single server/workstation". CML-Free carries the same non-commercial restriction, with one exception: accredited educational institutions, nonprofits and Networking Academy members may install it on shared infrastructure, including cloud environments, for multiple users.

Read that clause before buying for a team. Certification study is permitted, and so is evaluating the product for your employer. A shared team lab is not, nor is a customer demo environment, nor anything supporting a production network. Multi-user rights start at Enterprise, or Education for accredited institutions, which is where a $199 decision becomes a conversation with Cisco sales.

The same document restricts the images. Cisco's Virtualization Reference Platforms "are for use only within the CML environment. They may not be used independently or be exported for use in any other way". Buying CML as a cheap source of IOS images for GNS3 or EVE-NG is prohibited, whatever the forum threads suggest. A few platforms, CSR1000v and ASAv among them, are sold separately on Cisco.com under their own terms, but buying one separately does not license the copy that ships inside CML.

The bill the license does not cover

CML needs somewhere to run, and Cisco's published minimum looks modest: 8 GB of memory, four or more physical cores with virtualization extensions, and 32 GB or more of disk. That configuration runs a small lab. Cisco's guidance is to size for the maximum number and type of nodes running at once, and its own example is eight NX-OS 9000 nodes wanting 16 vCPUs and 64 GB of memory.

Two hardware constraints follow from that. Cisco requires Intel cores with virtualization extensions, so CML does not run on Apple M-series hardware. On a cloud VM, nested virtualization is required, which dictates which instance types are usable.

That leaves three ways to run it: buy a workstation or server, rent a cloud instance and install CML yourself, or hand the server to a hosting provider. All three are bring-your-own-license. The license comes from Cisco either way, and whoever runs the hypervisor has no effect on which tier you need.

If the hardware is the obstacle rather than the license, hosted CML is the third of those routes: CloudMyLab runs the server, and the CML license stays yours, bought from Cisco. That splits the decision in two, so you can size the license against your topology and the hardware against your budget separately. See hosted CML for how that works in practice.

FAQ

Is Cisco CML free?

Yes, within limits. CML-Free costs nothing, runs up to five nodes at a time and has no expiration date. It ships IOL, IOL-L2 and ASAv images plus Linux hosts, is limited to non-commercial use, and its telemetry cannot be disabled. Cisco also offers a free four-hour DevNet sandbox session for trying CML without installing it.

Is Cisco CML a one-time purchase or a subscription?

Cisco's Offer Description lists Personal, Personal Plus, Education and Enterprise with a license duration of "Subscription". Cisco publishes the price but not the renewal term on its public pages, so confirm the term at checkout rather than trusting a figure quoted with "per year" attached.

Is there a discount on Cisco CML?

Sometimes. Cisco runs occasional flash sales on the personal tiers, announced through its @LearningatCisco account rather than on the product page, and they have not required a discount code. Cisco Learning Credits are the other route: two cover CML-Personal and four cover CML-Personal Plus, which is worth checking if your employer holds unused credits.

Can I use CML images in GNS3 or EVE-NG?

No. Cisco licenses its reference platform images for use inside CML only, and exporting them for use elsewhere is prohibited. If you want those vendor images in another emulator, you need a separate entitlement for them.

Can my team share one CML-Personal license?

No. Personal and Personal Plus are licensed to a single named user on a single server or workstation for non-commercial use. Shared team labs and customer-facing environments need CML-Enterprise, which is multi-user and includes Basic TAC support.