Centrio vs Franz:
which aggregator should you pick?

Franz launched in 2016 and was the category standard for years. It supports a wide range of services and runs on every major OS. In 2026 it's starting to show its age: a high price ($14.99/mo), heavy memory footprint (400–500 MB), slow startup, and an update cadence that's clearly slowed down.

Centrio is a modern, actively developed aggregator. It uses 2–3x less memory, starts in about 2 seconds, and costs roughly a seventh of Franz's price. It ships with a built-in VPN, works on Windows, macOS and Linux, and covers a broader range of regional services out of the box.

💸 Franz is the most expensive option in the category

$14.99/month or $99/year — nearly 7x what Centrio Pro costs. Franz doesn't offer anything that justifies the premium over Centrio at that price point.

🔒 A built-in VPN — only in Centrio

Centrio ships with a full VPN client supporting VLESS, VMess, Trojan, Shadowsocks and Hysteria2 — useful for reaching services that are blocked or throttled on your network, right from inside the app. Franz has nothing comparable.

🐌 Franz is heavy on RAM

With 5 services open, Franz uses 400–500 MB of memory. Centrio uses about 180 MB. On a machine with 8 GB of RAM, that difference is noticeable — and Franz's 8–12 second startup time doesn't help either.

📅 Franz ships updates rarely

Franz's development pace has slowed considerably — several bundled services are outdated or broken. Centrio is under active development, with new services and fixes shipping regularly.

🌍 Broader regional service coverage

Centrio was built to also support services that most Western aggregators skip entirely — VK, Odnoklassniki, Yandex Messenger — useful if you work with clients, teams, or family across the CIS region.