I worked with MIPs for 8 years and commercial solvers have always been several orders of magnitude faster/better than open-source solvers.
This is generally true for domain-specific software -- unlike general purpose software, incenting a small pool of specialized talent to make open-source contributions is always hard.
The key to high performance in MIPs comes from having good heuristics, not necessarily from improving the basic algorithms (the algorithms are pretty standard -- simplex or interior point). Finding effective heuristics is hard and tedious, but they make a significant difference in solution speed. For instance, naive Simplex may take 40 minutes to solve a problem but with heuristics the solution time might be 5 seconds.
That said, Cbc is competitive for smaller problems, and here's the thing: many production sized problems aren't that big -- it really depends on your problem domain. I've deployed commercial solvers on Cbc (30k variables/constraints) and it was more than adequate.
I don't have any details on this, but Gurobi (a best of class solver) also offers an on-demand cloud SaaS which you can pay for on demand [1]. The economics of this may work out for some types of problems.
Also, if you're in academia, you can get Gurobi/CPLEX licenses for free (yes). My research group in grad school didn't spend a cent on these solvers, and we still got a taste of best-of-class solution performance (that's how they get you :).
This is generally true for domain-specific software -- unlike general purpose software, incenting a small pool of specialized talent to make open-source contributions is always hard.
The key to high performance in MIPs comes from having good heuristics, not necessarily from improving the basic algorithms (the algorithms are pretty standard -- simplex or interior point). Finding effective heuristics is hard and tedious, but they make a significant difference in solution speed. For instance, naive Simplex may take 40 minutes to solve a problem but with heuristics the solution time might be 5 seconds.
That said, Cbc is competitive for smaller problems, and here's the thing: many production sized problems aren't that big -- it really depends on your problem domain. I've deployed commercial solvers on Cbc (30k variables/constraints) and it was more than adequate.
I don't have any details on this, but Gurobi (a best of class solver) also offers an on-demand cloud SaaS which you can pay for on demand [1]. The economics of this may work out for some types of problems.
[1] https://www.gurobi.com/pdfs/user-events/2017-frankfurt/Gurob...
Also, if you're in academia, you can get Gurobi/CPLEX licenses for free (yes). My research group in grad school didn't spend a cent on these solvers, and we still got a taste of best-of-class solution performance (that's how they get you :).