I think that's fair. I also think it's fair to count on-prem versus hosted as a metric for your org that should be evaluated.

I think that what is missing from the article is that it's not a matter of free versus paid, but rather integrated solution versus dispersed solution with custom glue code. Depending on your organization and your constraints, you should define your budget, wants and needs, build metrics to represent those, evaluate all systems against your particular metrics, and come to a dispassionate result.