Gurobi is so frustrating. I had the same experience: blistering performance on my problems, much better than OR-Tools, but just couldn't make it work at all with the licensing. It's like they've never heard of the cloud, or had any concept that anyone would use their software in any way other than big "batch" jobs on an in-house machine. I feel like someone could make a killing just buying Gurobi and making it work in a modern way.
NextMV was practically the opposite (at the time, I'm sure it has improved now, especially since they used to be far more insistent on decision diagrams): rather bad/terrible performance, but excellent in terms of licensing and deploying the code, and they had great support too. The modern deployment made sense given they were a new/modern company. One silver lining to the terrible performance, and why I used to stick up for them at the time was that you could get somewhat acceptable results fast: if you stopped after one second, CBC might be absolutely nowhere, but NextMV's solver would at least give you something. This meant you could do things that made use of extremely fast results, like trying a configuration and checking the (approximate) solution, then trying a bunch more, all very quickly.
Disclaimer: I work for Gurobi, but these views are my own.
---
I'm sorry to hear that you find our licensing frustrating. It is true that in the past we focused a lot on local deployments holding on to the notion of a physical machine. However, we have added a few licensing options that you might find interesting, specifically the Web License Service (https://www.gurobi.com/web-license-service/), where you can get a short-lived JSON Web Token inside of a Docker container which renews automatically. You can find our Docker Hub images here (https://hub.docker.com/orgs/gurobi/repositories).
NextMV was practically the opposite (at the time, I'm sure it has improved now, especially since they used to be far more insistent on decision diagrams): rather bad/terrible performance, but excellent in terms of licensing and deploying the code, and they had great support too. The modern deployment made sense given they were a new/modern company. One silver lining to the terrible performance, and why I used to stick up for them at the time was that you could get somewhat acceptable results fast: if you stopped after one second, CBC might be absolutely nowhere, but NextMV's solver would at least give you something. This meant you could do things that made use of extremely fast results, like trying a configuration and checking the (approximate) solution, then trying a bunch more, all very quickly.
In the end I mostly settled on OR-Tools.