I have not used Hive, but I've only heard bad things about it. Maybe it has gotten better over the last two years.
My Schools have been using Printix for the last two years, and we've only had one outage that lasted 2 hours. It's super easy to set up, and pricing is based on staff count; students are free.
It doesn't matter how many MFs, etc you have.
The free trial is really good also, so you can do a full test of the system in your environment, and it doesn't cost anything.
We use follow me printing and have Paxton cards set up for authentication.