Skip to main content

Community vs Enterprise

Miabi is open-core. The Community edition core is free and open source under AGPL-3.0-or-later and is fully functional — a complete, production-ready PaaS, not a crippled trial. A commercial license is also available for uses that don't fit the AGPL (for example, offering a modified Miabi as a hosted service without publishing your changes). The Enterprise code is under a separate commercial license and adds capabilities aimed at larger teams and regulated environments.

How features are gated

Enterprise functionality is gated in two layers:

  1. Build tag. Enterprise features are compiled behind the enterprise build tag, built with make build-ee. The standard Community binary (make build) links a deny-all stub in place of those features.
  2. Signed license key. Even in the Enterprise binary, features stay locked until they are unlocked at runtime by a signed license key, verified offline against a public key embedded in the binary.

This means there is no hidden code path to "turn on" Enterprise in a Community build, and no network call is needed to validate a license. See Licensing for how activation works.

Which artifact you run

The official miabi/miabi images and release binaries are the Enterprise build — the enterprise code is compiled in but stays dormant, so they run as free Community until a license is installed. That's the frictionless path: pull miabi/miabi:latest, and if you later buy a license, drop it in and features unlock — no re-pull or redeploy.

Miabi publishes one edition. The tags are miabi/miabi:latest, miabi/miabi:<version>, and their -rootless forms (mirrored to ghcr.io/miabi-io/miabi). There are no -ce or -ee image variants.

If you want a build with zero enterprise code (the deny-all stub), build it from source: make build produces the Community binary, make build-ee the Enterprise-capable one. No pure-Community image is published.

Feature comparison

CapabilityCommunityEnterprise
Core PaaS (apps, domains, TLS, DBs, backups, monitoring, marketplace)
Multi-node & cluster (Docker Swarm)✓ unlimited✓ unlimited
Built-in container registry (local storage)
Registry S3/MinIO storage
OAuth/OIDC SSO providersonemultiple
SAML 2.0 + enforced SSO · SCIM 2.0 provisioning
Custom RBAC roles
Per-resource permission policies
Audit log
Audit export (JSON/CSV)
SIEM streaming + retention
Per-workspace quota overrides
Private template registry
Workspace-owned build runners✓ unlimited✓ unlimited
Platform-shared runner pooloneunlimited
White-label brandingbrandfull
Restricted (force non-root) security profile
HA control plane · cross-region DR
tip

The Community edition includes the entire core platform — deploying apps, custom domains, automatic TLS, managed databases, backups, monitoring, the marketplace, and the built-in container registry (local storage) — plus unlimited nodes, unlimited workspace-owned build runners and one platform-shared runner, one SSO provider, the audit log, and brand-level white-labeling. Most individual developers, startups, and homelabs never need anything beyond it.

note

Enterprise is about identity, governance, scale storage, and resilience: multiple SSO providers with SAML and SCIM, custom roles and per-resource policies, audit export and SIEM streaming, quota overrides, S3/MinIO storage for the container registry, a private template registry, an unlimited platform-shared runner pool, full white-labeling, a restricted security profile, and HA/DR. (A license can also set an explicit node cap; by default both editions are uncapped.)

Where to go next

  • Licensing — how the offline license key works and how to activate it.
  • Roles & Permissions — the workspace role model (custom roles are Enterprise).