Community Edition is open source software, designed for individuals or small self-managing teams. It is community supported. CE is perfect for home lab use and learning how to manage containers.

Business Edition is a commercially supported product that includes features for Security, Access Management and Permission, and Auditing, making it more suitable for company use. 

A Node is a physical or virtual device running a container runtime. 

We categorize nodes as Data Center & Cloud (unlimited CPU), Network Edge (< 4 vCPU), IIoT (Intelligent Internet of Things/SBC/SoC). 

View “What’s a Node for licensing purposes?” for more information.

For customers who have purchased a Business Edition Plan, our standard license gives you 9x5 Next Business Day support. If you need 24x7 support, then please get in touch with our sales team and we’ll supply pricing. For more information regarding support go to www.portainer.io/support-terms 

Customers utilizing our Take5 program (5 nodes free) can get community support via our Community Slack Channel.

No. A single Portainer license supports container management across all orchestrators and environments. 

Upgrading from Community Edition to Business Edition is as simple as deploying the Portainer Business instance instead of Community Edition, reusing all of your existing database/settings.

Downgrading from Business Edition to Community Edition can be tricky. Please contact us before making that change and we will help you through it.