Licensing, in plain terms.
Every feature ships in the free build — historian, alarms, recipes, the editor, the custom-widget SDK. Nothing is held back to sell you later. This page says when you owe nothing, when a commercial licence is the easier route, and what the paid products are.
Most people owe nothing. Ever.
Run NEXT HMI on your own machines for your own plant and you are done — nothing to buy, no seat count, no tag count, no expiry. The licence only asks questions when you hand the software to someone else.
You run it yourself
A factory, workshop, lab, or integrator running NEXT HMI on its own hardware for its own operators. Free, forever, all features. Most users are here, and that is the point of the project.
You ship it to others
A machine builder shipping a panel PC, or an integrator handing installations to clients. AGPL-3.0 asks you to pass the source along with it. A commercial licence releases you from that, at €100 per unit shipped.
You are regulated
A pharma, food, or medical-device plant needing an append-only, attributed record of what operators did. That record — the audit trail — is the one paid feature, and it ships only in the proprietary enterprise build.
Complete, not a demo.
Open-core products usually hold back the one feature that makes the product worth having. There is nothing held back here: whatever the platform can do, the free build does. An HMI without alarms is not an HMI, so there was never a version of this with alarms behind a paywall.
LICENSE-EXCEPTION.md, so you need not take a website's word for it.
For machine builders and integrators who ship it.
AGPL-3.0 does not require you to pay anyone. It requires that when you distribute the software — or network-serve a modified version — you make the corresponding source available to those recipients. A commercial licence is the alternative to doing that.
| Your situation | Under AGPL-3.0 | Commercial licence? |
|---|---|---|
| You self-host it, unmodified, for your own operators | No obligation at all | Not needed |
| You modify it for internal use, still self-hosted | Offer the source to your own users — usually trivial | Not needed |
| You ship it on a machine or panel PC to a customer | Give that customer the corresponding source, which they may pass on further | Worth it if that does not fit your product |
| Your procurement policy bans AGPL outright | You cannot use the software under its open licence | Required |
The audit trail, in the enterprise build.
The audit trail is the paid feature — the only one. It is not in the open-source build and cannot be unlocked there; it ships solely in a separate, proprietary enterprise build for plants that answer to a regulator, activated with a key bound to your machine. Every other feature on this site is in the free build, which needs no key at all.
What the audit trail is
An append-only, per-project record of operator actions against live equipment — alarm acknowledgements, successful PLC writes, sign-in and sign-out. Every record says whether the actor's name was verified by the server or merely claimed by the caller, so a reader can tell evidence from a lead. Writes are flushed to disk before acknowledgement; rotation renames rather than deletes.
How activation works
The enterprise build opens on an activation screen carrying that machine's Device ID. Send it to us; the key we sign back works on that machine and no other. Until it is installed the manager runs but starts no projects — so activation is the first thing you do, once, on the panel. The audit trail records only while its module is licensed.
What it is not, yet
No cryptographic integrity chain over the file, no electronic-signature capture — so it is not on its own a 21 CFR Part 11 compliance package. Better said here than in a qualification meeting. If your regulator requires either, tell us what the auditor asks for before you buy.
Evaluate it on your own machine first.
A 7-day key, signed and bound to the device you name, with the audit-trail module as a tick-box if you want to evaluate that too. No payment details, no sales call, no double opt-in.
You will need the enterprise build and its Device ID — the Copy Device ID button is on the activation screen it opens on.
Licensing FAQ
Is NEXT HMI really free, or is this open-core bait?
Really free. No licence check, no activation step, no disabled features. Exactly one feature is paid — the audit trail — and it is not in the free build at all, hidden or otherwise; it ships only in the proprietary enterprise build. A plant with no auditor has no use for it anyway.
Do I have to publish my HMI screens if I use the free build?
No. Your pages, themes, translations, datasource configurations, and custom widgets are your own work, not a derivative of the platform — stated explicitly in LICENSE-EXCEPTION.md. The copyleft aims at people who fork the platform itself.
We are a machine builder. What exactly triggers the commercial licence?
Handing a copy to someone outside your organisation. If the software leaves your building on a panel, AGPL-3.0 asks you to give that recipient the corresponding source, your changes included. Plenty of companies just do that. A commercial licence exists for when your product or your customer's contract cannot accommodate it, and it costs €100 per unit that leaves your building — perpetual for those units, with nothing to renew.
Is there a runtime check that will shut our line down?
Not in the open-source build — it contains no licence check whatsoever.
The enterprise build has an activation check: the manager starts no project until a valid key is installed, and the audit trail records only while its key is valid. It runs at project start, never against one already running, so a lapsed key cannot take a live screen down mid-shift — it refuses the next start and says why. Nothing contacts a licence server; the expiry is a date inside the key, verified offline.
Why AGPL and not MIT or Apache?
A permissive licence lets a larger company build a product on this work, give nothing back, and contribute nothing to its maintenance. AGPL shuts that door without costing ordinary users anything — self-host and you will never notice it.
Can we try the enterprise build, or get its source?
Request a 7-day trial key — signed, bound to one machine, expires on its own, audit trail as a tick-box. No payment details, no sales call. When it lapses, whatever is running keeps running.
Enterprise source is available under a commercial agreement, escrow included if your compliance department requires it. Ask.
Can we white-label it?
Under a commercial licence, yes. The open-source build shows a short attribution notice on the runtime boot screen — the product name and the AGPL-3.0 notice. The setting that replaces it is plain project configuration that nothing verifies, so changing it without a commercial licence is a licence violation rather than something the software stops you doing.
We are a non-profit, a school, or a one-person shop.
The free build covers you completely. If you also need redistribution rights and the usual rate does not fit, write to us — that conversation is usually short.
Not sure which applies to you?
Describe what you are building and who receives it. You get a straight answer, including "you do not need to buy anything" when that is the true one.