Licensing, in plain terms.
Two questions decide what you owe: does a copy leave your organisation, and does your plant answer to a regulator? No to both, and you owe nothing.
Community, or Enterprise.
Same code, same features — nothing in Community is crippled to sell Enterprise. Enterprise adds your own branding, no obligation to hand over source, and the audit trail.
AGPL-3.0-or-later. Run it on your own hardware, at any scale.
- Every feature — editor, runtime, historian, alarms, recipes, users, OPC-UA
- Unlimited screens, PLCs, tags and operators
- Nothing to activate — no key, no trial clock
- GitHub issues, documentation and every release
- Your own branding on the boot screen
- No obligation to hand over source
- Audit trail for regulated plants
A commercial licence on top of the same open build.
- Everything in Community
- Your own branding instead of ours
- No obligation to hand over source
- Per installation, never per screen or PLC
- Perpetual key, free replacements, no renewal
- Audit trail as an add-on: €99 per installation, excl. VAT
Five situations, and what each one costs.
| Your situation | What you owe | Why |
|---|---|---|
| You run it on your own hardware, for your own operators | €0 | The open licence asks nothing of you until a copy leaves your organisation. |
| You ship it on a machine or panel PC to a customer | €0 if you pass the source on with it €149 per installation, excl. VAT if you would rather not |
The open licence asks you to give the source to whoever receives the software. With a commercial licence nothing follows the machine, and your customer inherits no obligation either. |
| You want your own logo on the boot screen instead of ours | €149 per installation, excl. VAT | Our notice is part of the open licence and cannot be removed under it. It is what your customer sees every morning. |
| Your plant answers to a regulator and needs a record of who did what | €99 per installation, excl. VAT | The audit trail is the one part of the product that is not open source. |
| You want the work done, or a counterparty who can sign something | Quoted per assignment | Our time is sold separately from any licence, and is open to free-build users too. |
The terms themselves, rather than a website's summary of them: LICENSE · LICENSE-EXCEPTION.md · COMMERCIAL.md
One licence, the same for everyone who ships it.
Machine builder, integrator, OEM or anyone else: ship NEXT HMI without passing on the source, or put your own name on it, and this is the licence. One payment per installation, usually one per machine, so the number goes straight into a cost-per-machine.
- Installations 1–100€149
- Installations 101–500€125
- 501 and aboveOn quote
Counted per contract year, and each year starts again at the first tier. The lower rate applies from the 101st installation on; the first hundred stay at €149 and are never recalculated. 120 installations in a year: 100 × €149 + 20 × €125 = €17,400.
No minimum: ship five machines and you pay five times, ship none and there is nothing to administer.
This is a contract, not a lock — the free build has no licence check at all, and the open-source components we ship keep their own licences (COMMERCIAL.md).
For plants that answer to a regulator.
A record of what operators did to live equipment, kept next to the HMI that saw them do it.
What it records
Who acknowledged which alarm, who changed a value on the machine, and who signed in or out, with the time against each. Configuration work is deliberately left out: this is a record of what operators did to live equipment.
What you can rely on
Every entry says whether the name is one the system established itself or one the caller supplied. Nothing is ever deleted, and the files are plain text your own tools can read.
How you get it
An add-on key for the enterprise build, one per installation that records. Try it first: it is a tick-box on the 30-day trial key.
€99 per installation, once, excl. VAT. Paid on top of the commercial licence, for each installation that records — a plant with three servers pays for three.
One address, and no sales call.
Licences, the audit trail and our time all go through one address.
- Write to licensing@next-hmi.com saying 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.
- Send the ID of each machine that needs a key. The software has a button that copies it for you — there is nothing to look up.
- Paste the keys you are sent into the settings screen, and you are done. Replacements, when hardware dies, are free.
Support and commissioning — commissioning, migrations, custom widgets, PLC integration, a configuration review, and an invoice for a procurement department that needs one. Quoted for the piece of work, never bundled into a licence. Full picture on Services.
Found a vulnerability? Never a public issue — private disclosure only, through the security policy.
Evaluate Enterprise on your own machine first.
A 30-day key for the machine you name, with the audit trail as a tick-box. No payment details, no sales call.
Licensing FAQ
Do I have to publish my HMI screens if I use the free build?
No. Your pages, themes, translations, connections and custom widgets are your own work, not a derivative of the platform — stated explicitly in LICENSE-EXCEPTION.md. The licence aims at people who fork the platform itself.
Can a licence key shut our line down?
No. The key is checked when a project starts and never while one is already on the screens, and nothing is ever checked over the internet. A purchased key carries no expiry date at all. The only case that leaves a panel waiting is a machine rebooted after a trial has run out — and the free build has no key to trip over in the first place.
We are a non-profit, a school, or a one-person shop.
The free build covers you completely. Ship it without the source, or under your own name, and it is €149 per installation: the same for everyone.
We sent in a bug fix. Do we get anything back for it?
Not in money or a discount: the price is the same for everyone. What you do get is everyone else's fixes. Yours goes into the next release for every user, and theirs reach you the same way.