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, 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
- Audit trail available as an add-on (€99 per installation)
- Perpetual key, free replacements, no renewal
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 device 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 device | 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 | 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
For machine builders, integrators and OEMs.
One payment per machine you ship, and a number you can put straight into a cost-per-machine.
- Devices 1–100€149
- Devices 101–500€125
- 501 and aboveOn quote
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.
€99 per installation, once. An installation is the system as deployed at one site, however many devices carry it — counted separately from the per-device licence.
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 — today, alarm acknowledgements are the second kind, which is the honest answer to give an inspector. Nothing is ever deleted, and the files are plain text your own tools can read.
Still being built
The packaged compliance side — exports, retention settings, and the paperwork a quality department signs off — is not finished. Its scope is set with the first customer who needs it, and the €99 does not move.
One address, and no sales call.
No shop and no portal. Licences, the audit trail and our time all go through the same place.
- 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. Deliberately not sold: response-time commitments or an SLA, the one promise a small team cannot honestly make every working day of the year. 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 7-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. If you also need to ship it to others and the usual rate does not fit, write to us — that conversation is usually short.