Licensing for Xperience applications

This page describes licensing requirements for some of the common environment setups when developing and running ASP.NET MVC 5 or ASP.NET Core applications with Kentico Xperience.

Xperience websites consist of two separate applications – the live site (an MVC 5 or Core application) and the Xperience administration. If these applications run on different domains, you need to acquire licenses for both domains.

You only need to purchase a license for the domain of the live site application. The additional license for the administration is provided for free. To obtain the additional license, contact your sales representative directly or email us at sales@xperience.io.

The live site and administration applications also use web farm functionality for synchronization. Licensing of the web farm servers works automatically – you only need a license with additional web farm servers when running multiple instances of the same application for one site. Scenarios where multiple live site applications run different sites with a shared administration application are also supported (a license key for a live site domain automatically allows one additional web farm server).

Web farm servers are counted separately for the administration interface and for the live site. For example, a license key for the live site application with 3 web farm servers allows you to scale the front-end application to up to three instances. An accompanying license key for the Xperience administration interface application with 1 web farm server only allows you a single instance.

The specific number of web farm servers for each application varies depending on your purchased licensing model. Subscription licenses offer an unlimited number of web farm servers as part of their subscription plan. Perpetual licenses allow you to negotiate the desired number of web farm servers for each application according to your requirements.

Licensing models

Perpetual licenses

A perpetual license provides you with a license and right to use Kentico Xperience indefinitely and:

• includes a one-year maintenance contract for all software updates, upgrades, and 24/7 technical support, with the option to purchase ongoing maintenance for subsequent years
• allows you to run a website on a single server or cloud instance with the option to purchase additional servers or cloud instance licenses for load balancing/web farm(s)

Perpetual licenses are based on specific project and production environment requirements. They take into consideration the number of servers or cloud instances supporting the production environment. We recommend purchasing licensing for the highest potential quantity of servers or cloud instances that might be needed to support the production environment. 

Subscription licenses

A subscription license provides you with a pay-as-you-go license to access and use the software for a defined pre-paid period and:

• includes all software updates, upgrades, and 24/7 technical support
• allows customers to run a website on any number of servers or cloud instances at no additional cost

All subscription licenses, by default, support auto-scaling, which means there are no limitations on the number of web farms servers or cloud instances. The supported website(s) environment will be able to dynamically scale to accommodate increased site traffic and performance demands without any additional licensing requirements. 

If a subscription license expires, there is a 30-day grace period during which the license is still fully operational. After the grace period, Kentico Xperience will stop working, and the website will no longer be accessible online.

Subscription license key activation

Initially, subscription license keys need to be added to the system via the License keys application. Afterwards, their renewal is automatically managed by the Subscription license renewal system scheduled task.

Example scenarios

The following table contains examples of common environment setups used by Xperience applications and their corresponding licensing requirements. See How licensing works to learn about how the system performs license key validation.

For scenarios not listed in the table above, contact your sales representative directly or email us at sales@xperience.io.