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Licensing & entitlements

EntityFlow is open-core. The community edition runs with no licence and is fully featured for core schema design and real-time collaboration — there's no trial countdown and no nag screens on the community feature set.

What a licence unlocks​

A licence enables enterprise entitlements:

  • SSO — OIDC/SAML federation (see Bring your own identity provider).
  • SCIM — automated user provisioning and deprovisioning.
  • Audit log — append-only record of account lifecycle and admin actions.
  • Database-per-tenant — isolated diagram-plane databases per tenant.

How licensing works​

A licence is a signed, offline token — an Ed25519-signed payload set in EF_LICENSE_KEY. Licence keys for self-hosted add-ons are issued by SYILAB (from EntityFlow Office) and appear in your EntityFlow Hub under Licences, where you can copy or download them. The token carries:

  • the subject (who it's issued to),
  • the plan,
  • the enabled features,
  • the seat count,
  • the expiry.
export EF_LICENSE_KEY="<your-signed-licence-token>"

Offline validation​

Validation is offline. The deployment verifies the token's signature against embedded public keys and checks expiry against the local clock. No network call is required.

An absent or invalid key is not an error — the deployment simply runs as community edition. It never crashes for a missing or malformed licence.

Optional online check-in​

Set EF_LICENSE_CHECKIN_ENABLED=true to enable an optional online check-in that can refresh entitlements or honor revocation. Crucially, a check-in failure never disables a valid offline key — air-gapped and offline installs keep working on the strength of the signed token alone.

caution

Offline validation trusts the local clock to enforce expiry. Rolling the system clock backward can defeat expiry checks. If you need stronger guarantees against this, enable online check-in (EF_LICENSE_CHECKIN_ENABLED=true).