Licensing Guide
Neo4j is fully open source software. Every single line of code in every component can be evaluated with full transparency. We believe this is the best way of building software that provides value to our customers, partners and to the open source community. For organizations that want a commercial license and the assurance of a relationship with a commercial entity, Neo Technology also offers commercial licensing.
There are three editions of Neo4j, and every edition is available under both an open source license and a commercial license:
Neo4j Community
Neo4j Community is a high performance, fully ACID transactional graph database – licensed either under the GPL or a Neo Technology commercial license.
Neo4j Advance
Neo4j Advance has advanced monitoring – licensed under the AGPL or a Neo Technology commercial license.
Neo4j Enterprise
Neo4j Enterprise has added online backup and High Availability (HA) clustering – licensed under the AGPL or a Neo Technology license.
Which license is right for you?
That depends on how you're using Neo4j.
You are developing Open Source Software
We love open source development, and so if all your software is open source then you are free to use any of the Neo4j editions for your project. Even if you are developing software or services that you get paid for – as long as the source of the system is available to the customer, commercial use of Neo4j is not a problem!
You are developing closed source software (non OEM)
If the application or service using Neo4j is closed source, then your choice is between the free single-server edition Neo4j Community or one of the commercially licensed production-oriented editions Neo4j Advanced or Neo4j Enterprise.
If you need monitoring and/or your system can't afford downtime, consider Neo4j Advanced for monitoring and management and Neo4j Enterprise for disaster-grade failover and online backup. Most production deployments need the features in Advanced and/or Enterprise, but every situation is unique. In addition to enterprise grade production features, both Neo4j Advanced and Enterprise include commercial support and maintenance from Neo Technology.
If you don’t need the production-oriented features of Neo4j Advanced and Enterprise, in particular if you can live without monitoring/management and a fault tolerant high availability configuration, then you can use Neo4j Community under the GPL in most closed source (non OEM) scenarios.
You want to embed Neo4j as an OEM component
You distribute your software and wish to distribute Neo4j with it. If your product is Open Source software – Neo4j is, too. If not, you contact Neo Technology for a commercial OEM setup since neither the GPL nor the AGPL permit closed source OEM scenarios.