Differences between Greenbone's commercial and community products

There are two versions of Greenbone’s on-premise solution: a community version and a commercial version.

Our community versions – the Greenbone Source Edition and the GSM TRIAL – are free of charge. They use our Greenbone Community Feed with a large number of vulnerability tests. However, they do not include any support, warranty or quality commitment. The community editions are completely created and provided by Greenbone as a gift to the community.

We are happy to know that you use this gift to make your networks and applications more secure. Many of you also use these solutions for educational purposes.

The commercial products can be purchased from Greenbone or Greenbone partners. In addition to our hardware and virtual appliances for on-premise installation, we offer vulnerability management via a software-as-a-service platform. The enhanced Greenbone Security Feed is part of all our commercial solutions and is not available as a stand-alone product.

The revenue from Greenbone’s commercial product line allows us to provide the community products free of charge, and has done so for many years. The company as a whole benefits from our commercial products to focus on the development of the most widely used and (we believe) best open source vulnerability product on the market.

What we experience quite often:

  1. Greenbone users are very happy to use our community products and they tell us so. This makes us very happy, too!
  2. People want to use our community versions in proprietary environments, but experience the need for a fully supported solution in combination with our extended security feed. We want to show people the value of our commercial solutions, and by investing into securing their systems, they also support the community products.
  3. We find that there are businesses built around our community products, but where users are charged for services that we offer to the community for free. It is not a sustainable business model for Greenbone as we do not charge for our community products. Another downside we experience is when users of such builds require support – Greenbone can’t support these derivatives for obvious reasons.
  4. Last but not least: people buy our products and are happy with them. This makes us very happy and confirms that we’re doing right in our daily work and business!
    Having this said, we wish you a lot of fun and security – regardless of which product you choose.
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