We believe in a simple, transparent and flexible licensing and pricing model that is aligned with the business value Sitefinity delivers to you. We offer a domain-based or server-based licenses for Sitefinity CMS that are available on perpetual or subscription bases. The Sitefinity experience management capabilities for marketers, powered by the Sitefinity Insight are licensed based on total number of contact profiles and available only as a software-as-a-service subscription. All licenses include one year of maintenance and technical support.
The Sitefinity CMS domain-based license is per production domain name and allows for unlimited production servers, though some domain-based licenses have server limitations.
A production domain is a domain name used to access a website in a production environment, which is a setting where the software is put into actual operation for its intended purpose or accessed by its intended end users. For example, a production domain can be a root domain such as mycompany.com or a sub-domain of the root such as partners.mycompany.com.
A license for the localhost domain is included in every trial or commercial license and the application can be accessed from http://localhost on every server it is installed on.
Licenses with active maintenance purchased prior to December 6, 2013 allow for unlimited production sub-domains and licenses purchased between Dec 6, 2013 and May 31, 2014 allow for 5 production subdomains.
Every license for a given production domain comes with unlimited number of free sub-domains for accessing websites used for non-production purpose such as development, testing, or staging. In some cases we allow free registration of other non-production domains such mywebsite.cloudapp.net for websites hosted on Windows Azure.
For example, our customers typically use the following non-production domains: dev.mywebsite.com, uat.mywebsite.com, stg.mywebsite.com.
All production and non-production domains need to be designated and registered with a Sitefinity CMS license in order to obtain a valid software key. Note that if you use a content delivery network (CDN), there’s no need to register the CDN domain because Sitefinity CMS treats the CDN as an external service that is not subject to its licensing mechanism.
Unlimited number of domain names can redirect (forward) to any domain name associated with a Sitefinity CMS license as long as the domain which the user sees after the redirect is the domain associated with the Sitefinity CMS license.
For example, a domain redirect is when a user goes to myoldcompany.com and they are redirected to mycompany.com, which in turn opens a website powered by Sitefinity CMS. In this case the user sees mycompany.com in the url bar of the browser even though they first navigated to myoldcompany.com.
You can register unlimited production domain aliases with a Sitefinity CMS license for free. A domain alias is considered any domain name used as an alternative address for a given website.
For example, if the main production domain is mywebsite.com and its domain alias is myalias.com, then http://mywebsite.com and http://mywebsite.com/landingpage will take visitors to the exact same website pages as http://myalias.com and http://myalias.com/landingpage. Also, for all registered domains, the Sitefinity CMS licensing mechanism will automatically recognize the “www.” prefix (e.g. www.mywebsite.com, www.myalias.com) as an alias. Hence, there’s no need to register the “www.” variation for your domains.
We also provide complimentary aliases for domains used to access localized versions of the website (e.g. mycompany.se; de.mycompany.com) as long as these websites are powered by the respective localization features of Sitefinity CMS and are not separate CMS instances. However, if the localized websites are significantly different in terms of design and content from the website opened by the main production domain, they would not be considered aliases and require you to purchase additional domain licenses.
Note: Only customers with active license maintenance are eligible to request free domain alias registrations.
The Sitefinity CMS server-based license is per production server and allows for unlimited number of production domain names.
A production server is a server where the software is deployed for its intended production purpose – publishing and/or administering content on a website that is accessible to its intended users. A server is defined as one physical machine, virtual machine or cloud service instance (e.g. Microsoft Azure App Service) with computing power for the web application process equivalent to at most eight CPU cores.
For example, one physical machine with two quad-core CPUs counts as one server and another physical machine with two eight-core CPUs will count as two servers. If Sitefinity runs on two virtual machines with four CPU cores allocated per machine or a single virtual machine with sixteen allocated CPU cores in both cases this will count as two servers for licensing purposes. A virtual machine’s computing power is counted as the total number of physical CPU cores or virtual processor core equivalents allocated to the machine.
In case of load-balanced production environments and some fail-over setups the Sitefinity load balancing capabilities need to be configured to ensure that the system functions properly and website always serves the most up to date content.
For example, if you use Sitefinity CMS on two or more production servers in a web farm, load-balanced, or cloud (e.g. Windows Azure, Amazon EC2, or Rackspace Cloud) environment then you need to setup the CMS for load balancing. For the server-based licensing option, you will also need to purchase additional production servers.
If Sitefinity CMS is used in a fail-over setup where the fail-over server is synchronized in real time with the production server to ensure that the cached content of the standby fail-over server is always up to date with the cached content on the production server, then load balancing product capabilities need to be configured for such a setup and the hot fail-over server requires an additional server license.
If the fail-over server does not synchronize its cache with the production server, then there’s no need to configure load balancing and no additional server license is required.. However, in this case all content on the failover server will need to be cached in real time in the event of production server failure and your website visitors may experience slower initial page load times.
Additional production domains and servers can be purchased in the form of add-ons for a given license as long as they are for the benefit of a single organization or entities controlled by this organization by at least 50%.
Web development agencies can purchase add-ons for all licenses that benefit a single end client and then transfer the license ownership to the end client together with all add-ons.
All domain, server and feature add-ons are bound to the maintenance of the underlying Sitefinity Edition license they are associated with, so that add-on maintenance is renewable at the same date as the license regardless of when an add-on was purchased or associated with the license.
Unlike other vendors, we do not charge extra for non-production domains and servers. Every Sitefinity CMS license comes with unlimited number of free domains and servers for accessing websites used for non-production purpose such as development, testing and staging.
For example, our customers typically use the following non-production domains: dev.mywebsite.com, uat.mywebsite.com, stg.mywebsite.com.
All production and non-production domains need to be designated and registered with a Sitefinity CMS license to obtain a valid software key.
Licenses can be transferred together with their add-ons to a third party upon request to our sales team.
For example, a web agency purchasing a license for an end client should then transfer ownership of the license to the end client, which would be using and benefiting from the software.
Every Sitefinity CMS license includes a license for several other Progress products listed below. All these developer tools can be used within the scope of Sitefinity web applications accessed from registered domains.
Every Sitefinity CMS license includes a license for several other Telerik products listed below. All these developer tools can be used within the scope of Sitefinity web applications accessed from registered domains.
Read more about the included developer tools.