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Community vs Enterprise

The community edition covers the complete edge-to-cloud loop and can be used in production on its own. Enterprise capabilities cover the procurement, operations, and compliance needs of large organizations.

The table below reproduces the capability comparison from the NereidAI project overview.

Capability Community Enterprise value
Edge connectors & NPU adapter plugins ✓ Same capabilities, with vendor-backed integration support
Link / Forge / Horizon, single-site ✓ Multi-site scale — federated operation across many sites, certified hardware/accelerator combinations, and vendor-supported rollout with LTS
Sphere + Identity multi-tenant control plane — Unified identity and cross-product governance — one login, one portal, consistent tenants and policies across the suite
Identity external IdP federation (OIDC / LDAP / SAML) and SCIM provisioning — Enterprise IAM integration — connect to an existing directory and automate user lifecycle management
High availability, disaster recovery, large-scale rollout policy — Scale and resilience — fleet-wide rollouts with HA/DR for sites that cannot tolerate downtime
Audit, hardening, compliance baselines (等保 / MLPS etc.) — Compliance and audit readiness for regulated industries and SOE / multinational procurement
Signed release artifacts and per-release SBOM ✓ Plus signed offline bundles and enterprise supply-chain workflows
CVE response SLA and backported fixes — Contractual response commitment with fixes backported to LTS versions
Air-gapped delivery, private POC, training self-service Turnkey delivery and knowledge transfer on the customer's premises
Support GitHub issues / Discussions (community only, no SLA) 7×24 LTS with a named engineer

How to read this table

  • A ✓ in the Community column means the capability is available in the Apache-2.0 community edition; a — means it is a commercial capability.
  • "Community" is not a crippled edition. The community edition is a complete, production-usable edge-to-cloud loop. Enterprise value is about scale, governance, and assurance — running many sites, meeting procurement and audit requirements, and getting contractual commitments.
  • The self-service entry for air-gapped delivery means the community edition supports it, while commercial terms add turnkey delivery and knowledge transfer.

Security & delivery posture

The same posture work that underpins the community edition also determines what is available today, gated on the first tagged release, or delivered commercially. From the project overview:

Capability Status
Air-gapped / offline installation (full image bundles, no internet required) Available
No mandatory call-home; data stays inside the customer perimeter Available
mTLS service-to-service and device-to-platform links Available
Unified SSO and centralized RBAC across all suite products (Identity) Available
Signed release artifacts and per-release SBOM First tagged release
Enterprise SLA on CVE response and backported fixes Commercial contract
Compliance baselines (e.g. 等保 2.0) and local-OS / accelerator certifications Per-engagement roadmap

Next steps