When Is It Time To Move From Payara Community to Payara Enterprise?

“Which version of the Payara Platform is right for me?” We get asked this question all the time, so we wanted to provide you with a more in-depth discussion that outlines the similarities and differences between the two editions of the Payara Platform, Enterprise and Community, to help you choose the one that best fits your needs.

Developers vs. Operations teams 

Payara Platform Communityis streamlined and developer-focused, perfect for those experimenting with new features and APIs, not creating mission-critical applications. It's ideal for developers and software development students who want to innovate rapidly, supported by frequent releases.

On the other side, Payara Platform Enterprisehas more operations-focused capabilities. It builds on the community edition's developer focus by adding capabilities suited for running mission-critical applications in production environments.

Innovation vs. Stability 

Payara Platform Community is much more experimental than Payara Platform Enterprise. It is an innovation platform, where our engineers try out new APIs and ideas. Features in the community edition may change significantly between releases, they might be removed or revoked in later community releases. Once these features are stable, they can be moved to Payara Enterprise.

It is very important to note that Payara Platform Community is stable only within a single release, but each release stands on its own and capabilities may change from one community release to the next.

Payara Platform Enterprise values stability across minor releases, offering migration tools and a well-defined software lifecycle to ensure smooth transitions between releases. If you would like to achieve long term stability, Payara Platform Enterprise is best suited to address your needs.

Security & Compliance vs. Experimentation

Favoring innovation, experimentation and rapid development, Payara Platform Community offers limited features for regulatory compliance and it is not designed to meet stringent requirements from governing bodies.

As stability for mission critical applications is at the core of Payara Platform Enterprise, the solution includes advanced security features. These include encryption, authentication, and proactive monitoring. In addition, regular updates and security fixes are released to ensure compliance with regulatory standards.

Leading Edge vs. Backwards Compatibility 

Payara Platform Community is at the leading edge of the Payara Platform development and because of this, features, capabilities, tools and APIs may change significantly between individual Payara Community releases.

Payara Platform Enterprise only includes only stable and production-ready features, tools and APIs. When changes are necessary in Payara Enterprise, we ensure there are migration and upgrade tools available, and we aim to maintain backwards compatibility across all releases.

Community vs. Customer 

Payara Platform Community is focused on the needs of the Payara Community and follows the standard open-source mantra of “Release Early, Release Often”. It is ideal for fast-paced organizations that can handle rapid changes and self-support using open-source code.

Payara Platform Enterprise is designed for customers with demanding production environments, offering direct support from Payara Engineers, a 10-year software lifecycle, monthly releases, bug fixes, patches and security alerts.

Speed vs. Reliability

Payara Platform Community is focused on moving fast, releasing capabilities early and often to gain early community feedback on ideas and implementations. While a single release of Payara Platform Community aims to be a quality release, some features will be early in development and subject to change. Maintaining compatibility across Community releases is not a goal, therefore compatibility is not maintained!

Payara Platform Enterprise focuses on reliability, with high-quality releases that are better integrated and more extensively tested than Payara Community releases.

Every release of both Payara Platform Community and Payara Platform Enterprise passed theJakarta EEand MicroProfileTCKs as well as extensive test suites that also check scalability,  availability and performance!

Development vs. Production 

Payara Platform Community is an 'off the shelf' solution that is optimized for development environments.

Payara Platform Enterprise is customized to support production deployments and comes with specific capabilities and technical guides on configuration for high availability, scalability and security.

Assembled vs. Integrated

As an open source software company, the source code for our all our software is released under an open source license.

Payara Platform Community incorporates code from key upstream open source projects, such asthe Eclipse Foundation, Jakarta EE, MicroProfile, Hazelcast and many others. In addition, we integrate and test all these elements to create a solid platform.

Payara Platform Enterprise further integrates and tests these projects to create a platform suitable for demanding operational environments. All features of Payara Platform Enterprise are in our open source repositories but they may need self assembly if you wanted to incorporate them into Payara Platform Community.

Performance vs. Scalability and Availability 

Payara Platform Community is focused primarily on developer productivity and raw performance. To support these aspects, it may disable or remove capabilities that offer scalability and high availability.  

Payara Platform Enterprise integrates and tests these projects to create a platform suitable for demanding operational environments.

Manual vs. Automated 

With innovation and software experimentation in mind, Payara Platform Community focuses on manual operations to provide flexibility to developers.

Payara Platform Enterprise is optimised for production operations and delivers operational tools and features that enable more automated configuration, deployment, management and administration.  The Payara Enterprise engineering team is focused on building capabilities into the Payara Enterprise Platform to help deliver automation of key administrative and operational tasks in production environments, saving you valuable time! 

We hope this summary helped you decide which Payara Platform edition is right for you! If you still have questions, download a copy of our free guide 'Choosing the Right Payara Platform Edition: Community vs Enterprise' or get in touch with us to discuss the specific requirements of your intended application(s).