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

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Which version 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 similarities and differences to help explain why you would want to choose one or the other.  

We thought it might be helpful to enumerate some of the differences between two editions: 

Developers vs. Operations teams 

Payara Platform Communityis more stripped down and focused on making lives easier for developers who are experimenting, not creating mission-critical applications. It is for you, developers and software development students, who want to play with the latest features and APIs during development, and whose main goal is to innovate. Therefore, if you want to open the door towards the rapid innovation with frequent - not monthly - releases, using Payara Platform Community edition is the right choice.

On the other side, Payara Platform Enterprisehas more operations-focused capabilities. It builds on the developer focus of community and adds more capabilities 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. They test them within Community, and if they work and benefit users they are stabilised, better integrated and more rigorously tested as they move into our Payara Enterprise products. They might be removed or revoked in later community releases.

New innovations and APIs in Payara Community may change significantly between releases. Once we are happy with a new feature or API and we believe it is ready for production usage it is moved into 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.
  • If you would like to achieve long term stability, Payara Platform Enterprise values stability across minor releases and includes migration tools and a well-defined software lifecycle to ensure it is easy for you to move between releases.

Leading Edge vs. Backwards Compatibility 

Payara 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 Enterprise only includes features, tools and APIs we believe are stable and ready for demanding production usage. Where 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 focused on organizations that can cope with the rapid pace of change inherent in the community project and who can self support using the open source code.

Payara Platform Enterprise is focused on the needs of our customers, organizations that have demanding production environments and need the level of stability and support that an Enterprise subscription provides: direct support from Payara Engineers, 10-year software lifecycle, monthly releases, bug fixes and patches, and security alerts and fixes.

Velocity vs. Quality 

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 quality, with releases which are better integrated and more extensively tested than Payara Community releases.

For Payara Platform Community and Payara Server Enterprise every release has passed theJakarta EEand MicroProfileTCKs and extensive test suites that also test Scalability, High Availability and Performance!

Development vs. Production 

Payara Platform Community, out of the box, is optimised for development environments. Payara Platform Enterprise is optimised for production deployments and comes with capabilities and guides covering configuration for high availability, scalability and security.

Assembled vs. Integrated 

Payara is an open source software company and the source code of our all our software is released under an open source license. Both platforms incorporate code from many upstream open source projects from Payara Community;the Eclipse Foundation; Jakarta EE; MicroProfile; Hazelcast and many others and we integrate and test all these projects to create a platform suitable for the most 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 therefore is configured to deliver raw performance and may disable or remove capabilities that enable Scalability and High Availability.  

Payara Platform Enterprise is focused on delivering the best platform for mission critical production deployments and delivers configurations and capabilities that prioritise Scalability, High Availability and Security over raw performance.  

Manual vs. Automated 

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! 

Hope this has helped you make up your mind which is the right choice! 
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