Keygen is a fair source software licensing and distribution API, built for developers, by developers. Use Keygen to add license key validation, entitlements, and device activation to your business's desktop apps, server applications, on-premise software, and other products.

Keygen comes in two editions. Keygen CE is our Community Edition, and is free (as in beer) to self-host for personal and commercial use. Keygen EE is our Enterprise Edition, and it requires a license key to use. Keygen EE comes with dedicated support, as well as enterprise-grade features like request logs, audit logs, permissions, environments, and more.

We built Keygen to make software licensing accessible to everyone.

The easiest way to get started with Keygen is with our official managed service in the cloud. We'll handle the hard stuff — high availability, backups, security, and maintenance — while you focus on product.

Our managed hosting can save a substantial amount of developer time and resources. For most businesses, this ends up being the best value option and the revenue goes to funding the maintenance and further development of Keygen. So you’ll be supporting Fair Source software and getting a great service!

Keygen is a fair source software licensing and distribution API, and we have a free (as in beer) self-hosted solution. Keygen Community Edition (CE) is exactly the same code base as our managed solution, Keygen Cloud, but with a less frequent release schedule (think of it as an LTS release).

Bug fixes and new features are released to Keygen Cloud several times per week. Features are battle-tested in Keygen Cloud, which allows us to fix any bugs before the general self-hosted release. Every 6 months or so, we combine all the changes into a new self-hosted release.

Keygen CE does lack a few features from Keygen Cloud, most of which are available in Keygen EE.

Interested in self-hosting Keygen? Take a look at our