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Introduction to Ory Enterprise License

The Ory Enterprise License (OEL) is a commercial license designed for businesses and organizations that rely on Ory's open-source identity and access control software (Ory Hydra, Ory Kratos, Ory Keto, Ory Oathkeeper, and Ory Polis) in production and mission-critical environments. It grants access to enterprise-grade features, dedicated support, and builds optimized for stability, security, and scalability.

When to use the Ory Enterprise License​

You should consider the Ory Enterprise License if your organization

  • operates Ory solutions in critical production environments where downtime is unacceptable.
  • requires timely patches and updates for security vulnerabilities (CVEs) within specific timeframes.
  • needs dedicated support from Ory's core engineering team with guaranteed response times (SLAs) for incident resolution.
  • handles high-traffic volumes and large datasets (100GBs scale) requiring optimized database performance and zero-downtime migrations.
  • needs enterprise-specific functionalities not available in the open-source versions, such as the OAuth2 Resource Owner Password Credentials (ROPC) grant in Ory Hydra or multi-tenancy/organizations features in Ory Kratos.
  • requires advanced deployment patterns like multi-region for high availability, disaster recovery, and data domiciling.

In contrast, open-source builds are well-suited for

  • individuals and researchers exploring Ory's capabilities.
  • development and testing environments.
  • deployments where occasional downtime for upgrades is acceptable and CVE patching is not required.

Benefits of Ory Enterprise License​

All Ory Enterprise builds share common advantages over their open-source counterparts:

  • Regular, up-to-date releases: Enterprise builds are released frequently and include the latest dependencies, addressing known CVEs in Golang, third-party libraries, and other components.
  • Dedicated support & SLAs: OEL holders receive dedicated support channels and are covered by Service Level Agreements (SLAs), ensuring qualified responses within defined timeframes based on incident priority.
  • Drop-in replacement: OEL is designed as direct replacements for open-source installations, requiring no special configuration or complex migration paths from existing OSS setups.
  • Unlocked Enterprise features: The OEL activates exclusive functionalities. Specific enterprise features for each Ory service are detailed in their respective documentation sections.
  • Zero-downtime migrations: Unlike open-source versions that require downtime during upgrades, enterprise builds support zero-downtime migrations.
  • Optimized CockroachDB integration: For deployments with large-scale databases and traffic patterns, an enhanced CockroachDB integration is available. This provides not only zero-downtime upgrades but also zero-downtime schema migrations by leveraging CockroachDB's Online schema changes feature.
  • Multi-Region deployments: Enterprise builds, when used with CockroachDB, support multi-region deployments. This enables:
    • Enhanced high-availability: Go beyond simple Availability Zone (AZ) failover with true multi-region resilience for superior uptime and disaster recovery.
    • Data domiciling: Comply with data privacy regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and others by keeping data in specific geographic regions while maintaining a global, logical view of all data within a single database.
    • Lower latency: Improve application performance for globally distributed users by locating data closer to them.
  • Seamless operation: Running, configuring, and using enterprise builds follows the same familiar patterns as the open-source versions.

Use cases​

The Ory Enterprise License is leveraged by organizations requiring robust and scalable identity infrastructure. For instance, OpenAI utilizes the Ory Enterprise License with Ory Hydra Enterprise to manage authentication for its 400 million weekly active users, ensuring reliability, massive scale, and uninterrupted service. Read more about OpenAI's use of Ory.