Licensing Question: Planning Two Self-Hosted Instances Under One Organization

Hello Bitwarden Team and Community,

We are currently planning our self-hosted deployment and want to make sure we fully understand the licensing implications before moving forward.

Our company would remain a single Organization, but due to operational requirements we may need to run two separate self-hosted Bitwarden instances. These two servers would be isolated on different networks with no connectivity between them.

The same employees (for example, User A and User B) would need accounts on both instances, since they rotate between sites.

My question:

  • If both servers belong to the same Organization, can we apply the same Organization license file to each instance and only pay for the actual number of unique users (e.g., 2 seats total for User A and User B)?

  • Or would Bitwarden licensing consider each server as a separate environment, meaning we would need to license the same users twice (effectively 4 seats)?

I want to confirm whether this type of setup is allowed and compliant under Bitwarden’s licensing terms.

Thank you for clarifying before we finalize our deployment plans.

This question is best addressed to support@bitwarden.com so that you have an “official answer”. This community forum mostly just contains the opinions of your peers, which will not have much gravitas with your company’s licensing/compliance people.

@euha2004 Welcome to the forum!

I second the advice of @DenBesten. – And if you get an answer from BW support, please share it here if possible. Would be interesting to know.

(Personal speculation: I have no self-hosting experience, but from what I know, I think the self-hosted server creates / manages / provides the Organization – so I would have my doubts if it is technically possible to have two separate servers running one Organization… but again, I don’t know the technical details of self-hosting and their variations…)

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.