Which Plane Edition to Choose: Community, Pro, Business, Airgapped

For most teams in Kazakhstan, choosing a Plane edition comes down to one question: where does the data need to live? If it has to be on your own server and you don’t need paid features, the free Community Edition is enough. If you need SSO or advanced permissions on your own server, you need Commercial. If your network is isolated from the internet, choose Airgapped. If the data can stay with the vendor, pick between cloud Free, Pro and Business based on the features you need.

This article is for IT company leaders, team leads and heads of IT departments who have already decided to try Plane and are choosing an edition. Below you’ll find a comparison of all options, what each tier gives you, cost estimates for teams of 10, 25 and 100 people, and a “situation → edition” matrix. Prices and plan contents are as of October 2026 and they do change, so check plane.so/pricing before you buy.

In short: all Plane editions in one table

Edition	Where it runs	Price as of October 2026	Best for
Community Edition	Your server, Docker or Kubernetes	Free, no user limit	Teams that need data in Kazakhstan without paid features
Cloud Free	Plane cloud	Free, up to 12 users	Small teams and pilots
Pro	Cloud or your server (Commercial)	$6 billed annually, $8 monthly, per user per month	Teams of up to a few dozen people
Business	Cloud or your server (Commercial)	$13 billed annually, $15 monthly, per user per month	Companies needing workflows, cloud SSO, advanced Intake
Enterprise Grid	Cloud or your server	Custom, from 100 seats	Large companies needing LDAP and fine-grained permissions
Commercial	Your server	Free plan with 12 seats per workspace, license beyond that	Teams that need paid features on their own server
Airgapped	Isolated network without internet	Terms on request from Plane	Banks, government, closed environments

Commercial and Airgapped are not separate plans but delivery methods. They run the same Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise Grid plans as the cloud.

Community Edition: free with no user limit

Community Edition is the open-source version of Plane under the AGPL-3.0 license. It installs via Docker or Kubernetes, and the number of users is unlimited. According to Plane’s documentation, it matches the cloud Free plan in features: projects, work items, cycles, modules, views, Pages and built-in Intake.

What Community lacks: the features of paid plans. There is no SSO, time tracking, initiatives, dashboards, approval workflows, LDAP or fine-grained permissions. Updates and backups are on you. There is no vendor support either, only the community and GitHub.

It’s important to understand the growth limitation. To move to a paid plan, you first have to switch to Commercial Edition. The migration is documented, but it is a separate operation with a backup and verification. If you’re fairly sure you’ll need SSO in six months, it makes more sense to install Commercial on the free plan right away.

Cloud Free, Pro and Business: what each tier gives you

Plan contents per Plane’s pricing page as of October 2026.

Feature	Free	Pro	Business
Users	Up to 12	Paid per seat	Paid per seat
Intake (request intake)	In-app	In-app	Plus forms, email and assignees
Time tracking	No	Time tracking and worklogs	Plus worklog approvals
Initiatives	No	Yes	Yes
Dashboards	No	Basic	Advanced, with widgets
Workflow	No	No	One workflow
SSO (SAML, OIDC)	No	Self-hosted only	Cloud and self-hosted
Cloud AI credits	No	500 per seat per month	1,000 per seat per month

Free works for a pilot and small teams of up to 12 people. After a couple of months, teams usually start missing time tracking and initiatives.

Pro covers the needs of a typical product team: time tracking for hourly contracts, initiatives to connect goals and projects, and basic dashboards for managers. AI credits let you use AI features in the cloud.

Business is needed when the process requires a formal workflow, request intake via forms and email, effort approvals or SSO in the cloud. In our experience, these are usually companies of several dozen people or more with a client service team or an IT department that handles requests.

Commercial and Airgapped: paid features on your own server

Commercial is a closed-source self-hosted edition with feature parity with the cloud. It installs with the prime-cli installer and works with a license server. Without a key, it is a free plan with 12 seats per workspace. With a key, Pro, Business or Enterprise Grid are unlocked. When upgrading, seats are counted by users with paid roles. Commercial v3.0.0 was released in July 2026.

Airgapped is a variant of Commercial for networks with no internet access. There are no external dependencies or outbound connections, licenses and updates are delivered offline, and images are pulled from your own Docker registry. AI features run on a local model. Feature-wise, Airgapped matches Commercial.

Plane lists both editions alongside the cloud in its certifications: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022, GDPR and HIPAA. That’s a good starting point for your security team, but not a substitute for your own review.

Plane’s pricing page has no separate price list for self-hosted licenses. In the calculations below, we use cloud per-seat prices as a benchmark, and you should confirm the exact terms for Commercial and Airgapped with Plane before budgeting. We covered how to install both self-hosted editions in our Docker guide to installing Plane.

Enterprise Grid: for companies with 100+ people

Enterprise Grid is priced individually; according to Plane, the minimum is 100 seats. What it adds on top of Business, per the pricing page: LDAP and IdP groups, Granular Access Control (permissions at the level of individual objects), multiple workflows with approvals, and audit logs with API access. AI credits are allocated flexibly.

This tier is for companies where the security team requires auditing, access separation between departments and integration with a corporate directory. For a 50-person product team, it is almost always overkill.

Cost estimate for 10, 25 and 100 people

Based on prices as of October 2026, in US dollars per year.

Team	Cloud Free	Pro, annual billing	Pro, monthly	Business, annual billing	Business, monthly	Community self-hosted
10 people	$0	$720	$960	$1,560	$1,800	$0 plus server
25 people	Doesn’t fit, 12-user limit	$1,800	$2,400	$3,900	$4,500	$0 plus server
100 people	Doesn’t fit	$7,200	$9,600	$15,600	$18,000	$0 plus server

What’s not in the table. Self-hosting adds costs for the server, backups and engineering time. According to Plane’s documentation, the minimum server spec is 2 cores and 4 GB of RAM, with 8 GB recommended for production. For 100 people, it’s worth comparing with Enterprise Grid if you need LDAP and auditing. For a comparison with Jira and Confluence for the same team, see our Plane vs Jira breakdown for 2026.

Kazakhstan context. Cloud plans and Commercial licenses are paid with a corporate card in dollars, and the vendor does not issue closing documents that meet Kazakhstan standards. Running Community Edition on a Kazakhstan hosting provider moves your costs into tenge under a contract with signed acts of work, and keeps the data in the country as well. In the cloud, data is stored with the vendor, so for teams that need to keep customers’ personal data in Kazakhstan, the choice often narrows down to Community, Commercial or Airgapped. Also consider language: Plane’s interface is localized by the community, the completeness of the Russian translation depends on the version, and English remains the primary language.

Which edition to choose: decision matrix

Situation	Edition	Why
2–4 week pilot, up to 12 people	Cloud Free or Community	Quick start with no payment
Data must be in Kazakhstan, no paid features needed	Community	Free, server paid in tenge
Data in Kazakhstan, SSO or time tracking needed	Commercial with Pro plan	Paid features on your own server
Data in Kazakhstan, workflows and advanced Intake needed	Commercial with Business plan	IT department and service processes
Network without internet, security requirements	Airgapped	Offline licenses and a local AI model
No storage requirements, team of up to 50	Cloud Pro	No server to maintain
SSO needed in the cloud	Cloud Business	Cloud SSO starts with Business
100+ people, LDAP, auditing, fine-grained permissions	Enterprise Grid	The only tier with these features

Checklist before you buy:

1. Decide where the data must be stored.
2. List the must-have features: SSO, time tracking, workflows, LDAP, auditing.
3. Count headcount a year from now, not today.
4. If you choose self-hosted, decide who will maintain the server.
5. Confirm the terms for self-hosted licenses with Plane.
6. Run a pilot on the chosen edition with one team.

How we do it

During the diagnostic, we look at data requirements, must-have features, team size a year out and who will administer the system. That’s usually enough to pick an edition without debate. Then we install Plane on a server in Kazakhstan or connect the cloud, run a two-to-four-week pilot with one team, and use the results to decide whether a paid plan is needed. If it is, we move the installation to Commercial without losing data.

Details are on our Jira and Plane task tracker implementation page: stages, timelines and what’s included in the deliverables.

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Sources. Prices and plan contents: plane.so/pricing. Self-hosted editions: Plane documentation. Server requirements and installation: docs.plane.so. Community Edition repository: github.com/makeplane/plane. All prices are as of October 2026 and may change.

Terms in plain words

Community Edition

The open-source edition of Plane for your own server, with no limit on the number of users. Feature-wise it matches cloud Free; there is no vendor support, only the community.

Commercial

The closed-source edition of Plane for your own server, where paid features are unlocked with a license key. You need it if you want SSO, time tracking or workflows on your own server.

Airgapped

A variant of Commercial for networks without internet access. Licenses and updates are delivered offline, and AI features run on a local model.

SSO (SAML, OIDC)

Single sign-on with a corporate account; SAML and OIDC are two common standards for it. In Plane, it is a feature of paid plans.

LDAP

A protocol for connecting to a corporate employee directory. It lets you manage access to Plane through existing accounts and groups.

Granular Access Control

Fine-grained permissions at the level of individual objects, not just projects. In Plane, they belong to the Enterprise Grid tier.

Intake

A module for collecting incoming requests that are then triaged and turned into work items. On the Business plan, requests can also come in through forms and email.

AGPL-3.0

The open-source license of Community Edition. It allows you to install and use Plane freely; if you modify the code and make the system available to users over a network, you must publish your changes.