Bichon ships in three editions. Community is the open-source AGPLv3 build. Pro and Enterprise are a separate commercial build on the same core, shipped as one binary; the license you upload determines which of the two feature sets is active. GET /api/v1/features reports the active edition at runtime.

One core, three editionsCopy Anchor Link

Community is the open-source AGPLv3 build — not a reduced demo. The core archiving engine (IMAP sync, storage, search, authentication, import/export) is developed in the open and shaped by community requirements. That is what keeps the core continuously evolving and stable.

Pro and Enterprise are a separate commercial codebase built on that same core, shipped as one binary and selected by license. They benefit from the core's evolution rather than being a closed, separately maintained fork: fixes and improvements that land in Community flow into the commercial builds, and the storage and data model remain compatible. Commercial surfaces — audit integrity, analytics, the built-in IMAP server, journaling, SSO, and the compliance suite — sit on top of the core.

Because the core is shared, moving from Community to Pro or Enterprise is a binary swap against the same data root, not a data migration; existing accounts, mail and indices are used as they are.

Core Archiving — all editionsCopy Anchor Link

• Multi-account IMAP download (password + OAuth 2.0 with Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo presets)
• Per-account SOCKS5 proxy, SSL/TLS, STARTTLS
• UID-based incremental sync with UIDVALIDITY rebuilds
• Fetch scoping, cron schedules, server auto-configuration
• Full-text search (subject, body, sender, recipients)
• Advanced filters, faceted tags, thread grouping, contacts view
• Saved searches (50 per user)
• Permission-gated, permanent message delete (no trash); bulk restore of archived messages back to their source IMAP server; remote content blocking
• Source-mailbox cleanup: scheduled or on-demand move of archived mail into bichon_auto_created_trash (reversible; never a permanent delete)
• Three-layer storage: Tantivy + bichon-blob + memdb (zero external dependencies)
• BLAKE3 content deduplication, Zstd compression
• Native incremental backup & restore (AWS S3, MinIO, R2, or a local directory)
• Multi-user RBAC: 5 built-in roles, custom roles, 27 permissions
• TOTP two-factor authentication, API tokens
• CLI import: EML, MBOX, Gmail MBOX, Thunderbird, PST; MBOX and attachment-ZIP export
• WebUI batch export: MBOX from an email search, ZIP from an attachment search — from a saved search or the current result set
• WebUI import: EML, MBOX, PST
• Embedded SMTP receiver (receive only)
• In-place message repair: re-fetch a message's missing content blobs from its source server
• REST API + OpenAPI 3.0 (/api-docs: Swagger UI, ReDoc, Scalar, Explorer)
• Dashboard analytics, 18-language WebUI, dark/light themes

Feature MatrixCopy Anchor Link

Upgrades and third-party forksCopy Anchor Link

As described above, moving from Community to Pro or Enterprise is a binary swap, not a data migration: run the Pro/Enterprise server against the existing data root and upload the license. Existing accounts, mail and indices are used as they are.

The data model also carries edition-specific records — audit chains, legal-hold cases, minimum-retention locks and compliance configuration — that only Pro and Enterprise write. Third-party forks built from the Community codebase are independent projects and are not validated against those records. Moving an instance between a fork and Pro/Enterprise, in either direction, is therefore unsupported: the fork may not understand those fields or records, and writing the affected data through it can silently drop them.

Before moving any instance to or from a third-party fork, take a full backup of the data root — plus the index and blob directories if they are overridden — and confirm compatibility with the fork's maintainers for your exact versions. This matters most for instances with legal hold or a minimum-retention lock enabled, where losing or misreading the record can break a compliance obligation. See Migration & Upgrade.

LicensingCopy Anchor Link

Pro and Enterprise licenses are Ed25519-signed certificates bound to a machine ID. Upload via POST /api/v1/license/upload; check status at GET /api/v1/license/status. The license file (license.txt) lives in the data root and can be replaced offline for disaster recovery. Trial limits, the full status list, and what happens when a license lapses are covered in Licensing & Trials.

• A 30-day trial runs the Pro edition with a 2-account limit.
• The account limit (alc claim) caps every account, not just IMAP sync accounts — NoSync accounts, a journal archive and View accounts all count. The limit is a commercial boundary, so leaving any account type outside it would make it meaningless.
• A license is perpetual for the release you purchase. The first 12 months include updates; from year two, an annual update subscription is required to receive new releases.
• Builds released after the updates-expiry date (upd claim) refuse to start until the license's update coverage is renewed. The release you are already running keeps working.
• During early access, update and renewal terms are confirmed with each customer before purchase.

Note: Trial and licensing details apply to the Pro server (bichon-pro-server). The Community edition requires no license.