Farna Control Community vs Team
A dimension-by-dimension comparison of Farna Control's free Community tier and the paid Team tier as your Delivery Governance Platform scales from one team to an organization. No hype, no FUD - just the facts that matter for your buying decision.
Comparison table
| Dimension | Community | Team |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, with no time limit. | One annual price per organization, whatever your seat count. Current price and any founding terms are on /control/pricing. |
| Who it is for | An individual engineer or a single team running a governed pipeline. | An organization rolling governance out across more than one team. |
| Hosting and data | Self-hosted on your infrastructure. No telemetry by default. Air-gap capable. | The same. Nothing about the paid tier changes where your data lives. |
| SSO / SAML | Not included. | Included. |
| SCIM provisioning | Not included. | Included. |
| Role-based access control | Single team, single role. | Team RBAC across the organization. |
| Audit | Local audit on your instance. | Org-wide append-only audit log with hash-chaining and exports for security review. |
| Cost and spend controls | Per-agent token budgets, a pipeline spend circuit breaker, and an org-wide pause (kill switch). | Everything in Community, plus organization and team spend limits, a budget overview, and a cost breakdown. |
| Support | Community support. | Direct, asynchronous support from the team, with a response within 24 hours, seven days a week. No sales calls, no account managers. Product-side defects in Farna Control itself are fixed and shipped in a release. No uptime SLA and no contractual SLA: you operate the infrastructure, and self-hosting and third-party issues are covered by documentation and the community. |
| Upgrade path | Apply a Team license key to the same instance. No migration. | n/a. |
| Governed object and evidence | The delivery run remains the governed object. Local records distinguish observed facts, derived values, reported claims, and attested decisions. | The same governed object, with organization-wide evidence and exports for broader review. |
| Autonomy progression and composition | Use approval gates, budgets and pauses while a team establishes confidence. Compose with the repositories, trackers and model providers you already use. | Use organization-wide controls as more teams adopt the same progression from approval to notification to autonomous execution. |
What the free tier actually does
The Community edition is a full governed pipeline you run on your own infrastructure, free with no time limit. You get the full pipeline engine, connector layer, HITL gates, eval hooks, capability scoping, and cost controls - all running locally with no telemetry by default.
You can run as many pipelines as your infrastructure supports. You can connect GitHub, GitLab, your tracker, and your model providers. You get a local audit log on your instance. The free tier is the same codebase as the Team tier and includes every core governance capability. Team adds the organization-level features.
What the Team tier adds and how it runs
Team adds SSO/SAML, SCIM provisioning, team RBAC, org-wide append-only audit logs with hash-chaining and exports, and per-pipeline spend controls. These are the features that let you roll governance out beyond a single team and satisfy a security reviewer.
Team is a self-hosted feature unlock, separate from any Enterprise agreement. You run the instance on your own infrastructure and you hold the data. Support is direct and asynchronous from the team, with a response within 24 hours, seven days a week. There is no uptime SLA and no contractual SLA: you operate the infrastructure. The paid tier buys governance features and compliance evidence, and the license key changes only which features are unlocked.
When Community is enough
- A single team, no compliance sign-off needed, no SSO requirement.
- You want to evaluate Farna Control before committing budget.
- Your governance needs are met by local audit and single-team access.
When it is time for Team
- A second team needs governed access.
- A security or compliance reviewer asks for org-wide evidence.
- SSO or SCIM is already mandatory in your organization.
Try Farna Control
Start with Community. Upgrade when you need to.
Questions? Open a discussion on GitHub.
See also: Build vs Buy and Farna Control vs Factory.ai.