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Community vs Pro

kwatch ships in two editions from the same binary. Community needs no account and no key. Pro needs a license key, one per cluster.

Early access

Pro is free during early access. A license lasts 3 months and may be renewed. You can have up to 2 clusters per account, or per company domain for work emails. There are no prices and no payment details.

At a glance​

CommunityPro
CostFree, no account, no keyFree during early access
DetectionPod crashes, OOM kills and Pending pods; node NotReadyAdds node pressure and draining, readiness, rollouts, Jobs and CronJobs, PDBs, HPAs, storage, network, admission, certificates, quota, custom resources, control plane, probes and unusual events
AnalysisRoot-cause headlineFull proof, shared-factor suspects, who changed what, impact and redacted log excerpts
IncidentsBasic dedup and noise control, state in memoryFlapping detection, startup summary, state kept on disk across restarts, changes made while kwatch was down
Delivery1 provider, namespace filters and silencesAll providers, routing by scope, threads, text templates, audit log
OperationsRBAC audit, secret redaction, health, metrics, text /statusSeverity overrides, maintenance holds, runbook links, heartbeat, /status JSON, flight recorder and replay-export, standby replicas

The per-capability list is on the pricing page and in the generated feature reference. Every capability there carries its tier.

Community​

Community is free forever and works without contacting any server.

  • Detection of pod crashes, OOM kills, Pending pods and restarts, and node failures.
  • Root cause headline on every incident.
  • Noise control: basic deduplication, settling, and symptom merging.
  • Scope: namespace, reason and label filters, and silences.
  • One alert provider. If you configure several, Community keeps the one in app.communityProvider, or the first by name when that is empty.
  • State in memory. After a restart kwatch takes a fresh baseline: existing failures are not re-sent, and only new or worsening ones alert.

Community messages end with a short note naming what Pro adds. Set app.hideProHints: true to remove it.

Pro​

Pro adds everything marked Pro across these docs: the extra detectors, the full root-cause and change history, routing, threads, templates, severity overrides, maintenance holds, runbooks, audit log, heartbeat and probes, persistence, the flight recorder, /status JSON and standby replicas. Configuration for Pro features is accepted in Community and ignored; kwatch lint prints an info: line for each one, and the file stays valid when you upgrade.

How Pro licensing works​

  • One license, one cluster. The first successful check binds the key to that cluster.
  • Early access limits. Up to 2 clusters per account. With a work email the limit is 2 per company domain, shared by everyone using it. With a free mailbox provider such as Gmail the limit is per account.
  • 3 months, renewable. Each license runs for 3 months from the day you start it, and we may renew it.
  • Offline for 7 days. kwatch renews daily. A renewal is valid for 3 days, followed by a 4-day grace period.
  • 3 moves per 30 days to another cluster, with the installer (License / Pro, then Move license to this cluster) or Transfer on your account page.
  • When a license ends, kwatch falls back to Community. Detection and alerting never stop.
  • What is sent: a hashed cluster id, the kwatch version and the node count. A Community install without a key makes no license calls.

Get Pro​

  1. Sign up and open the sign-in link.
  2. Choose Get 3 months of Pro free on your account page.
  3. Run the installer, open License / Pro and choose Add or replace key.

Details, moving a license and troubleshooting are on the License page, and the commands are in the CLI reference.

Source available​

kwatch is source available under the Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2). You may run it for free in your own clusters, read and change the code, and share it. You may not offer it as a hosted service or remove its license-key checks. Releases up to and including v1.0.0-rc.10 stay under the MIT License. See licensing.