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Updated and tested 1 November 2026
Three nodes. That's the number that decides most of this. Portainer Community Edition is open source under the zlib licence, has no licence key and no node limit. Portainer Business Edition is the commercial edition, needs a licence key and is free up to 3 nodes with no trial period and no card on file, though the key has an expiry date and is renewed through a form. Paid plans start above that. Below the line, the question is which feature set you want. Above it, the question is which one you're willing to pay for.
What counts as a node
Portainer's definition, from its pricing page: any server, VM, Raspberry Pi, desktop, laptop, industrial computer or embedded device capable of running containers that is either running the Portainer Server or is managed by one. Two details catch people. The machine running the Server counts when Portainer also manages it, which is the usual setup on a single VPS; a Server that only manages other machines doesn't use a licence, according to the node definition in the licensing FAQ. And a Swarm or Kubernetes cluster counts per node, not per cluster, so a three-node Swarm plus a VPS where Portainer also manages its own Docker is four nodes and outside the free tier.
The free tier used to be 5 nodes, and older tutorials still say five. The 3 Nodes Free program replaced it for new users, and existing 5 Nodes Free keys run until their expiry date. After that, Portainer's renewal FAQ says 5 nodes stays available for non-commercial use only, and commercial users move to the 3-node key.
Features behind the Business licence key
The Community Edition is a full product. It manages Docker standalone, Swarm, Kubernetes and Podman environments, deploys stacks from compose files and git repositories, has users and teams with per-environment access, app templates, registries, the Agent and the Edge Agent. The Portainer stacks guide and everything else in this tutorial series runs on CE.
A few screens in my CE 2.45.3 install showed Business Feature badges on things CE users tend to expect: webhooks on running stacks and on containers, and scheduled backups to S3. The one webhook CE does offer is a toggle on the repository form, at the moment you create the stack.
In CE 2.45.3 a git stack starts from a saved Source, and the webhook toggle is on the create form.
CE's own backup is a manual download of Portainer's configuration, and the Settings page says it "does not include containers", so your volumes need a backup of their own.
CE backs up Portainer's own configuration as a download; scheduled S3 backups are a Business feature.
Business Edition adds the layer an organisation asks for. Role-based access control is the biggest of them and the first one people run into: CE has users, teams and an Administrator flag, while BE has the full role hierarchy of Administrator, Environment administrator, Edge administrator, Operator, Helpdesk, Namespace operator, Standard user and Read-only user, per the Portainer roles documentation. Around that, Portainer's own CE versus BE comparison lists single sign-on with provider templates and Active Directory, registry management with image update notifications, audit logs with syslog export, kubeconfig import, Kubernetes cluster provisioning, fleet governance policies, GitOps extras like change windows and stored git credentials, and commercial support. CE is not supported by Portainer; the forums and GitHub issues are what you get.
In CE the only role choice for a new user is the Administrator toggle.
The flat version of that paragraph, for scanning: if the words RBAC, SSO, audit log or support contract appear in your requirements, it's BE. If they don't, CE does the job.
