Commercial use of Neo4j Desktop

I have read documentations regarding different licensing models of Neo4j, e.g. Neo4j Licensing | Open Source Graph Databases & License Overview. But I'm not absolutely sure if my current Neo4j setup, used for commercial purpose, is legal or not. Please advise.

We have a team of several people. We intend to provide analytics services to clients, using Neo4j. That said, we first understand the clients' needs, collect/import their data to Neo4j, and then do the analytics in our side, and return them our findings/insights, including suggestion/action points.

For now, we use Neo4j Desktop, which includes Neo4j Enterprise features, but is supposed to be locally used for developing purposes. We're not attempting to centralize the data or analytics in some servers (thus, no need to use Neo4j Community Edition or Enterprise Edition). Each of our staff has their own laptop, in which we install Neo4j Desktop. Whenever wanting to discuss/collaborate, each staff opens their laptop and uses Neo4j Desktop to show their progress/findings. We don't share the Db Instance in those laptops. Everyone is on their own.

What we're doing seems to be in the grey area: in one hand, we stick to Neo4k Desktop license (and its requirements); in another hand, we use Neo4j for commercial purpose. Note: We're neither startups nor working in education fields.

Looking forward to your advice. Thank you.

Hello @tnt84,

As you note, Neo4j Desktop includes a license for "Neo4j Enterprise Edition for Developers". The intent of the license is to allow the person-at-keyboard (developer) to use Neo4j Desktop and the associated graph apps in Desktop for development purposes, including learning and evaluation of Neo4j.

Since Desktop is providing Enterprise Edition features (albeit on a single local machine), the intent is not to process real data for the purpose of getting business results, unless you also have a commercial license with Neo4j. I am not a lawyer, but your usage does not seem to be covered by the Developer edition license in Desktop.

I would suggest exploring Neo4j Aura or talking to a local sales representative about your unique usage situation.

Thank you for your advice, @anurag.tandon