Editions & self-hosting¶
Cytario is a single product that your organization can run in a few forms. The differences matter mainly to your administrator and to what extra surfaces you may see. Your day-to-day work — browsing, viewing, analyzing — is the same across all of them. This page is a quick orientation so you can tell what belongs to your deployment.
The short version¶
| Hosted (SaaS) | Enterprise (EE) | Self-hosted / on-premises | Open-source (OSS) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | Cytario, fully managed | Your infrastructure | Your infrastructure | Your infrastructure |
| Admin portal for billing / users / storage | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| Self-service subscription | Yes | No | No | No |
| Storage onboarding | Guided, one-click | Guided, one-click | Operator provisioned | Operator provisioned |
| Compute / analysis plugins | Via portal | Yes | Optional | Via plugins |
| Source access | n/a | Closed core | n/a | Open source |
How to tell which you're using¶
- If you reach the platform through a hosted address and manage billing or storage through a separate admin portal (with sections such as Billing, SSO, and Storage), you're on the hosted (SaaS) edition.
- If you run on your own servers and there is no self-service subscription, you're self-hosted — either the open-source build (no admin portal at all) or the Enterprise (EE) build (closed-core, with the admin portal and optional plugins).
What differs between editions¶
The two biggest sources of difference are how storage gets connected and which extra tools you see:
- Subscription & billing exist only in the hosted edition. Self-hosted deployments are licensed separately and have no self-service subscription.
- Storage onboarding is a guided one-click flow in the admin portal for hosted and Enterprise; for self-hosted/open-source, accounts and access roles are provisioned by your operator before you connect a bucket.
- Plugins (for example a CZI image loader, or an analysis application) are present only when your organization has installed them.
If you are a developer or operator, the Operators & infrastructure section covers connecting and disconnecting storage for self-hosted deployments in detail.
The bottom line for everyday users
The Getting Started path in this guide applies to every edition. The only thing to keep in mind is where your storage comes from: a well-configured organization already has connections ready, so you can browse and view right away.