We want to make it easier for developers to use HiveMQ and MQTT. By creating an open source edition of HiveMQ, developers can now download and use the HiveMQ broker without worrying about evaluation licenses or our permission to use it. We hope this will accelerate the adoption of HiveMQ and MQTT in the creation of new IoT solutions.

We want to encourage developers and partners to create extensions that integrate HiveMQ and MQTT into the fabric of modern application infrastructure. To do this the industry needs an open MQTT platform that can be easily extended. Our strategy is to make HiveMQ CE the open platform for MQTT integration. HiveMQ CE includes an extension framework and APIs that make it easy to integrate MQTT data into other applications.

More details about our rationale can be found in our Open Source release blog post.

HiveMQ CE is an open source Java implementation of the MQTT broker specification. HiveMQ CE also includes an extensible framework and open API that makes it easy to integrate HiveMQ into other applications.

HiveMQ Professional and Enterprise are commercially licensed products that include the features companies require to deploy business critical applications, including elastic clustering, enterprise security integrations, HiveMQ control center for monitoring and observability, logging, and more. HiveMQ also offers 24/7 technical support for customers of HiveMQ Professional and Enterprise. A full comparison of the editions is available here.

HiveMQ CE users have access to online support through community support channels.

Existing customers will continue to use their commercially licensed versions of HiveMQ. Customers will continue to receive technical support under their current support agreements.

HiveMQ CE can be used in production. We do expect many customers will require the features in HiveMQ Professional and Enterprise to ensure their production deployments are reliable and scalable.

Support for HiveMQ CE is available on the community support forums. HiveMQ offers customers of HiveMQ Professional and HiveMQ Enterprise direct technical support options to meet the needs to support production deployments.

Anyone is welcome to participate and contribute to the HiveMQ open source community. We encourage people to use Github issue tracker and create a pull requests.

The scope of the HiveMQ open source community is to

1) provide a high-quality implementation of the MQTT client and broker specification, and
2) provide an extension framework to make it possible to integrate HiveMQ CE into other applications.

Therefore, we ask that contributions be focused on improving the current implementation and project scope.

We will not accept contributions that would add features that expand the scope of the projects. It is HiveMQ’s intention to offer commercial products that will add features suited for enterprise deployment of HiveMQ, such as clustering, monitoring tools, enterprise security, technical support, and more. We also expect other companies and open source projects will create extensions of HiveMQ CE to suit their specific customer requirements. If you would like to suggest a new feature, please contact the project team to discuss if it fits within the project scope.