Our Plans

Rocket.Chat offers three paid plans built around deployment postures: Commercial, Government, and Defense. Two free entry points, Starter and Community, cover evaluation and small or non-production use.

The Commercial, Government, and Defense plans are collectively called the premium plans. Where other documentation refers to a premium plan or a premium feature, it means any of these three.

Plan overview

This table compares the three premium plans. For Starter and Community, see Free options at a glance.

For the full feature breakdown across all plans, including capability comparisons and how plans map to deployment requirements, visit our plans page. Request a guided evaluation to explore fit, validate requirements, and get support for an official PoC.

Free options at a glance

The two user limits are measured differently. Starter limits how many users you can add to the workspace. Community limits how many users can be connected at the same time.

Commercial plan

The Commercial plan is built for commercial organizations and operators of critical infrastructure that need secure, scalable collaboration with the controls required for strictly regulated industries. You run the workspace in your own infrastructure, with no shared resources and no external dependencies, so your data stays within your jurisdiction.

• Who it's for: Commercial organizations, critical infrastructure operators, and highly regulated industries such as finance and healthcare.

• Deployment posture: On-premises, private cloud, or fully isolated deployments. A multi-instance microservices architecture supports high availability, disaster recovery, and large-scale workloads.

• Regulatory frameworks supported: HIPAA, with a Business Associate Agreement available, for protected health information; financial services obligations for compliant messaging, trade communication capture, and record-keeping; EU operational resilience and incident reporting requirements under NIS2 and DORA; GDPR controls and granular retention policies.

• Capability highlights:

  • Access control: Zero-trust access model.

  • Governance: Granular retention policies and audit.

  • Encryption: End-to-end encryption.

  • Audit: Tamper-evident audit logs with message export.

  • Monitoring: Workspace logs and metrics through Grafana and Prometheus.

  • Scaling: Multi-instance scaling for resilience.

• Add-ons:

  • Rocket.Chat AI (Sovereign AI) for privacy-first AI inside your environment.

  • VoIP for SIP-based voice calling through FreeSWITCH.

  • Mission Critical support, with a 30-minute SLA and direct Level 2 access.

  • Professional Services for deployment, integration, and migration engagements.

Government plan

The Government plan lets public sector agencies operate with full data sovereignty. You keep communications compliant, auditable, and within jurisdictional control, and you can collaborate across agencies and partner organizations without giving up ownership of your infrastructure, identities, or policies.

• Who it's for: National, federal, state, and local government agencies; EU institutions and member-state governments; UK public sector; and other public sector organizations with sovereignty and cross-agency collaboration requirements.

• Deployment posture: On-premises and sovereign cloud deployments that keep data within jurisdictional boundaries. Native Matrix federation enables controlled, cross-organization collaboration without shared infrastructure or a common authorization boundary, so each participant's data stays within its own sovereign environment.

• Regulatory frameworks supported: GDPR, national data-protection regimes, and public sector record-keeping and retention requirements. Built-in controls for data handling, consent management, and privacy compliance across EU and US frameworks.

• Capability highlights:

  • Sovereignty: Sovereign deployment with no foreign jurisdictional exposure.

  • Federation: Matrix federation for cross-agency and partner-nation collaboration.

  • Governance: Granular retention and tamper-evident audit logs with message export.

  • Identity: Identity integration with national and agency identity providers.

  • FIPS 140-3: Run the workspace in a FIPS 140-3 compliant configuration with the FIPS license add-on. See the FIPS Compliance Guide.

• Add-ons:

  • Rocket.Chat AI (Sovereign AI) for on-premises intelligence with classification-aware access.

  • VoIP for SIP-based voice calling.

  • FIPS for FIPS 140-3 compliant deployment.

  • Mission Critical support.

  • Professional Services for accreditation, deployment, and migration support, including migrations from Skype for Business Server and other legacy platforms.

Defense plan

The Defense plan is built for defense and intelligence environments that require operational isolation, security assurance, and classified data handling. It supports sovereign, air-gapped, and classified deployment, and coalition collaboration without shared infrastructure.

• Who it's for: Armed forces, defense ministries, intelligence agencies, federal system integrators, and coalition or multi-domain operations.

• Deployment posture: Air-gapped and fully isolated environments; SCIF-ready; DoD ATO up to IL6, with confirmed production deployments on NIPR, SIPR, and JWICS across the full DoD Impact Level spectrum.

• Regulatory frameworks supported: DoD security and accreditation requirements through IL6; FIPS 140-3 compliant deployment with the FIPS license add-on, available since Rocket.Chat 8.7.0; CJIS-aligned and ITAR-aligned controls; classification-aware records handling.

• Capability highlights:

  • Classified deployments: SCIF-ready, fully isolated, and air-gapped environments.

  • Encryption: End-to-end encryption with post-quantum options and FIPS-compliant cryptography.

  • Access control: Attribute-based access control (ABAC) with clearance-level permissions.

  • Federation: Cross-domain collaboration across independent Rocket.Chat deployments without shared infrastructure, including Matrix federation and XMPP bridge support for interoperability with legacy systems.

• Add-ons:

  • Rocket.Chat AI (Sovereign AI) running fully inside classified enclaves, with provenance and classification-aware access.

  • VoIP for sovereign SIP voice.

  • FIPS for FIPS 140-3 compliant deployment. See the guide for the known limitations, including password hashing.

  • Mission Critical support with the highest-priority SLA.

  • Professional Services for ATO support, accreditation engagements, and bespoke integrations.

Starter workspaces

Every workspace you deploy on Rocket.Chat 6.5 or later is provisioned as a Starter workspace. Starter is self-managed and self-hosted, includes many premium capabilities with usage limits, and is intended for technical evaluation or small teams.

• Who it's for: Technical evaluations and small teams exploring Rocket.Chat's premium capabilities.

• Deployment and limits: Self-managed and self-hosted, for up to 50 users. Air-gapped deployment is not available on Starter; it is a paid-plan capability.

• Security and identity: Active Directory and LDAP authentication, single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and role-based access control, along with end-to-end encryption, retention, data loss prevention, and content moderation.

• Communication: Channels, groups, direct messages, threaded discussions, multimedia and file sharing, searchable history, read receipts, and unlimited push notifications, with a localized interface in 64 languages and video integrations for Pexip, Jitsi, BigBlueButton, Google Meet, and Zoom.

• Extensibility: Marketplace apps, the Apps-Engine, and visual customization.

• Support: Community knowledge and self-serve documentation, with no paid support add-ons.

• When you reach the limit: Your workspace is restricted from adding new users. Existing users and data remain accessible. From there, contact our sales team to discuss an upgrade to Commercial, Government, or Defense, which does not require data migration. You can also downgrade to a Community workspace if you need only very basic capabilities for non-production use.

Community workspaces

Rocket.Chat Community is the open-source (MIT) edition of the platform, for teams that have exceeded Starter's user limit and need only very basic capabilities.

Important: Community is not suitable for production deployment by organizations that depend on Rocket.Chat for business-critical operations, compliance, or reliability. If you need sovereignty, regulated-industry compliance, premium support, advanced governance, or large-scale or classified deployment, choose a paid plan instead.

• Who it's for: Hobbyist, educational, or small non-production deployments where the limitations below are acceptable.

• Deployment and limits: Self-hosted only, for up to 100 concurrent users. Push notifications are capped at 10,000 per month.

• Capability scope: Core messaging with basic channels and direct messages, basic identity management, video calls through Jitsi and BigBlueButton only, and limited app integrations.

• Support: Maintained by an active user and developer community. See Community Resources for documentation, forums, and guides.

Proof of Concept (PoC) for scoped engagements

For most organizations, Starter is the evaluation path. It is free, self-managed, and exposes most premium capabilities, so your technical evaluators can validate Rocket.Chat against your use case directly.

A separate, scoped Proof of Concept (PoC) is available for engagements where Starter cannot represent the target deployment, for example:

• Classified or air-gapped environments, including Defense and IL-tier deployments.

• Sovereign cloud or jurisdiction-bound deployments, where evaluation must happen inside a specific environment.

• Federation, cross-domain, or coalition scenarios that require multiple coordinated deployments.

• Large-scale or multi-instance architectures that exceed Starter's user and feature limits.

A PoC is a guided, time-bound evaluation aligned with your goals and success criteria. PoCs are approved based on use-case fit, alignment with the product, agreed success criteria, and active engagement from your team. If yours is approved, expect a structured process covering scope and timeline alignment, platform access in the target environment, and joint evaluation of outcomes with our team. Request a guided evaluation to get started.

Pro plan (legacy)

Effective April 29, 2026, the Pro plan moved to legacy status and is no longer available for new purchases.

If you hold a legacy self-service paid subscription, see Change Your Workspace Plan for the options available to you. For help choosing a current plan, contact the support team.

Choosing the right plan

• Choose Commercial if you are a commercial organization that needs secure collaboration, regulatory support, deployment flexibility, and high availability.

• Choose Government if you are a public sector organization that needs sovereignty, jurisdictional control, auditability, and secure collaboration across agencies or government bodies.

• Choose Defense if you operate in classified, air-gapped, SCIF-ready, IL6, NIPR, SIPR, JWICS, or mission-critical environments that require controls such as ABAC, FIPS 140-3, post-quantum encryption, and controlled federation.

• Choose Starter if you are running a small, self-managed, non-critical workspace with up to 50 users.

• Choose Community if you have exceeded Starter's user limit and need only very basic open-source capabilities, with no production-grade compliance, support, or reliability requirements.

Related topics

• Subscribe Your Workspace: subscribe to a premium plan and apply your license.

• Change Your Workspace Plan: upgrade, downgrade, and legacy subscription options.

• Plan Downgrade Behavior FAQ: what happens to your data and features on a downgrade.

• Fair Use Allowance FAQ: how usage limits are applied.

• Security Overview: security and compliance capabilities, and the plan each one requires.

• Authentication Across Plans: authentication features compared across plans.