Positioning your Enterprise and Open Source Editions

Startups balancing an open source project with a paid enterprise version — and often a cloud-based SaaS version too — have some positioning balancing acts to pull off, making their positioning more complicated than a simple, closed-source software. If you’re trying to balance how to position your enterprise edition and manage it’s relationship with your open source project, these tips are for you.

Don’t position your OSS as the ‘crappy’ option

First of all, you’ll probably have some kind of table that shows all the features you get in the open source version versus the enterprise version. To make an over generalization, in most cases you’ll have the same core functionality but the enterprise version has a fancy UI and some kind of support commitment.

If you don’t conciously position both the enterprise and the open source editions, though, there’s always the risk that the open source version will come off seeming like the ‘crappy’ version. “This is our free give-away, but it’s just not as good as the other thing.”

First of all, if that is your attitude about the OSS, you should probably rethink your strategy and get rid of the open source edition altogether. But if that is not what you mean to say, and you are really committed to expanding your open source community and building an amazing project, don’t let your users or visitors to your webiste interpret your open source project’s positioning as an inferior version of paid thing.

Don’t position open source and enterperise editions for the same target market

Your open source and enterprise editions are ideal for different types of users. People don’t choose an open source project just because they are ‘broke’ (at least not always — plenty of very much not broke big companies use free open source). There are other reasons to use pure open source that have nothing to do with the financials.

Tease out — and make sure to clearly communicate — who is best for each edition. You want to make it easy to understand, for people in your target market, which edition is the best fit for their specific situation. Doing this requires understanding the characteristics of an ideal users for the open source project and that characteristics of an ideal users for the enterprise edition. If those characteristics are the same, you’re doing something wrong.

I’m doing a free webinar all about positioning enterprise editions of open source software this Friday (June 18th) at 9am PT. Register here.