The open-core boundary
Exactly what is in the open-source edition and what belongs to the managed Ciele Cloud service.
Ciele follows an open-core model: the product is open source, and a small set of commercial features that only make sense for a managed multi-tenant service live outside the open-source tree. This page draws the line precisely.
In the open-source edition (AGPL-3.0)
The whole product your visitors and administrators use is open source:
- The admin console and the assistant editor with live preview.
- The chat widget and its runtime.
- The flow router and flow actions.
- The knowledge and retrieval pipeline, including website crawling, files, and FAQs, with source citations.
- Help desks and escalation channels.
- The operations surfaces: inbox, improvements, insights, and alerts.
- Multi-tenancy with organizations, members, roles, and row-level security.
- Publishing to your website with an embed snippet.
If a feature is documented in the main Documentation without a managed-edition note, it is part of this open-source core.
Cloud-only (not in the open-source tree)
These are the managed-service features. They are excluded from the open-source code and are never created in a self-hosted deployment:
- Plans and billing — subscription plans, payment, and invoicing.
- Usage metering and enforced limits — per-plan monthly quotas and their caps.
- The cross-organization operations surface used to run the managed service.
- Managed single sign-on onboarding for the admin console.
- Hosting, upgrades, backups, and support with a service commitment.
How the split is enforced in the code
Enterprise code lives under a dedicated path and is excluded when the public open-source tree is assembled, so an open-source checkout simply does not contain it. The enterprise database migrations are a separate chain applied only where they exist; a self-hosted deployment has no such directory and creates none of those tables. See Database.
Why the boundary is where it is
Everything a self-hosting organization needs to run assistants for its own users is in the open-source core. The Cloud-only features are the ones tied to Ciele operating the service for other organizations — charging for it, capping usage across tenants, and standing behind availability. Keeping them out of the open-source tree means the open-source edition is complete and self-contained on its own terms, and the managed edition adds only what a managed service needs.
If you want those managed capabilities without building them yourself, use Ciele Cloud.