The whole admin plane on your own hardware — and with it every decision about who uses which model, what gets checked and what gets logged. Here’s what running Pia yourself looks like day to day.
The Community Edition is the real server, not a demo: local authentication built in and a documented walkthrough from zero to first login. If you can run a standard .NET service and a database, you can run Pia. The server is source-available: customers can request the full source for review.
Every Pia server runs on a signed licence file, including this one — the Community licence will be free once the edition is out. On first start the server prints a setup token; paste it together with the licence on the setup page and it activates without a restart.
Read the walkthroughCommunity and Enterprise are the same container image. The signed licence decides what it unlocks, so moving up later means replacing one file — same server, same data.
| Capability | Community | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Local login with MFA and passkeys | Included | Included |
| AI proxy with your own provider keys | Included | Included |
| Sync and chat history across devices | Included | Included |
| Admin dashboard, token board, runtime policies | Included | Included |
| Audit log and login-anomaly detection | Included | Included |
| Encryption at rest | Included | Included |
| End-to-end encryption, recovery, device revocation | Included | Included |
| Plugins, MCP and the public REST API | Included | Included |
| Groups as the unit of policy | One fixed group | Groups you define |
| Guardrails with a decision log | Not included | Included |
| Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on | Not included | Included |
| Managed personas and client policies | Not included | Included |
| Knowledge bases with cited answers | Not included | Included |
| Users / admins | 5 / 1 | Per contract |
Guardrails, quotas, provider routing and plugin allowlists are settings on a group — that is why they sit on the Enterprise side, not because the feature itself is switched off. Everything above the group row works on a Community licence.
Both editions are coming soon and cannot be ordered yet. The Community licence will be free.
Whatever you set on a group applies to every member automatically: token budgets per hour, day and week — hard limits, not guidelines — per-user and knowledge-base quotas, guardrail configuration, and the list of permitted plugins. Policy stops being tribal knowledge.
Which model answers is yours to set, in layers: a default for the group, one per mode — text optimization routed differently from the assistant — and one per type for assistant personas, say a code model for developer personas or a fast one for everyday questions. Whatever you leave unset falls back to the next layer, down to the server default.
Roles, identity sources, disabling, session revocation, soft delete with recovery. Offboarding is a checklist the server already knows.
Usage over time, broken down by user, group, and model, plus the heaviest requests and a per-user request log — you see the invoice coming before it arrives. What was in those requests is not there: the log knows the timestamp, model, template and token count — not a single sentence from the conversation.
The console is split into areas — accounts, groups, guardrails, audit, tokens, licence and more. Roles (bundles, in the console) grant view or manage rights per area; an Auditor role ships ready-made: audit log, token board, AI feedback. Only an owner can hand out rights. Useful from the second admin on — the Community Edition has one.
Rate limits, quotas, identity and lockout policy, AI payload caps, provider retry behaviour — all editable from the admin UI while the server runs. No config-file archaeology, no restart window. One click in settings tells you whether the provider connection is up. Better you find out than your users.
Registered devices with pairing status and sync cursors. Revoke a lost machine to cut it off from sync, or delete it outright — the difference is deliberate, and documented.
Edition, expiry and seat counts at a glance; licence events on a timeline; install or replace a licence from the UI, with an automatic rollback if the new file fails to validate. Expiry is a hard stop, not a slow fade: the server returns to setup mode and waits for a valid licence. Your data stays fully intact — the server simply stops accepting requests until a licence is in place. So it does not catch you out, the console starts warning 30 days ahead.
Plugins come in three kinds — server-delivered tool packs, MCP servers you bring, and REST APIs wired in as tools. Which of them a group may use is an Enterprise setting; the catalogue itself works on every edition. Third-party plugins are covered by signing certificates, with the trust list managed by you.
Connectors put pods on the tool plane: register a pod, issue its token, pick a transport, grant it to a group, and watch its presence. Operators put them on the task plane: serve skills, supervise running assignments, control retention. Nothing participates until an admin turns it on.
Auth, sync, AI proxy, assignments, and the E2EE endpoints are a documented contract — build your own integrations against the same API the client uses.