Upgrading From The Community Edition

Upgrading to the paid version of Beekeeper Studio is easy, you don't need to download a new app. Simply purchase a license key and enter it into the app when prompted.

1. Purchase a license key from our pricing page.
2. You'll receive your license key after your purchase completes.
3. Click Help -> Manage License Keys in the app.
4. Enter the license key into Beekeeper Studio

!!! info "Air gapped systems" Our business license supports offline activation. Read more about offline license support

Why Upgrade Beekeeper Studio?

That's easy -- a whole bunch of useful features are only available in the paid version of Beekeeper Studio.

For example, the full version includes a JSON row viewer and more comprehensive import/export options.

There are a lot more awesome features in the full version of Beekeeper Studio, you can see them all on the pricing page.

??? info "Full Version Database Support" {% include-markdown "../includes/supported_databases.md" %}

Lifetime Access

When you pay for 1+ years of a Beekeeper Studio license, you get lifetime access to any version of Beekeeper Studio released within your subscription window.

This means you can use the version of Beekeeper Studio you purchased forever, even if you don't renew your license.

We think this is a fair compromise between subscriptions and one-time payments, we hope you do too.

Read more about lifetime licenses and how they work

Get Your Boss To Pay

If you work for a company, you can ask your boss to pay for Beekeeper Studio. It's a business expense, and they will be happy to pay for it when they realize how much time it will save you.

If your boss asks you for why they should pay for Beekeeper Studio, you can tell them:

1. Increased Productivity: Beekeeper Studio saves you time. According to user surveys, Beekeeper Studio saves most developers about 30% of their time spent on database tasks. That's a lot of time!
2. Great ROI: You can calculate your specific return on investment on our handy ROI calculator.
3. Easy Collaboration: Beekeeper Studio makes it super easy to collaborate with your team by sharing connections and queries through our cloud workspaces.
4. Onboard non-technical users: Beekeeper's streamlined UI makes it easy for less-technical team members to work with databases, which can help your team be more productive.
5. One-time payments: If they don't like subscriptions, tell them you can make a 1 time payment, simply follow the guide above.
6. Security: Our code is open source and undergoes continual vulnerability testing with GitHub enterprise. Plus Beekeeper never sends any data to our servers, and we don't track you in any way. Read more in our mission.

What other bosses say

Our efficiency for managing our SQL code is a 2-3x improvement using Beekeeper compared to before. I'm not sure I know what we would be doing without Beekeeper

- Jeff Richter (VP Information Products)

Beekeeper Studio is BY FAR the most user-friendly DB GUI out there! I started using it a year ago and now our whole team bought a license. The multi-DB support is simply awesome as I use 4 different types of databases on a regular basis. Plus it works on Windows and Mac.

- Matt K (VP Engineering)

I work in Support at a Tech company. Once our devs made the switch it was a game changer for me. So much easier to navigate than the previous system and having multiple queries open at once boosted my efficiency. Thank you!

- Naomi (Support Engineer)

Purchases support a small independent team

Beekeeper Studio is run by a small team. We've bootstrapped Beekeeper Studio from nothing without family money, VC investment, or a corporate sponsor.

Building quality software is hard work, especially for such a small team! Even so we're committed to open sourcing the majority of our code base, and offering a lot of features for free.

When you buy a copy of Beekeeper Studio you directly support our business, and our efforts in open source. Thank you! 🙏