How to Trial Craft CMS and Plugin Editions

A valid license is required to run Craft Team or Pro editions (as well as commercial plugins) on a public domain.

To help developers and clients find the right license, we allow private trialing of paid editions. Craft itself doesn’t make any determination about whether trials are allowed in a given environment—instead, it communicates with our web services and displays potential licensing issues in the control panel.

If you’d like to explore Craft Team or Pro editions (or any of the commercial plugins in the Plugin Store) before buying, you can upgrade and run your site from any domain that Craft does not consider to be a public domain.

Here are some examples of domains we consider “private” and therefore permit use of trials on:

• localhost
• 127.0.0.1
• mysite.test
• mysite.ddev.site
• testing.mysite.com
• mysite.yolo
• mysite.com:1234

Changing Editions #

Craft never automatically upgrades itself or plugins (even if you have supplied a key that corresponds to a paid edition). In an environment that allows admin changes, visit the in-app Plugin Store, then click the Upgrade Craft CMS link in the navigation.

Press Try for free button under the Team or Pro editions:

Craft immediately swaps editions, and updates your project config files so that other environments know what edition your project targets, when deployed.

No credit card info is required. You can play with Craft Pro for as long as you need—provided the site is running on a non-public hostname.

All paid plugins in the Plugin Store will follow Craft’s lead. This means that once Craft is in trial mode, you can try out any plugin in the store for free.

If you deploy your site before purchasing Craft Pro, your website will work normally. However, Craft will ask you to either downgrade your license (by switching back to Solo) or purchase the upgraded license when you access the control panel.