RabbitMQ licensing path finder: open source or commercial support

Your route depends on three inputs: the series you run, whether you need a licence or only support, and how many cores run RabbitMQ across every environment. There is no price in the result because the figure depends on term, region and what else is on the agreement, and a number published here would be wrong more often than right.

Each route has one deciding condition, listed in the table. Work down it in order: the version check comes first, because a series without commercial support cannot be licensed at any core count.

A commercial licence covers a series only while Broadcom's commercial support for it runs, and as of 29 October 2026 that rules out 4.0 and every series from 3.12 down. The table is read from the project's release table and is the same data the extended support page shows; the last column is the route that follows from it. Moving up a series usually means a newer Erlang/OTP too, so check the Erlang range for the target series in the matrix below before you plan the upgrade.

Count every environment where RabbitMQ runs, not production alone, and expect two vCPUs to be counted as one licensed core. Our licensing guide says the licence covers production, staging, QA, UAT and any development environment that runs RabbitMQ, because production-only licensing is not offered on the commercial path, and that two vCPUs count as one physical core.

The licensing page describes the count as vCPU allocated to the broker nodes, so the finder shows both when they land on opposite sides of 72. Ask for the licensed core count to be written into the quote, and treat the quote as the figure of record.

Broadcom's 72-core minimum has applied to every new order or renewal of a core-based Broadcom product since 10 April 2025, which is why a 20-core estate buying direct is billed as 72. Right-sizing the broker nodes before you license is the one lever on the core count itself.

If you need an engineer accountable for your cluster rather than the commercial distribution, open-source RabbitMQ is supportable without a licence. The licence buys the patched commercial builds, a longer patch window and product-level support; it is not a prerequisite for 24/7 operational cover or a 15-minute P1 response.

The choice depends on the series. While community support runs, open-source support is the simple path; once it has ended, patches for new CVEs come from a licence or from extended long-term support (LTS), and the lifecycle table shows which date applies to you. A licence and a support contract are separate things, and many estates carry both.

The commercial edition is sold as VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ: a commercial edition of RabbitMQ with features and support beyond the open-source edition. Open-source RabbitMQ is released under the Mozilla Public License and its builds are public on GitHub and rabbitmq.com. What the commercial license adds is listed on rabbitmq.com's commercial features page, checked on 29 October 2026:

• Longer support timelines. Critical patches and CVE fixes for more release series, which is why a license is the route for a series whose community support has ended but whose commercial support has not.
• Expert support from the core engineers who build RabbitMQ, on top of the operational cover an MSP provides.
• Enterprise features. Enterprise security features, disaster recovery features, distributed shovels, AMQP 1.0 over WebSockets, intra-cluster traffic compression, audit logging and a stream browser.

Security fixes are where the difference shows first. rabbitmq.com/security marks some patched releases "Enterprise Support Only", meaning no public GitHub release exists for them; the CVE lookup by version shows which of your advisories that affects.

Send your core count, series and environments through the quote request and AceMQ replies within 1 hour with a quote against your actual estate, per environment and in writing. AceMQ is Broadcom's strategic RabbitMQ MSP partner, which is what allows a quote below the 72-core minimum.