Good commercial third party tool for software licensing

Question

EDIT : Please answer only those options that you have used or heard good words about it.

EDIT : I have also found this SO thread helpful. Any experiences about options listed here will be great help.

We are small software firm launching our winforms based product very soon. We want to use any good third party tool for solving licensing issues. I'm not talking any open source, but strictly commercial software distribution...

We have checked eleckey, but we want opinions from who have used it.. ElicKey

If you have used any other third party commercial tool and had a good experience with it, PLEASE let me know.

EDIT : Added bounty to get more answers.
Best Regards, Mahin Gupta

Answer 1

I have some experience with Licence Protector from Mirage Computer Systems Gmbh, which really is quite impressive in its feature set. As I have not been working with any competing products, I have no idea how it stacks up against others, though.

Answer 2

What about CryptoLicensing for .NET ?

Answer 3

I have used Eleckey 2.0 Internet Plus. It's very good.

Eleckey has some other variants also to meet your business needs. I think it provides all the features that one may require for licensing.

Apart from licensing, the Plus version includes Automatic Software Update Manager, Which i think actually is a Plus for Eleckey. I know that it's not that difficult to develop the Automatic Update feature on own, but It's good if can you get it readily available with licensing solution.

I have tested many features, including auto update, and I am satisfied with it.

Answer 4

We are fairly widely used - www.flexerasoftware.com

Answer 5

So far, we have made positive experiences with the solution from WIBU Systems.

Besides the licensing features their solution also provides means of protection of your NET assemblies from reverse engineering though this only works for pure NET code.

Answer 6

I suggest Software Key (http://www.softwarekey.com) Using it is very easy. It supports .NET applications as well as C++ and VB 6, etc. It comes with a server (hosted) to license and activate your keys.

Answer 7

Themida and WinLicense from oreans are recommended and very powerful

Answer 8

@Mahin, my recomendation is IntelliLock from EZIRIZ.

IntelliLock supports the .NET Framework 1.1, 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5. There is also a comprehensive support for the Compact Framework 2.0 and 3.5. IntelliLock combines strong license security, highly adaptable licensing functionality/schema with reliable assembly protection.

check this features

• 100% managed solution
• Create trial versions of your software
• Easily turn your trial version into a fully licensed version with license files
• Custom locks - Implement custom trial limitations
• Comprehensive license management
• License Tracker to track license generations/requests
• Lock license files to specific assembly attributes
• Read license files from embedded resource in assemblies
• Validate/Activate license files via your own License Server
• Software development kit
• Military-Grade strong license encryption
• Reliable Assembly Protection - based on .NET Reactor
• Visual Studio 2005/2008 integration via Add-In
• Assembly merging/packing functionality
• Full 64bit assembly support
• Lock/Unlock/Protect your assemblies without adding code
• Command Line support
• Intuitive GUI (Graphical User Interface)

Answer 9

Depending on the expected amount of users and deployment strategy Aladdin may be an option for you.

We use the HASP HL product for protection of .NET applications for several years now and it works nice and reliable. This is a hardlock based solution, but it is also compatible with Aladdin's software based SRM solution.

The companies portfolio is very flexible, you can deploy the same application software protected, hardware protected, as trial versions, ...

You can create different packages features and/ or protect the application file with an envelope that requires the hardlock (HASP HL) or an windows-like activation (SRM).

Runtimes are available for the most common operating systems.

You can protect .NET or natively complied applications, Java applications, or simply data files and documents.

According to their own information, Aladdin is one of the world's biggest players in software protection. Since they fused with SafeNet last year, their market share should have grown even more.

As a side note, Aladdin makes sure that the products remain backwards compatible as long as possible. We still have a almost 5 year old .NET 1.1 legacy application in the field and it is still able to run with the latest drivers.

Answer 10

We've used FLEXlm and safenet sentinel for our products. We moved from flexlm due to cost (IIRC correctly they charge per platform and that was starting to get expensive). The advantage of flexlm is that is is more widely known - customers would often already have products that used it so their sys admins were happy. I've had less experience with sentinel but it seems to be very flexible and do everything we needed from flexlm.

Update: Flexlm seems to have changed name http://www.flexerasoftware.com/products/flexnet-publisher/features.htm (and ownership, last I heard it was owned by Macrovision)

Answer 11

I think it will be helpful if you mention what platform your software runs on.

Answer 12

Have a look at CryptoLicensing For .Net It is a cryptographic licensing scheme supporting various licenses - full, trial, machine-locked, activated, domain-locked, etc, etc. All these options can also be mix and matched.

It comes with a read-to-use license service for activations and full featured generator API for generating licenses from your own backoffice system, e-commerce system and the like.

Answer 13

Not what you wish to be told however, someone has to say it.

• The reason for having a licensing system is to stop people that have not paid for the software from using it.
• The reason for shipping the software is to keep the people that have paid for the software happy

You cannot do both!

The best you can hope for is:

• It is hard to use an un-licensed copy of your software, so the pain of breaking the licensing system is more than the pain of getter an order signed to by the software.
• The IT person can tell the end-user, sorry this will not work, as you have not paid for a licence, and the end user believes it.
• You can prove in court that anyone that is using your software without a licence must know that they have “broken” the licence checks and therefore must know they have committed a crime
• Your oversees agents / sales people can not give a copy of the software to a customer without telling you and pocket the money without the customer and/or you finding out in the end. (This is often the case you care about most)

Answer 14

We'd appreciate it if you would also consider the licensing tools we offer at Agilis Software. Our customers are pretty happy, as you can see at our website. For details, go to www.agilis-sw.com.

Thanks,

Dominic

Answer 15

Have you considered LM-X License Manager from X-Formation? It's fast and easy to use and provides many different licensing models with lots of flexibility.