EVE-NG is known for keeping things simple while still being a powerhouse, but choosing a version got trickier in June 2026. Version 7 changed the shape of the free tier. Running the Professional ISO without a license now puts you in Freemium mode, which gives you 7 nodes, unlimited VPCS, and admin-only access. The Community Edition that most guides still point you toward, the free 63-node build, is marked End of Support and End of Life as of June 2026 on EVE-NG's download page, though the ISO still downloads. Professional remains the paid tier, with the full feature set, better performance, and support.
That changes the question. It used to be a straight choice between Community and Professional. Now it is closer to how many nodes you actually need, and whether you are willing to run a build that will not be updated again.
To help you choose, here’s a snapshot of their key differences:
|
|
Community (6.x) |
Freemium (v7) |
Professional (v7) |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Functionality & Cost |
Free. Marked End of Support & End of Life as of June 2026. The ISO still downloads, but there are no further updates or support. |
Free. The Professional ISO running unlicensed. This is the supported free path going forward. |
Listed at 150 EUR. Full feature set, official documentation, and ticketed support. |
|
Node limit per lab |
63 nodes. |
7 nodes, plus unlimited VPCS. |
1024 nodes, with "hot links" for live changes. |
|
User access |
Single-user, basic OS-level access control. |
Admin account only. |
Multi-user with role-based access control (RBAC) and templates. |
|
User Interface and User Experience |
Simple, a bit old-school. Basic customization. |
The v7 interface, built on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, with a new installer and first-boot UI. |
Polished UI with extensive customization. HTML Desktop Console, Wireshark Capture support, optimized for complex workflows. |
|
Performance and Resource Utilization |
Depends on your hardware; can become sluggish with 50+ nodes on a standard laptop (like 8GB RAM). |
At 7 nodes, hardware is rarely the constraint. The node cap is. |
Optimized for 1024 nodes, scaling via distributed computing on robust setups. |
|
Real-Time Features |
No live timers or status bars, requiring manual lab time tracking. |
No live timers or hot-linking. These stay behind the license. |
Includes live timers and "hot-linking", simplifying real-time management. |
|
Local Development & Docker Integration |
No Docker or local dev support. |
No Docker or local dev mode without a license. |
Docker and dev mode included, enabling the use of tools like Wireshark in containers. |
|
Integration and Automation |
Basic command-line interface (CLI) automation, with limited integration with tools like Ansible or CI/CD. |
The full APIs stay behind the license, and a 7-node cap limits what you would automate anyway. |
Full APIs for simple automation, integrating smoothly with DevOps workflows. |
EVE-NG v7 arrived on 24 June 2026, with builds shipping through 7.0.1-21 in early July. The change that matters most here is the free tier. Freemium is not a separate download. It is the Professional ISO running without a license, and it gives you 7 nodes, unlimited VPCS, and admin-only access. Everything beyond that needs a paid license.
At the same time, EVE-NG marked the Community Edition End of Support and End of Life as of June 2026 on its download page. The ISO is still there and still installs, but it will not receive further updates or fixes. The platform also moved to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, with a new installer and an upgrade assistant for moving from v6.
The practical upshot is that the free self-hosted path went from 63 usable nodes to 7. If your lab fits in 7 nodes, Freemium is fine. If it does not, and most CCNP and CCIE topologies do not, you are choosing between running an end-of-life build unsupported, paying for Professional, or moving the lab somewhere that includes the license. We walk through each of those routes in EVE-NG's free tier is now 7 nodes.
In this article, we'll explore the distinctions between EVE-NG Community and Professional. Understanding these differences will help you choose the version that best suits your needs. Whether you're a network admin, a student pursuing certifications, or someone who enjoys network emulation, this article will provide insights to maximize your use of EVE-NG.
One of the primary differences between EVE-NG Community and Professional is their licensing and cost, which is crucial when determining the right fit for your budget and objectives.
EVE-NG's free tier: Freemium (v7) gives you 7 nodes. The 63-node Community Edition still downloads, but it's end-of-life.
EVE-NG Community was free and open-source under the Apache License 2.0, and for years it was the obvious starting point for CCNA and CCNP study. You can still download it. What's changed is that EVE-NG marks it End of Support & End of Life as of June 2026, so you would be building your labs on something that will not get updates or fixes.
The current free path is Freemium: the v7 Professional ISO, unlicensed, capped at 7 nodes with unlimited VPCS and admin-only access. It's supported and current, but 7 nodes is a genuinely small lab. A basic OSPF or VLAN topology fits. A CCNP-scale multi-area design generally doesn't.
You can hit up community forums or GitHub to troubleshoot problems or swap custom setups. Just keep in mind, you're mostly relying on yourself here, not official support channels.
EVE-NG Professional: A paid license, listed at 150 EUR, unlocking the full feature set and 1024 nodes per lab.
EVE-NG Professional requires a commercial license, listed at 150 EUR on eve-ng.net. Learning Center / Corporate is listed at 150 EUR plus added roles, and adds multi-user support. Prices can vary by subscription length, user count, and support tier, so treat the listed figure as a starting point and check the EVE-NG site for current terms. The license unlocks enhanced scalability, exclusive tools, and priority support.
Designed for enterprises, training centers, and users needing more power, the Professional version justifies its cost with features tailored for larger simulations, like modeling entire company networks, and real-world scenarios such as pre-deployment testing of multi-vendor environments. The license fee supports ongoing improvements, updates, and new features, along with access to official documentation and a ticketing system, which is invaluable when time is critical.
The user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) significantly affect how you interact with EVE-NG. While EVE-NG Community and Professional share a foundation, their UI and UX differences influence ease of use and customization.
EVE-NG Community: While it's simple, the UI might seem a little dated next to other network tools, like GNS3 or Packet Tracer.
While functional, the UI may appear less modern compared to tools like GNS3 or Packet Tracer. Its straightforward, organized layout, featuring intuitive menus, toolbars, and icons, facilitates navigation and management of network labs. Basic customization options (like color schemes and layouts) are available, but limited, keeping the focus on simplicity for smaller labs or learning environments. This simplicity can be both a pro and a con. It’s easy for beginners, but users accustomed to more advanced tools may find it lacking.
EVE-NG Professional: There are customization options aplenty; you can play with themes, arrange panels, and save layouts to make your workflow better.
The enhanced configuration management options let you save, import, and export device setups easily. Add in detailed docs, tutorials, and dedicated support, and you get a smoother ride.
The ability to handle a sufficient number of devices and labs is essential for building and simulating complex network topologies. Here, EVE-NG Community and Professional diverge significantly.
Free tiers: Community capped at 63 nodes. Freemium caps at 7. Neither can lock open lab nodes.
EVE-NG Community limited you to 63 nodes per lab, which was adequate for smaller simulations but restrictive when changes were needed mid-run, since modifications require shutting down devices. Freemium, the v7 free tier, caps at 7 nodes plus unlimited VPCS. That's the sharpest practical difference between the old free path and the new one, and it's the reason a lot of engineers who were comfortably inside 63 nodes are now re-evaluating.
Professional: Allows you to lock specific lab nodes, providing more control over your lab environment.
EVE-NG Professional supports up to 1024 nodes per lab and is designed for enterprise-level simulations and rigorous testing. The "hot links" feature enables real-time connection changes without downtime, boosting efficiency. With hot links, you can make adjustments without restarting devices, saving time during complex simulations—for instance, adding a VLAN or rerouting traffic mid-session.
This scalability accommodates realistic, multi-vendor topologies and concurrent simulations, making it suitable for teams or large-scale projects.
The performance and resource utilization of EVE-NG Community and Professional greatly affect the user experience, particularly in larger network topologies.
EVE-NG Community: Performance is all about what kind of hardware you're running.
On Community, as you approached the 63-node limit, you'd expect slowdowns or resource exhaustion (CPU, RAM). Running on a mid-range laptop with 8GB of RAM and a quad-core CPU might lag when pushing 50+ nodes with traffic, especially with memory-intensive devices like virtual firewalls. On Freemium the calculus flips: at 7 nodes you'll hit the licence ceiling long before you hit a hardware ceiling. Hardware stops being the thing that limits your lab.
EVE-NG Professional: Fine-tuned for better performance and resource use, Professional is better at memory management, processing packets, and using CPU cores to handle up to 1024 nodes smoothly.
EVE-NG Professional can distribute the workload across multiple machines, exceeding the capacity of a single host. As a result, it handles simulations that would overwhelm a single machine, making it ideal for modeling extensive networks.
EVE-NG Community: Without real-time tracking of how long a lab's been running, things can get tricky for time-sensitive tasks or learning on your own.
You gotta rely on doing things by hand. Without real-time lab timers, managing time-sensitive tasks or self-paced learning becomes challenging, requiring manual methods. Students timing themselves during a Cisco exam practice lab would need to use an external stopwatch.
EVE-NG Professional: Lab timers are especially useful in training, and "hot-linking" support makes it easy to adjust things during live sessions, making your workflow more flexible.
Instructors could set a 2-hour timer for a class lab, while engineers could swap connections mid-test to mimic failover, all without pausing the environment. It's a total game-changer for testing or teaching.
Local development and container support are crucial for extending functionality, where Professional excels.
Community: No local workbench or Docker network integration.
EVE-NG Community: This prevents you from incorporating custom tools or apps into your simulations, like network monitoring tools or attack simulations. Customization is a manual process, and the absence of built-in container support limits integration with tools like Wireshark or traffic generators.
Professional: Allows for a localized development environment and has Docker network integration, including Wireshark Docker support.
EVE-NG Professional: You can create custom extensions in a dedicated development mode and deploy Docker containers for tools like HTML5 desktops or traffic analyzers. This streamlines deployment and adds flexibility for complex labs. A developer could build a custom QoS monitoring tool, run it in a container right next to the lab, and use Wireshark to capture live traffic—all inside the same environment.
Community: Lacks features for user roles, rights, and custom lab image templates.
EVE-NG Community: Limited to one active user session and basic OS-level access control, it’s less suited for teams or secure, multi-user environments, offering minimal administrative flexibility. A single user can lock the lab, but there’s no way to assign roles or secure access beyond basic password protection, making it impractical for shared setups like a classroom.
Professional: Allows admins to set user-specific profiles, define roles and rights, and even customize lab image templates for a more tailored experience.
EVE-NG Professional: Supporting multiple concurrent sessions (license-dependent), it includes robust RBAC, MFA, LDAP/RADIUS integration, and encryption for secure, scalable collaboration. The current release line is EVE-NG 7 (7.0.1-21 as of 3 July 2026), built on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Admins can create profiles for “view-only” trainees, “edit” engineers, and “admin” managers, integrate with corporate LDAP for SSO, and use pre-built templates to standardize lab setups across a team.
EVE-NG Community: Basic automation is possible, but it requires lots of manual effort, and doesn't integrate directly into modern network management or orchestration tools. You could script lab creation via CLI, but integrating with Ansible or a CI/CD pipeline requires significant manual effort.
EVE-NG Professional: Excels with comprehensive APIs and SDKs for integration with tools like Ansible or CI/CD pipelines.
It allows you to automate lab provisioning, configuration, and testing, which adds teamwork and keeps things consistent. All of these reasons make Professional the top choice for organizations already using modern Automation Platforms for the network. A DevOps team could use APIs to spin up a lab, apply configs via Ansible, and run automated tests in a Jenkins pipeline—streamlining pre-production validation of network changes.
Whichever path you pick, you still need hardware and time to run it. CloudMyLab hosts EVE-NG on cloud VMs or bare metal, so you skip the infrastructure part entirely.
Forget the cumbersome task of downloading and configuring software on your laptop or PC. CloudMyLab offers a pre-installed and hosted software environment, so you can jump right into what really matters - your lab.
With the free tier now capped at 7 nodes, the node ceiling is the thing that pushes most people off self-hosting. Hosted EVE-NG Pro sidesteps both problems at once: you get the 1024-node limit and the license, without buying hardware or running the v7 upgrade yourself. It's all available on cloud infrastructure or bare-metal, designed to scale with your needs.
Worried about making a commitment? Take advantage of a 1-day free trial for EVE Pro, courtesy of CloudMyLab. It’s a risk-free way to get a taste of what’s on offer.
With a Class Apart SLA of 99.1% and 24x7 support, you’ll never find yourself stranded. Whether you’re a newbie needing guidance or an expert facing an intricate issue, CloudMyLab’s dedicated team is always ready to assist.
PNETlab comes up a lot as a free alternative that offers some Pro-level features: Docker support, a lab store, no node limits. It started as a fork of EVE-NG Community. The catch: EVE-NG has publicly called it an unauthorized fork, and there's no official support or guaranteed updates. For home labs and self-study, PNETlab works. For anything professional or production-adjacent, EVE-NG's commercial backing, regular updates, and partner ecosystem (including hosted options through CloudMyLab) make it the safer choice.
With Community end-of-life, the honest decision now runs on node count and how much risk you'll carry.
Go with Freemium (v7) if your labs genuinely fit in 7 nodes and you're working solo. Small routing or switching topologies, protocol fundamentals, quick config tests. It is free, current, and supported. You'll outgrow it faster than you expect.
Stay on Community (6.x) only if you need the 63 nodes today, you're comfortable running an end-of-life build, and nothing about the lab is production-adjacent. It still downloads and still works. It just won't be updated or supported again, so treat it as a stopgap rather than a foundation.
Go with Pro if you need hot-linking, Docker, multi-user access, or labs beyond 7 nodes on a supported build. If you're prepping for CCIE, running enterprise POCs, or managing a training environment, neither free tier will cut it.
Go with CloudMyLab hosted if you want Pro-scale labs without buying the hardware, running the upgrade, or managing the license. Our free trial lets you test EVE-NG Pro on dedicated hardware before committing, which is worth doing before you decide whether the 7-node ceiling is something you can live with.
Related reading:
Yes, but the free tier is much smaller than it used to be. EVE-NG v7 (June 2026) introduced Freemium, the Professional ISO running unlicensed, capped at 7 nodes with unlimited VPCS and admin-only access. The older Community Edition, which allowed 63 nodes, is marked End of Support & End of Life as of June 2026, though its ISO is still downloadable from eve-ng.net.
For CCNA, the 7-node Freemium tier is tight but workable for fundamentals: basic routing, switching, and VLAN labs. You'll be leaning on VPCS (which is unlimited) for endpoints. For CCNP, 7 nodes is generally not enough; multi-area OSPF, redistribution, and multi-vendor scenarios push past it quickly. For CCIE, it isn't close. At CCNP level and above you're choosing between an end-of-life Community build, a Pro license, or hosted EVE-NG Pro.
EVE-NG's download page marks Community as "EOS-EOL — End of Support & End of Life June, 2026." The ISO still downloads and the software still runs, but it won't receive updates, fixes, or support. Some pages on eve-ng.net still show the older 63-node figure while the site is updated for v7, so check the download page for the current status.
EVE-NG lists Professional at 150 EUR, with Learning Center/Corporate at 150 EUR plus added roles. Pro and Learning Center both support up to 1024 nodes per lab. Pricing can vary by subscription length and support tier, so check the EVE-NG website for current figures, or use CloudMyLab's hosted EVE-NG Pro, which bundles the license with the infrastructure.
Yes. Your lab files stay on the server. Applying a Pro license activates the additional features (hot-linking, Docker, RBAC, larger node limits) on top of your existing setup. EVE-NG also ships a v6-to-v7 Upgrade Assistant for moving to the current release line.
PNETlab offers more features for free, including Docker support and a community lab store. EVE-NG is commercially backed with enterprise support, regular updates, and official hosting partners like CloudMyLab. For learning and home labs, PNETlab works. For anything professional, EVE-NG's stability and support ecosystem makes it the safer bet.