General Features
What Babel Licensing does, where it runs, and which edition includes what. Each section links to the page that shows how to use the feature.
Fully Managed Licensing System
Babel Licensing covers the whole life of a software license: defining products and templates, generating and signing licenses, distributing them as files or serials, activating them on machines or sharing them across a network, tracking their use, and revoking or extending them. The client library enforces the terms inside your application; the service, the desktop and web tools, the WordPress plugin and the command line tool manage them on your side. The License Workflow page walks through the four stages from product definition to deployment.
Based on Digitally Signed Licenses
Every license is signed with an asymmetric key pair: the private key stays with you and signs, the public key travels with the application and verifies. A tampered or forged license fails verification before any of its content is trusted. Licenses are stored as XML files, which are easy to read and to ship with an installer, or as encoded strings, which fit in a serial a customer types, an activation response, or a database field. Both forms carry the same content and validate the same way.
Compatible With Any .NET Technology
The Babel.Licensing client library targets every .NET runtime that produces standard assemblies:
- .NET Core and .NET, up to .NET 10
- .NET Framework 2.0 to 4.8
- .NET Standard
- ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core
- .NET MAUI and Xamarin
- UWP and Mono
The Babel Licensing Service is a .NET application that runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, natively or in Docker. Both work with the usual development environments, including Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, and the client components install as NuGet packages.
Flexible Licensing Model
A license expresses what your product needs to check, all of it defined once in a license template:
- Trial licenses limited by time, run count or instance count, so a customer can evaluate before buying.
- Hardware-locked licenses tied to a machine fingerprint, so a license cannot be copied to another computer.
- Domain-restricted licenses that only validate inside a given network domain.
- Feature-based licenses that enable or disable parts of the product, the basis of tiered editions.
- Custom restrictions validated by your own code, for rules the built-in ones do not cover.
- Custom fields that carry any metadata you need: customer data, contract terms, configuration.
License Restrictions and License Properties describe each in detail; User Key Format defines how serials look.
Three Licensing Modes
The same license model is deployed in one of three licensing modes. A license file is validated offline, with no server involved, which suits disconnected and protected environments. License activation binds a license to a specific machine through the service, which can later deactivate it, extend its expiration date or push new features to already-activated clients. A floating license is a pool of seats shared across a network, allocated to clients while they run and released when they stop.
License Tokens Server
Activated and floating clients each hold a license token on the service while they are in use; file licenses consume none. The Server edition allows up to 1000 active tokens at a time, which is the maximum number of clients that can be connected or activated simultaneously, and reclaims a token as soon as its license is released or deactivated. The Data Center edition Data Center removes the limit.
Babel Licensing Service Server
The Babel Licensing Service is the central component: it activates and validates licenses, allocates floating seats, counts tokens, receives reports from licensed applications, dispatches webhooks and exposes a gRPC and REST API. It runs on-premises or in the cloud, on Windows, Linux, macOS or Docker, and stores its data in the Babel Licensing Database on SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB or SQLite, with MySQL and MariaDB supported on .NET 10 as well. Since version 11.7 it ships without a default administrator account or a hardcoded signing key, and since 11.8 it starts on FIPS-mode hosts whose container lacks a certified crypto provider; see Configuration, Health Check and FIPS Compliance.
Management From the Desktop Server
Babel Desktop is a cross-platform application for Windows, macOS and Linux that also configures obfuscation. Its Licensing section connects to a Babel Licensing Service with an API key. From it you manage customers, contacts, products, releases, orders, licenses and templates, generate, revoke, export and email licenses, browse reports, tokens, traces and logs, and administer users, API keys and webhooks, with a dashboard and a geography view. Changes require a local management profile, that is, Babel Desktop running on the service machine; profiles of remote services are read-only. Its MCP server can expose these operations to an AI assistant.
Management From the Browser Data Center
The web application administers the service from any browser with role-based users. Its dashboard shows license distribution on a map, sales by product and token usage; its pages manage licenses, templates, products, customers, orders and resources such as sign keys and email templates; it issues API keys for external integrations, configures webhooks that notify your systems of licensing events, and exposes exception reports and the activity log. The web application ships inside the single service package and is unlocked by a Data Center license; with a Server license the service address shows an upgrade page.
Sell Through WordPress and WooCommerce Server
The WordPress plugin manages products, templates, customers and licenses from the WordPress admin and integrates with WooCommerce, so a license is generated and emailed automatically when a licensed product is purchased. Email templates for issue, expiration and renewal notices are editable from the same interface.
Reporting From the Field
Licensed applications can send reports to the service: exception reports with stack traces, environment and system information for crash diagnosis; license reports that record which features, fields and restrictions are actually used; and custom reports carrying any data your application wants to collect, encrypted when sensitive. Reports are browsed in Babel Desktop or the web application and can be forwarded through webhooks.
Integrated SDK, MSBuild and Command Line Server
The client library and the Babel.Data package let you script every licensing operation, from validation in the application to license generation in a build. The lic command line tool, installed as a dotnet tool, generates signed licenses and serials with all their properties and restrictions from scripts and CI pipelines; since version 11.8 it emits machine-readable JSON or NDJSON output, with --quiet and --strict-exit; see AI-Friendly Mode. The Lic MSBuild task exposes the same switches to a build.
Operated by AI Assistants Through MCP Data Center
The Babel Licensing MCP Server exposes the service REST API to Claude and any Model Context Protocol client, so an assistant can look up a customer’s licenses, activate, extend or revoke them, create customers and orders, analyze activation trends and explain error messages, all in natural language. The AI Integration page shows the use cases for support, sales, development and administration.
Fully Integrated With Babel Obfuscator
Both licensing editions include Babel Obfuscator Ultimate, and the two products are designed to work together. The client library is meant to be obfuscated with the application that carries it, and the obfuscator’s Code Encryption lets a license password unlock encrypted code, so a feature-based license protects not just a switch but the implementation behind it. Licenses can also be generated and validated from Babel Desktop, the same application that runs obfuscation projects, and from its MCP server.
FIPS-Ready
License validation uses no algorithm FIPS disallows, and since version 11.8 it does not depend on the operating-system crypto stack at all, so licensed applications start on FIPS-mode hosts even when the container has no certified OpenSSL provider. The service itself starts on such hosts when obfuscated with the managed AES option of Babel Obfuscator. See FIPS Compliance.