Event sourcing deserves to be accessible not reserved for enterprise budgets. With Genesis DB CE (Community Edition), we're making our event sourcing database available to everyone who wants to build durable, traceable, auditable systems without complexity or vendor lock-in.
Genesis DB CE is free to use, free to deploy, and suitable for real production systems.
Why Community Edition?
The goal of Genesis DB CE is simple: Give developers a powerful, modern event sourcing database with zero barriers to entry.
- No cloud subscription
- No license fees
- No "evaluation mode"
- Just a single binary (or Docker image) you can run anywhere
If you're exploring event sourcing, prototyping new systems, or building smaller production workloads, CE gives you the same engine and developer experience as the full Genesis DB Enterprise edition with a reduced feature set.
Community Edition Feature Scope
Genesis DB CE shares the same core engine and version as the Enterprise Edition. There is no artificial performance reduction and no community-only branch.
The differences are feature availability not reliability or technical quality.
Feature Comparison
| Feature | CE | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Full event store engine | ||
| HTTP API (core operations) | ||
| Event write & read | ||
| Event stream hierarchy (/subject) | ||
| Commit-level validation with GDBQL preconditions | ||
| Standalone /api/v1/query endpoint | ||
| storeDataAsReference (payload option) | ||
| Reference Erase API /api/v1/erase (crypto erasure) | ||
| Schema registration /api/v1/schema/register | ||
| Schema retrieval /api/v1/schema/get |
Limited in CE
- GDBQL queries only inside commit preconditions (for validation logic)
- No standalone ad-hoc event queries
These constraints ensure CE remains fully usable while keeping advanced compliance, schema validation, and broad query capabilities as part of the commercial offering.
Closing Thoughts
Event sourcing shouldn't be difficult to adopt. Genesis DB CE exists so that teams, students, and independent developers can start building real event-driven applications immediately with a clean, fast, production-ready foundation.
We hope it helps push the ecosystem forward by making event sourcing more approachable, pragmatic, and enjoyable. Genesis DB CE brings event sourcing to builders, removing ceremony and mystique. Open, accessible, and immediately productive, without gatekeeping. Built for the future, not for nostalgia. A practical, modern tool designed for real applications, giving developers the power to use event sourcing simply, directly, and effectively from day one.