Appian Cloud and self-managed licensing covers the two ways a customer can run the Appian Platform and the Success Plans that govern support and platform options in each. Appian Cloud is Appian’s hosted service; self-managed Appian is software the customer installs on its own infrastructure. The pricing page lists the deployment options as self-managed, hybrid clouds (AWS, Azure, Google) or on-premises.[8] The contract that sits behind both is the Cloud Subscription Agreement and/or the Master On Premise Agreement, which the data processing terms name but which are not published.[9] This article therefore records the documented mechanics and not the commercial terms.
Editions
Success Plans
Success Plans are the support and platform wrapper. The public Success Plans page names three paid levels.[4]
| Plan | Added over the previous level (per the Success Plans page) |
|---|---|
| Foundation | Expert guidance services, 24x5 phone and web support, custom domains and email servers, private network integrations |
| Professional | High availability, 24x7 support, database encryption and log streaming, a custom security questionnaire |
| Signature | Proactive engagement and tailored support, a signature security package, data snapshots and restore |
The self-managed support page also lists a Community Success Plan and says its availability depends on the individual agreement with Appian.[5] The catalog records the tiers as Foundation, Professional and Signature, and the wrapper as Appian Success Plans. Prices are not published.
The Cloud FAQ attaches specific platform options to the plans. Customers on Professional or Signature plans with High Availability can request direct access to their business data source over the VPN tunnel (the Enhanced Data Pipeline) and log streaming to a syslog receiver in their own network.[1] Twelve snapshots and refreshes of an environment per year are available at no additional cost to customers on the Signature plan; more than twelve, and any on the Community, Foundation or Professional plans, are available for a fee.[1] See Twelve environment snapshots a year are included only with the Signature plan.
High availability
High availability (HA) is an Appian Cloud configuration of three active nodes in different availability zones of the same region. It is available for production environments of customers that have purchased Professional or Signature Success Plans, and it can be added to additional non-production environments for an additional fee.[3] Recovery objectives differ by plan: an RPO of 1 minute and an RTO of 4 minutes for Signature, and an RPO of 1 minute and an RTO of 21 minutes for Professional.[3] Trainable classification and extraction skills and Appian RPA are listed as not highly available, although both can be used in an HA environment.[3] To enable HA the customer opens a support case, after which Appian schedules a maintenance window.[3]
Metrics
Environment (Appian Cloud)
The Appian Cloud unit is the environment. Environment URLs are generated from the environment names recorded in the legal agreement: production uses ENVIRONMENT_NAME.appiancloud.com and lower environments use ENVIRONMENT_NAMEdev.appiancloud.com, with .appiancloud.us for US GovCloud regions.[1] The Appian Community success guide says that the Appian Cloud standard offering includes three environments (Development, Test and Production) and that Appian recommends at least four once the first application is in production.[2] The row is Environment (Appian Cloud).
A change of environment name needs a support case from a designated support contact and a maintenance window.[1] Environments can also be moved to a different hosting region on request, with possible rework of VPN connections.[1]
CPU count (self-managed licence file)
For self-managed releases up to 25.3, a licence is delivered as two files, k3.lic and k4.lic, with the same expiry date. A long-term licence is requested with the system configuration printed by the q executable and can be used only on the server it was requested for. A temporary licence is valid for 6 days and can be used on any server with the same operating system.[7] The page lists the reasons an installed licence can fail validation: a different operating system, a requested CPU count lower than the number of CPUs of the machine, a different FQDN, or files that were not extracted in the right folder.[7] Long-term files can take up to four to five business days to obtain.[7] The page is written for Appian 25.2, so it describes the installer-based releases that preceded Kubernetes. The catalog metric is CPU count (self-managed licence file).
Counting and floors
Administrators and licence contacts
The legal agreement names the first subscription administrator, also called the licence administrator. That person is the initial User Registration Administrator and Licensing Point of Contact, and Licensing Points of Contact can approve or deny product licence requests and are notified when licences are about to expire.[1] The FAQ stresses that naming the right person matters because Appian can provide certain details only to that individual.[1] For a licence manager this means that entitlement and expiry notices go to a named contact, which should be checked after staff changes.
Storage, backups and plug-ins
Storage is provisioned in line with the Customer Service Agreement, with no stated upper limit, and extra capacity is arranged through the Account Executive. Nightly backups are retained for 28 calendar days unless the customer’s legal agreement says otherwise.[1] All plug-ins must be approved before deployment to an Appian Cloud environment, and custom plug-ins are not supported by Appian Support; the customer is responsible for maintaining them.[1] A licensed self-managed installation is needed to develop and test custom plug-ins.[1]
Upgrades
The Cloud FAQ says Appian releases new versions quarterly and converts Cloud customers to the latest release in an automated process.[1] The self-managed support page is more recent on this point: starting with 26.1 Appian platform releases are available monthly for Cloud customers, while self-managed customers can upgrade quarterly, with release versions ending in .3, .6, .9 and .12.[5] The two pages are inconsistent, and the later statement is the one recorded as the current rule.
Virtualization and partitioning
The documents reviewed contain no virtualization or partitioning policy. For installer-based self-managed releases, the CPU count recorded in the licence file is the nearest equivalent: a licence requested for fewer CPUs than the machine has is listed as a cause of validation failure.[7] A customer that resizes or relocates a self-managed server should treat the licence file as bound to the configuration that was requested.
Cloud and self-managed deployment
From licence files to Kubernetes
Appian 25.3 is the last version that supports non-containerized deployment. Starting with 25.4, Appian can only run in self-managed environments using containers managed by Kubernetes, and no Windows or Linux installers or hotfixes are available for download for 25.4 and later; only Appian on Kubernetes (AoK) installers and hotfixes are.[6] Environments on 25.3 or earlier keep receiving hotfixes for the full support lifetime of that version, but they cannot upgrade to 25.4 or later without migrating to AoK or Appian Cloud.[6] Appian gives its reason as running one path for Cloud and self-managed customers, because Appian Cloud runs on Kubernetes and later features, such as Autoscale for Process, are built for it.[6]
The customer brings a Kubernetes cluster running a supported version, a relational database, drivers and init containers for some databases, and a domain name.[6] The FAQ states that Autoscale is not currently available for AoK.[6] The pricing page lists Autoscale (for Process) at Advanced and Premium and says it requires additional licensing,[8] so a self-managed customer should check the order form for both points. The AoK row is Appian on Kubernetes (AoK). The pages reviewed do not say how a self-managed licence is measured on Kubernetes, because the licence-file page predates that change.
Support periods by Success Plan
For self-managed releases, “The level of support Appian provides depends on which Success Plan your organization is on.”[5] The page, which shows release 26.9 of 25 September 2026, lists comprehensive security fixes and defect remediation, and critical security updates, by release and plan. A sample of its rows:[5]
| Release (date) | Foundation: fixes through / critical through | Professional and Signature: fixes through / critical through |
|---|---|---|
| 26.9 (2026-09-25) | 2027-09-25 / 2028-03-25 | 2027-09-25 / 2028-09-25 |
| 26.6 (2026-06-26) | 2027-06-26 / 2027-12-26 | 2027-06-26 / 2028-06-26 |
| 26.3 (2026-03-27) | 2027-03-27 / 2027-09-27 | 2027-03-27 / 2028-03-27 |
| 25.4 (2025-11-14) | 2026-11-14 / 2027-05-14 | 2026-11-14 / 2027-11-14 |
For the Community Success Plan the page lists release 26.9 only, with both periods ending on 2026-12-18.[5] The practical point for licence managers is that the Success Plan sets the length of the critical-update window from six months (Foundation) to twelve months (Professional and Signature) after the end of comprehensive fixes. The programme row is Self-managed release support by Success Plan.
Programs
Appian Success Plans and Appian Cloud High Availability are the programme rows. The pages reviewed describe no enterprise agreement, unlimited deployment or bring-your-own-licence programme for hyperscalers.
Out of scope
This article does not cover the Appian platform tiers, AI Actions, RPA, Process HQ or the free editions, which have their own articles. It does not cover professional services, marketplace purchases, or the individual terms of the Cloud Subscription Agreement, the Master On Premise Agreement and the order form, which are not public. Prices, minimum commitments and the way a Kubernetes-based self-managed licence is measured are not stated in the sources and are not stated here.