Perforce Licensing

Perforce can either be operated in licensed or unlicensed mode.

Trial Licensing

Without a Perforce license there is a limit to both the number of users and the number of clients (workspaces):

For Helix releases 2016.1 and later, without a valid license, the versioning service limits itself to either 5 users and 20 client workspaces (and unlimited files), or to an unlimited number of users and workspaces (but with a limit of 1,000 files);
Versions of the helix server prior to 2016.1 support the so called 20/20 usage allowance: 20 users and 20 client workspaces (and unlimited files), or an unlimited number of users and workspaces (but with a limit of 1,000 files).

Unlicensed mode can be used to evaluate Perforce (or if the team is small enough use it indefinitely).

Note that to transfer between unlicensed and licensed mode it is necessary to restart the perforce server process. Once in licensed mode it is not necessary to restart the server when a license file is updated.

Production Licensing

With a Perforce license file, perforce is simply licensed per user. Any licensed user can create as many clients (workspaces) as they wish, operate on as many servers as they want, etc. The sole restriction is the number of users.

Note there is no extra cost to operate replication servers.

Perforce User Types

Note there are several user types in Perforce that have different licensing implications.

Standard users are the typical user type will access to the full range of Perforce functionality, each of these users take a single Perforce license
Operator users are limited to performing administrative functions, they do not consume a Perforce license
Service users are the agents that facilitate inter-server communication in distributed environments. They can run a limited set of commands relevant to this role, and do not consume a Perforce license.

Please see the Helix Versioning Engine Administrator Guide for more information on the various user types and the commands they can run.