Private Tenant Subscription Explained

all the details you need to know

Posted by Kiwi TCMS Team on Wed 20 August 2025

Hello testers, this page explains what the Private Tenant subscription is and how it brings more value beyond the Kiwi TCMS application itself. Please read about the details below.

What is Private Tenant by Kiwi TCMS

This is our most popular subscription tier which combines SaaS hosting and additional support services. It is more about ease of use allowing your QA team to focus on more testing rather than specific software features.

Who is this subscription for

Private Tenant is suitable for medium sized teams which consider their Kiwi TCMS instance to be an important piece of infrastructure but not necessarily mission critical. These are organizations with less than 100 testers which would like to focus their limited resources towards their own products and are happy to consume 3rd party software as a service. Most typically these are start-up companies and medium sized businesses.

What do you get

Everything from lower tier subscription plans!

Most notably you get access to all versions of community releases and a dedicated SaaS namespace as your main Kiwi TCMS instance plus extra product features and technical support.

What do all of the individual items mean

1x SaaS hosting: you will receive the opportunity to create your own namespace under the tenant.kiwitcms.org domain name, for example https://acme-inc.tenant.kiwitcms.org.

IMPORTANT: A Private Tenant subscription entitles you to a single namespace and the email associated with the purchase is referred to as tenant owner. If you need more tenants you should purchase additional subscriptions under different email addresses!

Unlimited users: means exactly that - you may assign an arbitrary number of users to have access to the information kept under your tenant. With Private Tenant subscription there are no per-seat fees - it is a flat rate price!

Control of authorized users: means that you can control who has access to your data and adjust their permissions level when necessary. You can have your QA team and your partners collaborate in a single Kiwi TCMS tenant if you decide to do so.

With a Private Tenant subscription user accounts are actually kept under public.tenant.kiwitcms.org, which is also referred to as the main tenant or the public tenant while access control is granted on a per-tenant basis via the web interface by the tenant owner.

NOTICE: the name "public tenant" is a misnomer, which comes from one of the underlying programming libraries used inside Kiwi TCMS. In reality no data is publicly visible, including user accounts.

No User account admin: a stand-alone installation of Kiwi TCMS allows the first registered account, named super-user, to have access to all others. This isn't the case with a Private Tenant subscription. You may invite/authorize users and groups for your own tenant and manage access permissions however you cannot create, remove or disable user accounts. You cannot view the list of all other accounts which exist in the database.

Extra functionality: a Private Tenant subscription is actually built on top of a Kiwi TCMS Enterprise container image which means some extra features and add-ons are available to you as part of this subscription. Whenever possible add-on features are also accessible to Private Tenant subscribers. A notable exception are different login methods which cannot be enabled nor configured on a per-tenant basis!

Always the latest version: a SaaS tenant is always the latest version and is automatically upgraded by the Kiwi TCMS team. While we try our best not to introduce bugs and backwards incompatible changes it is possible that test automation scripts and/or 3rd party integration code may break sometimes.

IMPORTANT: With a Private Tenant subscription the responsibility of testing all of your integrations against the latest version of Kiwi TCMS falls onto the customer.

Backup & disaster recovery: the Kiwi TCMS team takes care to backup our SaaS cluster regularly in case a catastrophic failure occurs - this is designed for disaster recovery purposes.

While the Kiwi TCMS application itself keeps track of changes and removals of certain objects it may not always be possible to restore a deleted entry. You may be able to create new records with the same information however if a record cannot be restored via the Kiwi TCMS web interface we cannot help you. Due to technical limitations we cannot restore individual records from a Private Tenant.

Data access via web & API: keeping in mind that a Private Tenant namespace is allocated on a cluster with hundreds of others your only access to data is via web and API. Due to technical and security limitations we cannot give you access to the underlying database nor the raw backup files. You are free to export your data as frequently as you wish though!

Dedicated technical support: as a Private Tenant customer you receive full technical support from the Kiwi TCMS team spanning all components related to the Kiwi TCMS application. Working hours and response times are listed on our main page!

Happy Testing!

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