Flexible Licensing for all needs
Purchase or rent - your choice
First, you can purchase our licenses and have them maintained via an annual fee, which is mandatory when using the import interfaces for native CAD formats.
Alternatively, licenses can be rented (annual subscription). These annual fees include software maintenance.
Desktop products: Fixed seat or floating licensing
3DViewStation Desktop licenses can be purchased as fixed seats or floating licenses. The 3DViewStation VR edition and the batch tool KAS are only available as fixed licenses.
A fixed license is bound to one machine. This machine may be used by different users. In practice, these are often power users who need the software frequently or users who are on the road a lot or also fixed workstations, e.g. the stations of a production line.
Floating licenses can be used on changing machines. A license manager limits the maximum number of simultaneous users. If the user ends his session, the license is released immediately, i.e. without delay.
Floating licenses are used when there are many occasional users, but only a smaller subset of concurrent users. Many database systems license by the "named user" concept. Here, every user registered in the system is simply counted. This is not the case with us.
We recommend to provide all power users with fixed licenses and the remaining users with floating licenses. A ratio of 1:5 is a good starting value: 1 floating license per 5 named users. In practice, this ratio can also be 1:3 or 1:10. However, only real operation can show this.
But even if options are only needed occasionally, the use of floating licenses makes sense. Firstly, we allow customers to license fewer options than basic versions and secondly, the license for an option is only used when the corresponding function is called up in the 3DViewStation.
Web-based products: Licensing "per concurrent session"
3DViewStation WebViewer and VisShare are licensed "per concurrent session".
Only the number of concurrent sessions of one or more WebViewer servers is counted, similar to the floating model for desktop products. So it does not matter which user is accessing from which client.
This licensing model scales very well, as we do not limit the number of servers that can be used. For availability reasons, at least 2 servers should always be kept available for a large number of users. In case of extremely complex 3D CAD data (millions of parts and more) only a few users per server can be served, so more servers have to be provided. Especially in the public cloud these possibilities are appreciated.
We would be happy to advise you
Sales Germany
+49 2408 9385 517
Sales USA
+1 916 723 1441
What does a 3DViewStation license cost?
Kisters 3DViewStation is available with different basic versions and various options . As a rule, we discuss the requirements with interested parties (contact us) and can then say which product combination makes sense and what it costs. But we understand that you would at least like to know the order of magnitude:
The most commonly sold license is a fixed license of the 3DViewStation Desktop version with all 3D importers. As a purchase license, the price is around 1600 USD and is kept up to date through annual maintenance. The most popular options are "3D Advanced Analysis" and "3D Export", which each cost around 500 USD.
Is there a free version of 3DViewStation?
No, there is no free 3DViewStation version. This is because 3DViewStation is very valuable even just for viewing due to its outstanding performance, which is confirmed and appreciated by our customers. Many customers even switch from free viewers to us because their users get along better with 3DViewStation and can do their job faster and more efficiently. And if there are any questions about operation or problems, e.g. when loading certain data, our professional support is available promptly by email, telephone or Teams. This kind of support can only be provided for commercial software.
If you still want to use free viewers, we allow you to export to various data formats for which free viewers are available. However, it remains to be seen to what extent these will meet your requirements in terms of speed, functionality, user-friendliness and integration capability.
Could it be that the total cost of ownership is higher for free viewers than for the commercial Kisters 3DViewStation?
Let's take a look at the cost side: the investment for a free viewer is of course zero (COI, Cost Of Invest). But if you have 3 free viewers for 3 different data formats, for example, it can quickly become expensive: because 3 products have to be administered, i.e. installed and distributed, and 3 products have to be trained. And as the operation of 3 products is certainly different each time, the users will certainly work less efficiently as they have to learn a certain functionality 3 times. Switching between the 3 products due to the processing of data in different data formats causes disruption and loss of time in the workflow. Also, you can't expect to get professional support for free viewer software, which is why you have to research and try things out yourself if you have questions or problems, which costs time and ultimately money. This means that the cost of ownership (COO) of the free view software can be significantly more expensive than that of the commercial Kisters 3DViewStation. Added together, the free software can therefore cause higher total costs (TCOO, Total Cost Of Ownership) than licensed software. For this reason, we stand by our licensing models.