Academic vs. Commercial

The ANSYS corporate product portfolio is divided into two broad product license categories: commercial and academic. The primary difference between them is the terms of use: Commercial product licenses are intended for use by for-profit companies, organizations in which analysis work performed is often proprietary in nature. Conversely, academic product licenses are intended for use by academic facilities (such as universities) for nonproprietary scholarly activities such as teaching and research. The differences in these terms of use enables ANSYS to provide academic product licenses at significantly reduced cost compared to the commercial licenses — which helps organizations around the globe to meet their academic budget requirements.

The ANSYS Academic products are packaged differently from commercial products — a concept that relates to product names and features as well as whether add-on modules are included, excluded or simply limited:

  • An academic product is a bundle of analysis technology, often incorporating many commercial products and add-on modules. Some of the academic products have more than 10 commercial products bundled.
  • Academic product names and license files are different from commercial products.
  • A single academic product license may contain multiple tasks (typically 1, 5, 25 or 50 tasks). Each task maps to a separate user.