Edition comparison
Starter and Enterprise are the same Art2link ESB runtime under two different operating models. What differs is who deploys, who upgrades, what hardware sits underneath, and which adapters are available.
Both editions ship the same integration runtime, the same designer, and the same monitoring surface. The choice is operational rather than functional: Starter is a fixed-size, customer-self-deployed installation from the Azure Marketplace; Enterprise is a managed deployment that Cerebrum City sizes, upgrades, and pipelines on the customer's behalf, and unlocks the heavier adapters that integrate with packaged enterprise systems.
| Capability | Starter | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment model | Customer self-deploys from the Azure Marketplace into their own subscription. | Managed deployment by Cerebrum City into the customer's subscription. |
| Infrastructure sizing | Fixed at deploy: App Service Plan B3, Azure SQL 20 DTUs. Not changeable. | Sized to the workload at deploy and resized as the workload grows. |
| Version upgrades | No in-place upgrade. Customer installs a newer instance and migrates integrations across. | In-place. Cerebrum City promotes the upgrade through pre-production first, the customer validates, then production. |
| CICD pipeline | Not provided. | Injected and operated by Cerebrum City across every environment in the deployment. |
| Pre-production environment | Customer-managed. Stand up a second Starter instance to serve as pre-production and migrate integrations into it for validation. | Required. Stood up and maintained by Cerebrum City for upgrade validation. |
| Standard adapters | Included — API, Azure Blob, File Share, O365 Mail, Scheduler, Service Bus, SFTP, SQL. | Included. |
| Enterprise adapters | Not available. | Included — SAP, MQ Series, Salesforce, CloudSuite, and similar. |
| Support contract | Optional. Purchased in 40-hour blocks. Default response SLA: 8 business hours. | Required. Terms agreed case by case. |
| Path to the other edition | Move to Enterprise by exporting the deployment and importing it into a new Enterprise deployment. | n/a — Enterprise is the destination edition. |
Because Starter is a self-contained Marketplace deployment with fixed infrastructure, moving an existing Starter installation onto Enterprise is the same shape as any side-by-side migration: stand the new instance up alongside the old, carry the integrations across, then retire the old one. From that point onwards, the Enterprise deployment receives in-place version upgrades.
Starter ships without an included support contract. Customers who need formal support purchase it in 40-hour blocks against a default response SLA of 8 business hours. Blocks are consumed against incident response, configuration help, and migration assistance — whatever the customer brings to the queue.
Enterprise requires an active support contract for the duration of the deployment. Terms — hours, response SLA, named contacts, on-call coverage — are agreed case by case alongside the deployment itself; there is no shrink-wrapped tier because every Enterprise deployment is sized differently to begin with.
Choosing between them
If the workload fits inside a B3 App Service Plan and a 20 DTU Azure SQL, and the team is comfortable owning the deployment and migrating across versions, Starter is the cheaper and faster path to live. If the workload needs to grow, needs to talk to packaged enterprise systems through the enterprise adapters, or needs an upgrade discipline that goes through a pre-production environment with someone else's hands on the pipeline, Enterprise is the right starting point.