What are the Community Edition limitations?
Last updated: 2026-10-13
Community Edition includes every read-only report at full depth. Learn how the shared 20-site allowance, editing limits and online licensing requirements work.
Applies to: SharePoint Essentials Toolkit
Answer
The Community Edition license is free and never expires.
Community Edition now includes every read-only report, at full depth. That covers permissions, sharing links, Open to Everyone, privileged access, site, list, field, content type, item and user inventory, links, content search, site and content analytics, storage, and the activity, user activity and sign-in audit reports. There are no caps on rows, items or users within a report.
There are two kinds of limit:
- The number of site collections you can work on.
- Tasks that make changes to SharePoint in bulk.
Works with SharePoint Server (on-premises)
Community Edition works with SharePoint Server (on-premises) as well as SharePoint Online. The only requirement is that the computer running the toolkit must be able to reach licensing.cognillo.com over HTTPS. Environments without internet access need a Professional or Enterprise license, which can be activated offline.
Site collection limit
- 20 site collections per Microsoft 365 tenant. Every Community license in the same tenant shares this one allowance. Getting another free license does not add more sites.
- 20 site collections per license key, and no more than 20 sites in a single job.
- A site collection is counted the first time you run a report or task on it, or make a change to it from the Explorer. After that it stays counted, and you can run anything on it as often as you like.
- Subsites are included with their site collection. Two subsites under the same site collection count as one site.
- Discovering sites, adding sites to the toolkit, searching for sites or accounts, and testing a connection do not count against the limit.
- Before the Explorer makes a change on a site collection that isn't counted yet, it asks you to confirm that a licensed site will be used.
- The License page shows how many sites you have used, both for your own key and for your tenant.
- If you need sites removed from your count, or need more sites for your tenant, contact support@cognillo.com.
Editing and bulk change limits
Community Edition lets you try editing features so you can see how they work, but not use them for a large clean-up:
| Feature | Community Edition |
|---|---|
| Changes from a report's actions panel (permissions, sharing links, item actions) | Up to 10 changes per Apply |
| Find & Replace (Links, Content Search) | Only on lists with fewer than 100 items |
| Copy lists | Native API only. The Migration API needs Enterprise |
| Copy with version history, copy several source lists in one task | Needs Professional |
| Bulk Edit, add, remove or clone accounts, add or remove administrators, clean up orphaned users, copy item permissions, create site collections, bulk create | Needs Enterprise |
Report options such as extra columns, content filters, include and exclude rules, email delivery, export to a SharePoint library, and saved-search site sources all work in Community Edition.
How sites are counted (privacy)
The Cognillo licensing service keeps the site count for your license. No SharePoint URLs, site names, tenant names or content are ever sent to it.
- Before anything is sent, the toolkit converts each site collection URL into a one-way hash code (HMAC-SHA256). The tenant is also identified only by a hash of its host name.
- The service stores only these hash codes. They can be compared with each other, so the service can tell whether a site has been counted before, but they cannot be turned back into a URL.
- The service also receives your license key and the email address it was registered to, a computer ID, the toolkit's install ID, and the product version, so it can match the count to your license.
- Every answer from the service is digitally signed, so it cannot be faked or altered on the way back to the toolkit.
Online requirement
- Community Edition must be able to reach licensing.cognillo.com. Offline license activation is not available.
- If the service can't be reached for a short time, the toolkit uses its last confirmed answer for up to 7 days. That only covers sites that were already counted. New sites can't be added while offline.
Software updates
- Community Edition requires available updates to be installed.
- Community Edition will not work if an update is available but hasn't been applied.
Anonymous usage
- Community Edition sends anonymous crash and usage information to Cognillo. For details, see Cognillo Community Edition: What Usage Data is Shared?
Need more?
If you are evaluating Enterprise or Enterprise Cloud (Concurrent/Floating) and these limits get in the way of your testing, contact procurement@cognillo.com to ask for a Full Temp license. It runs as the full paid version, with no limits, for a set period.
To compare all editions, see the comparison chart on the product page.