Frequently asked questions

Same suite. Same hands. Live since launch. catena.run, the docs at /docs, the client portal, the external healthchecks for client services, payment processing, and invoicing all run on the Catena Suite we sell. The whole revenue surface is on the product. Dogfooding is the warranty.

The Community edition is, yes: the whole suite, source-available, self-hosted on infrastructure you own, with no licence fee and no telemetry. You install and operate it yourself from GitHub and the community docs. Catena Business is the paid managed edition, where we run the lifecycle for you: offsite immutable backups, managed updates, monitoring, identity, and a monthly assurance report. Same software either way -- start free and move to managed whenever you would rather not run a server.

Anything that fits a Dokploy compose template. Our vetted catalog (Nextcloud, OnlyOffice / Collabora, Rocket.Chat, Plane, DocuSeal, Invoice Ninja, Outline, EspoCRM, n8n, Postiz, Twenty, WordPress, ERPNext, Easy!Appointments, and others) installs at no extra setup cost. Anything else is a custom-template request -- talk to us. To explore the broader self-hosted ecosystem: awesome-selfhosted, awweso.me, Dokploy templates, awesome-sysadmin.

The whole suite is open-source and portable. Another competent IT partner can pick it up using the same automation.

You don't have to leave -- you already own everything. The server, the data, and the backup buckets are all in your name. When you want to part ways, we hand over and step out. No exit fees, no proprietary glue to unwind.

No. Daily use is browser-based (Nextcloud / Rocket.Chat / etc.). The technical surface is what we operate on your behalf -- your team only ever sees apps.

On the server you own, at the provider you chose. Default deployment: OVH BHS (Beauharnois, Quebec) for the live server + hot S3 mirror; eazybackup (Canadian-owned, datacenter in Ottawa, Canada -- Canadian government-grade certified, with Object Lock + versioning) for the cold mirror. Both Canadian-jurisdiction, Law-25-friendly.

The Community edition is free; we make our money on Catena Business, the managed edition: a monthly subscription per server, plus per-app, with hands-on support billed hourly only as you use it. No per-seat, ever. Hosting and backups are passthrough to your own accounts. See the pricing section.

No -- email delivery is a full-time specialty (deliverability, spam compliance, bounce handling). We integrate with five privacy-focused providers and wire up DNS + SSO so your team uses email like any other app. Suggested clients: Nextcloud's built-in mail interface (browser-based), Thunderbird (desktop, free, cross-platform), or Betterbird (Thunderbird fork with extra polish).

Yes. Dokploy lets you deploy any compose-shaped app under SSO + Cloudflare Tunnel. We can advise; we don't have to operate it.

Yes. The free Community edition self-installs on hardware or a VPS you own, with or without a public IP. If you would rather not run it yourself, Catena Business is the managed edition. Talk to us if you want us to run the managed edition on your own hardware.

Canadian dollars (CAD). Cross-border prospects pay via Stripe in CAD; Stripe handles the conversion at their interbank rate at billing time.

Catena is the company behind it. The Catena Suite is the software Catena builds and operates: Nextcloud, EspoCRM, Easy!Appointments, Rocket.Chat, Keycloak, and the Ansible / backups / monitoring tooling that runs the whole thing. On the Business edition your invoice comes from Catena and your email and files live on the Catena Suite; on the Community edition you run that same suite yourself.

Catena Business is a managed service -- we run the Catena Suite on your behalf for a monthly subscription -- so that part works like an MSP. Two things set it apart from a traditional MSP: the software is a product you can also self-host for free (the Community edition), and the managed scope is bounded to the Catena Suite. We do not manage your workstations, printers, Microsoft 365, or office network (see the editions grid). In exchange: you pay per server (not per seat), your code and data belong to you, and you can leave at any time with everything in hand.

The Catena Suite is Law 25 compliant at the infrastructure level (Canadian residency, documented subprocessors, immutable backups, MFA, encryption, logging). For the documentation layer (PIA / EFVP, registers, policies, incident runbook), we offer separate compliance enablement: audit and initial pack (in build, under legal review). Important: we do not replace your internal privacy officer -- Law 25 requires this to be a person inside your organization -- we deliver the infrastructure and documents that person can adopt and sign. Talk to us about Law 25 compliance.