Activating Additional Licenses

Applies to TestComplete 15.62, last modified on March 14, 2024

This page refers to key-based licenses — a legacy license type used in TestComplete until version 15.48. For information on the current, ID-based license type, see SmartBear ID-based Licenses.

To simplify license management, you may want to activate multiple TestComplete licenses on one License Manager PC. This typically happens when you want your License Manager in a network to control multiple Floating User licenses. However, you may also need to activate several Node-Locked licenses on one computer.

Activation steps

  1. After you activated a license on a License Manager PC (which can be any computer in your network or your local machine), repeat the activation steps for other license keys.

    See the following topics for details:

    Activating Floating User License

    Activating Node-Locked License

    When you activate a license over an existing one, the License Manager tries to combine these licenses into one. If license data can be merged, the License Manager permits the activation and merges the data of the new and existing licenses automatically. If the license data cannot be merged, the License Manager refuses to activate the new license. See below for details.

    It’s important to remember that the new license is bound to the same computer on which you activated your existing license.

  2. If you activate a license that has a set of features different from the license that is already activated on the computer, enable the new features manually on your TestComplete workstations. To do this, in TestComplete, open the File > Install Extensions dialog and enable the needed plugins.

Licenses that can be activated on the same computer

  • A Floating User license with another Floating User license.

    This may not work with new and old Floating User licenses. They have a substantial difference: new Floating User licenses are VM-enabled (that is, you can activate them on cloud computers and virtual machines), while older licenses didn’t have this capability by default. Merging such licenses is not allowed.

  • Node-Locked licenses that have different sets of features.

  • TestComplete and TestExecute licenses. These are different products, so their commercial licenses can be activated on the same PC. That is, you can use one computer (server) to manage different licenses.

  • A commercial license with a trial license, if the latter is already active.

Licenses that cannot be activated on one computer

The License Manager does not allow the activation of license keys whose data coincides with the data of the existing licenses and can overwrite it:

  • A Node-Locked license cannot be activated if a Floating User license is active, and vice versa. These are different license types that cannot be combined.

  • A Node-Locked license cannot be activated over another Node-Locked license that controls the same set of components (Platform, the Desktop, Web, and Mobile modules, and the Intelligent Quality add-on). Activation of such a license overwrites the existing data.

    Exception: If you try to activate a license key for any TestComplete module (Desktop, Web, Mobile) or for the Intelligent Quality add-on and the key has not been activated yet, the activation will be permitted. The resulting license will include a combination of the old and new licenses.
  • Two or more subscription licenses cannot be activated on the same PC.

  • A trial license cannot be activated if a commercial license is active.

Note

Although the licenses are merged on the License Manager PC, they are listed in your SmartBear account as individual licenses. If you need to unmerge and move any of the activated licenses to another machine, you need to deactivate  all the license keys and then activate them once again on the needed computers.

Troubleshooting

If you have encountered any issues during the license activation, you can try to fix them manually using instructions from the following topic —

Fixing Typical Issues With Floating User Licenses

You can try resolving the problem by using the Licensing Troubleshooter on our web site:

Licensing Troubleshooter

See Also

About Licensing System
TestComplete License Types
How To
Activating Licenses

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