Anaconda Terms of Service FAQs

No. Anaconda does not require academic institutions and universities to purchase a business or enterprise license for access to our package repository, regardless of their size, when used in course curricula. We maintain a free-use policy for educational entities when Anaconda is used in course curricula, including teaching, learning, and research at accredited educational institutions worldwide. This free-use policy applies even to large universities with 200 or more employees. The 200-employee threshold for paid licenses primarily applies to commercial organizations. However, it’s important to note that paid licenses may be required for specific use cases within academic settings, such as embedding Anaconda’s products, mirroring them, or providing third-party access beyond standard educational use.

Because Miniconda is a minimal Anaconda distribution installer that points to the Anaconda repositories by default, the need to pay depends on the package channels you use. If you use the default channel (named “defaults” and points to the Anaconda Repository) and your company has 200 or more employees, you need to purchase a license. However, if you use community-maintained package channels on anaconda.org (like conda-forge and bioconda) as your preferred channel, you don’t need a license. It’s important to note that community channels cannot guarantee the security, availability, consistency, or support available when using an Anaconda proprietary channel. Learn more about channels here.

Anaconda updated its Terms of Service four years ago to offset the significant costs associated with maintaining and hosting our platform and services. We’ve taken a fair and transparent approach by providing generous notice to violators of our Terms of Service.

We remain committed to supporting data professionals using Python by providing secure libraries that deliver immense value to the community. As a business, however, we must ensure the long-term viability of our model by enforcing compliance with our terms of service.

Detailed instructions for uninstalling Anaconda Distribution on Windows, macOS, and Linux can be found here.

If your business is greater than 200 employees, that’s correct. You need a commercial license and should reach out to our sales team to discuss next steps. The license that embedded partnerships provide is generally limited to said embedded platform and does not cover use outside of said platform.

We encourage all users to comply with our Terms of Service to avoid being in breach of those terms. You should reach out to our sales team to discuss next steps.

Click here to contact a sales representative.

No. Anaconda does not charge for open-source libraries or Python itself. Instead, it charges for the value-added services it provides. Much like distributors Red Hat and Canonical, Anaconda’s engineers curate, build, maintain, and serve these libraries as binary packages on secure cloud infrastructure. Non-educational organizations that do not fall under the “small organization” definition in the Terms of Service and are using these packages pay for access to Anaconda’s secure repositories.

Anaconda donates a portion of its profits to support the maintainers of popular open-source projects, helping to sustain the open-source ecosystem.  Over the past 12 years, we’ve invested over $30 million in creating, incubating, and maintaining numerous open source projects. We’ve created or incubated essential tools like conda, Numba, Bokeh, and Dask, while also maintaining and funding projects such as pandas, conda-forge, and Jupyter. Our support extends to employing key contributors of critical open source tools like pip/PyPA and conda-forge. We also invest millions of dollars annually to provide crucial infrastructure support by hosting Anaconda.org, a free platform for sharing open source packages. Additionally, we offer financial backing to NumFOCUS through our dividend program, supporting the broader scientific computing community. Throughout all of this, we maintain a strong focus on supporting educational and academic research facilities, which are vital to the open source ecosystem.

No. Our commercial fees do not apply to the user-uploaded packages at anaconda.org, which includes conda-forge. We do not build these packages. We host them as a free service to the community – something we’ve done for over 10 years. While commercial fees don’t apply, our Terms of Service do still apply to conda-forge, as they do for any third-party content we host, which is typically the case when an internet service provider hosts third-party content. For example, by using anaconda.org, users agree not to share content that is illegal, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, offensive, invades another’s privacy, or promotes bigotry, racism, hatred or harm against any individual or group.

• Anaconda updated its Terms of Service in 2020 to offset the costs associated with maintaining and hosting our platform.
• In March 2024 we made further changes to the Terms of Service, with the intent of consolidating and deduplicating legal language.
• We will be updating the Terms of Service in Q4 2024 to provide additional clarity and address the concerns and unintended impact on educational users that have been raised since the March 2024 changes.
• We remain committed to supporting data professionals by providing secure libraries that deliver immense value to the community. As a business, however, we must ensure the long-term viability of our model by enforcing compliance with our Terms of Service.