The Dongle is Dead - Long Live the Dongle

For more than 30 years, dongles have been an obvious and effective choice for software protection. Reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated, as the technology remains a favorite for developers and users alike. What software developers like about it is the great protection it offers against hackers, coming at comparatively low costs for them. Users, on the other hand, enjoy its portability and the option of using their licenses on the go and, if they want, offline. More recent copy protection technologies, such as licenses in the cloud bound to individual users or individual machines, might beat dongles on even lower upfront costs per user and on the immediate availability of the licenses. Power users typically also have licenses for multiple applications and software systems, and they are not too keen to lug around a big bulge of license dongles.

CmDongles have one feature that beats one key weakness of typical dongle solutions in many industries and use cases: CmDongles are multivendor-capable. That means, if your user already owns a CmDongle, you can ‘hop on’ as well with your license. This saves you and your users the price of the dongle and the shipping cost, and CodeMeter License Central makes sure that the license gets to your user in the blink of an eye – without compromising the level of protection we all know and love in our CmDongles. The required infrastructure is also cheaper to maintain than that of a pure cloud solution, as the server only creates the licenses in the first place and does not have to come into the picture at all during regular use of the software.

Your users benefit a lot from this option: Their licenses stay mobile and can be used offline. Switching computers is as easy as unplugging the CmDongle from one machine and plugging it into the next. And if everybody is on board, your users need only one CmDongle for the licenses from many different vendors.