Paxton Net2 Pro vs Free: What the Pro Licence Actually Gets You

Paxton Net2 is the UK's most widely installed access control platform and the system we specify most often for commercial and education clients. Part of the reason for its popularity is the licensing model: the Net2 software is free to download and use for basic installations. You buy the hardware — door controllers, readers, power supplies — and the core software costs nothing. That makes it an attractive proposition for a single office, a small school, or a retail unit.

The Pro licence changes the picture for larger or more complex installations. It is an annual subscription per server, and it unlocks a significant set of additional features. Whether those features justify the cost depends entirely on the site — there is no universal answer. But many clients come to us having been sold the free version for an installation that genuinely needs Pro, and the friction that causes is avoidable.

This article sets out what the Pro licence actually includes, what it does not include, and how to think about whether your site needs it.

What you get with the free version

The free Net2 software handles the core access control functions well. You can configure up to 1,000 users and 1,000 tokens, create access levels that control which users can pass through which doors at which times, view a live event log, and generate basic reports. For a single-site installation with a modest number of doors and a straightforward user structure, this is sufficient.

The free version also includes video door entry integration with Paxton's own door entry panels, basic anti-passback to prevent credential sharing, time and attendance reporting at a basic level, and the ability to connect to the Paxton Cloud management portal for remote access.

For a 10-door office with 80 members of staff and no requirement for complex scheduling, multi-site management, or integration with other systems, the free version does what it needs to do. We install plenty of free-licence Net2 systems, and they work well for the right application.

What the Pro licence adds

The Pro licence expands user capacity to 50,000 users with unlimited tokens. For larger organisations — a school with several hundred staff plus regular contractors, a multi-department business, a healthcare site with a high turnover of temporary workers — this headroom matters.

Multi-site management is the feature that organisations with more than one premises most frequently need and most frequently find missing when they have purchased the free version. Pro allows a single Net2 installation to manage doors across multiple sites from one interface, with centralised user management. A member of staff can be given access to their home site and limited access to other sites, all controlled from one record. The free version treats each site as a standalone installation.

Roll call — the ability to generate a report of everyone currently inside the building — is a Pro-only feature that has become increasingly important for fire safety compliance and emergency evacuation procedures. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, responsible persons must be able to account for all occupants in the event of an evacuation. A live roll call report from Net2 Pro gives fire marshals a real-time list of who is in the building and who has already exited.

Mustering takes this further: in an evacuation, staff present their tokens at a muster point reader and Net2 marks them as safely evacuated. The system tells the fire marshal who is still unaccounted for. This is the kind of feature that sounds optional until the day you need it.

Time and attendance in Pro

The free version includes basic time and attendance reporting — you can see when a user first swiped in and last swiped out on a given day. The Pro version adds significantly more depth: flexi-time calculations, overtime tracking, clocking in and out at designated time and attendance readers that are separate from the access control readers, and export to payroll systems.

For organisations that want to use their access control system to replace or supplement separate time and attendance hardware — clocking-in machines and the like — Pro is what makes that practical. It is particularly useful for manufacturing, warehousing, and care sector clients where shift-based working is the norm and accurate attendance records directly affect payroll.

Area counting and occupancy management

Net2 Pro includes area counting — the ability to track how many people are in a defined zone at any given time and enforce an occupancy limit. Entry to the zone is denied once the maximum occupancy is reached. This has obvious applications for meeting rooms, clean rooms, server rooms, and any space where occupancy limits matter for safety or operational reasons.

During the pandemic, a number of our clients used area counting to manage occupancy in communal spaces. Post-pandemic, the feature has remained useful for managing occupancy in high-demand spaces such as school sports halls used as examination centres, where maximum occupancy directly affects examination regulations.

Integration with third-party systems

Pro opens up Paxton's integration capabilities. Net2 Pro includes a software development kit (SDK) and supports integration with a range of third-party systems including intruder alarm panels, CCTV management platforms, visitor management systems, and HR software. The integration with Synology Surveillance Station, for instance — which we use on many combined access control and CCTV installations — requires Pro.

For clients who want their access control and CCTV to work together — so that a door event automatically pulls up the relevant camera footage, or an alarm trigger locks down access — Pro is what makes that possible. In a purely standalone access control installation with no integration requirements, this capability is less relevant.

So which version do you need?

As a Paxton Platinum Partner, we specify the licence that matches the installation — not the one that maximises margin. For a single-site installation with fewer than 1,000 users, no multi-site requirement, no integration with other systems, and no requirement for roll call or area counting, the free version is usually the right answer.

If you have more than one site, more than 1,000 users, a need for fire evacuation mustering, a requirement to integrate with CCTV or intruder systems, or a meaningful time and attendance requirement, Pro is the correct licence. The cost of the Pro licence over a three-year period is modest compared to the cost of retrofitting capability onto a system that was under-specified at installation.

If you are not sure which applies to your site, we will tell you honestly during a survey. We have no commercial incentive to push Pro on an installation that does not need it, and we have no incentive to undersell it either. Getting the specification right at the outset is what avoids the awkward conversation two years later when a client discovers their system cannot do something they assumed it could.