5+ best license control software to manage software licenses

License control or license management is basically controlling and documenting where and how software run so as to check and enforce compliance with different End-User license agreements or software licenses.

It therefore means that license control software or license management software are tools or processes that companies and/or organizations use for this purpose.

Sometimes remembering all the compliance and agreements you signed up for is not easy to do individually, so this is where license control software does its magic, letting you save time, costs that may arise out of non-compliance consequences, and stress.

License control software also help the software vendors themselves to monitor compliance and ensure the company or organization is compliant with the developer’s software license.

These software also prevent copying, sharing, and/or illegal use or pirating of the developer’s software by non-licensed users.

For vendors, license control or management involves creating trials, license keys, product activation or deactivation, and much more.

In order to implement license control in your company or organization, there are some prerequisites that come in handy, including:

• A software asset management (SAM) tool that record, store deployment details, and license details
• A software license auditor tool that identifies the licenses deployed across your system network and reports the information to the central management engine
• An asset inventory tool to account for the systems in your organization
• Dedicated license controllers or managers, and compliance maintenance processes for 360-degree control over licenses

The process of implementation of license control involves obtaining details of all the procured licenses, identifying where the licenses are deployed, comparing purchase and deployment of licenses, and uninstallation or procurement of licenses.

Best license control software

1. Snow
2. Reprise
3. Intelex
4. Samanage
5. Flexera
6. License Dashboard

1. Snow

Snow is a license control software designed to reduce the risks, costs and complexities usually associated with software assets, and licensing.

This tool helps your company or organization avoid overspending on software entitlements and cloud resources, while ensuring fully compliance with the licensing rules. Its license manager provides a unified view of all software, cloud and hardware assets, license entitlements, and application usage metrics.

This means that multiple stakeholders in your organization can gain access to tailored reports so they can create ELPs (Effective License Positions) for software vendors, track software usage and expenditure, track cloud usage and expenditure, identify and monitor the use of deployed assets and cloud subscriptions, as well as identify opportunities for reduction of costs that come with licensing and support.

The benefits of using Snow license control software include digital transformation such that you get a detailed understanding of all your technology usage so you can align to your company’s business goals, a unified view of multiple assets across the network and cloud, datacenter optimization for simplified management of datacenter licensing, financial management, software recognition guarantee, built-in automation for automatic import of audit data from multiple inventory tools, and support for all key licensing types such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and many more.

You can also give tailored access for multiple users in different key departments such as IT, Procurement, Finance and Governance. Another feature of benefit is the automatic detection of unused software assets so you can see the potential opportunities for license optimization, deletion, or overspend and take action to reduce costs on the latter. It is available as a hosted cloud service and an on-premise solution.

Get Snow

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2. Reprise License Manager (RLM)

This is an affordable, and easy to use enterprise-class license control software. It is flexible, and has the power to serve enterprise users ensuring your software is used within your specified terms and conditions.

Enjoy flexibility, simplicity, power and value for money as RLM provides all features needed and expected from an enterprise-class license control software. It is easy to administer whether on-premise or cloud, and lets you capture new customers and increase revenues by giving you the peace of doing your work knowing licensing is taken care of.

Features include a simple API that handles complex licensing models, mobility of licenses so you can move them easily, straightforward diagnostics from all licensed clients and servers, convenient trial modes convertible to permanent licenses later on, painless change of licensing even after software releases, multi-platform and operating system support, and automatic discovery of license service over a LAN network.

RLM can be used whether you’ve never used license control software before, or you use an in-house developed license control software, or a commercial one – RLM will help with the transition strategy.

Other features and benefits include efficiency, convenience and flexibility with added value to you and your customers. You can also access the RLMCloud feature, which is a hosted solution for managing licenses in the Cloud. With this tool, your customers need not install license servers on-site, as it is already enabled to use with no code changes, and you can deploy servers in Cloud or on-premise, as preferred.

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3. Intelex

Intelex is a simple yet so easy to use license control software that lets you track critical dates and actions with so much ease, and ensures your employees are fully licensed at all times.

With this tool, you can centralize licensing data and tracking activities and associated renewal and expiry dates in one centralized system, which is accessible across work groups, departments and different locations. You can also ensure your licenses are always updated by automating email notifications and sending these to employees and supervisors for upcoming or overdue renewals to ensure 100% compliance.

Other features include viewing license statuses and related requirements, ensuring all-round annual audit preparedness by maintaining a historical record of all licenses possessed at any given time for reporting, avoid penalties and fines, eliminate time wasting and inefficient loss of money and resources, and also ensuring regulatory compliance by checking that all employees are in possession of the latest license requirements for their roles, and avoid associated costs from unlicensed workers.

Get Intelex

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4. Samanage

This license control software lets you simplify, organize and automate the software license compliance processes in your company or organization. You can govern license compliance across your company with license tracking capabilities for maintaining long-term compliance, and enforcement of software usage policies for guaranteed security.

It also ensures you meet the IT audit requirements and lowers licensing costs, and non-compliance risks.

Features include a one repository control base where you can maintain proof of license ownership such as receipts, packing slips, reseller invoices and/or copies of all agreements, with easy reference in seconds to ensure compliance and create opportunities for cost improvement and negotiation leverage.

Get alerts on risks or gaps in your compliance status before they become huge problems, because this tool ensures you meet regulatory requirements, and minimize risk and exposure for your business from using unauthorized software. It supports Windows and other operating systems, plus you get a reports and dashboard so you can analyze your inventory and generate reports that can be exported to PDF or CSV formats.

Samanage tracks and monitors your contracts, software licenses and their requirements and/or restrictions automatically. It also tracks software titles installed across the entire company network and identifies changes over time, automatically stores and retrieves licenses, tracks changes in inventory and prepares your team for replacements or exchanges, gives reminders to ensure you don’t miss any expiration dates giving you time to renew contracts before they end.

You also get risk detection as Samanage scans your inventory to detect risky compliance gaps in your system network.

Get Samanage

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5. Flexera

License control can be difficult due to the increasing complexity of software licensing agreements, and/or the lack of best practices for software license management.

Most companies and/or organizations don’t know they’re compliant until a software audit is undertaken, which has potentials for penalties, true-up expenses, and corporate embarrassments, and this is why you need a license control software that is thorough enough to check mistakes that can significantly impact the company’s profitability.

Flexera is a centralized software license management and license control software that reduces license compliance risk in your business. Managing such risk is a challenge owing to the complexities of the agreements these days and lack of best practices, plus issues like mergers and acquisitions, or cloud and virtual deployments exacerbate the problem.

The solution is a centralized license control or management process, and Flexera offers just that. Its benefits include leveraging the right information by integrating with existing business systems to aggregate and reconcile your inventory and data for continuous compliance and audit readiness. Centralized licensing and software operations, control over licensing operations, and constant improvement through monitoring and tracking of key performance metrics are other benefits Flexera offers.

Its license control solutions are automated, and support software asset governance to reduce risk by ensuring continuous compliance is maintained across the software estate.

Features include an app portal that enforces continual software license control and compliance while increasing employee satisfaction and service delivery efficiency, the FlexNet Manager Suite which delivers the information needed through reconciling accurate inventory of applications against actual usage and product use rights.

It also has the Workflow Manager which helps businesses manage the application readiness and software license optimization processes for streamlined procurement, preparation, deployment, and ongoing application management.

Flexera’s entire enterprise product portfolio work together to deliver unique value in managing application usage across the software lifecycle, through years of experience, industry best practice expertise, and deep knowledge designed to help you create and implement solutions for your business needs.

Get Flexera

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6. License Dashboard

This is a simplified license control software that comes with automation and built-in licensing intelligence for the most accurate software and license management experience.

Build a license repository painlessly, import and validate license entitlements automatically, gather and cleanse audit data sets automatically, and schedule reporting of installs and licensing positions all in one tool. License Dashboard offers more than 60 inventory tools designed to integrate your audit solution to its license manager and manage all your software licenses faster and easily.

Features include seamless and automatic management of licenses, automatic collation and comprehension of licensing entitlements (which takes months if done by human hands), a market leading datacenter, virtual environment visualization, creation and exporting of reports at the click or touch of a button, and an intelligent dashboard and notifications for tips and advice on areas where investigation is warranted.

With this tool, you can also understand and assign user based licensing schemes and know who is assigned what, plus their entitlement to deploy across endpoints, thus resolves multi-user subscription aliases to one primary user account.

Also included is the ability to manage complicated vendors such as Oracle, SAP, and/or IBM, with their own workspaces that align their licensing rules with consumption data easily.

You can also get clear definitions of each license type and make strong recommendations for budget spend predictions, plus share the relevant metrics through the License Dashboard Portal, which is accessible to any and all your business stakeholders.

Get License Dashboard

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Why license control software is important for your business

Being compliant in as far as licensing and software in your company or organisation is concerned involves more than just knowing the software installed and license agreements you have signed for. It also involves the licenses purchased, the limit of your license purchases, the details of the license usage rights and restrictions, as well as maintaining compliance while reducing related costs significantly.

As mentioned in most of the license control software tools above, the lack of best practice may lead to your organization incurring related and/or associated costs.

Best practice includes five basic steps you need to incorporate into your company or organisation:

• Centralization of licensing operations so that multi-users gain one console view so as to manage and maintain licenses across the business enterprise
• Leverage accurate usage data
• Analyze reports of usage data by segmenting and analyzing by project or user group so as to gain insights on actual usage
• Automation of licensing operations
• Selecting the right license control software tools for easier management and increase of end-user satisfaction.

Have you found the best license control software for your company or organisation? Let us know what you use, or your favorite pick among the ones we’ve listed, by leaving a comment in the section below.