Licensing in Acunetix

Your Acunetix license determines how many targets you can set up for scanning. The total number of targets permitted is a combination of purchased FQDN targets and allowed target variations. This document explains the nuances of how licensing works in Acunetix.

FQDN targets vs. variations

Every Acunetix license has an allocated number of FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) targets based on your purchase. In addition to the FQDN target allocation, each license allows for a limited number of target variations. The maximum number of variations permitted is five times the license-based FQDN target limit.

A variation is when a target has the same FQDN but a different URL. If www.example.com is the FQDN target, then www.example.com/111 is a variation. These two URLs would count as 1 (FQDN) target against your license allocation and 1 variation against the total target variation limit.

Illustrative example

• Your Acunetix license has an allocation of 5 targets
• You create two FQDN targets: www.example.com and www.test.com. This uses two targets from your license allocation.
• In addition to those two targets, you can create up to four variations on those targets, for example:

• www.example.com/1
• www.example.com/2
• www.example.com/3
• www.example.com/4    
• www.test.com/1
• www.test.com/2
• www.test.com/3
• www.test.com/4 

• Alternatively, you could have 6 variations on www.example.com and 2 variations on www.test.com, or some other split of variations between the targets.

The important point to note is that the total upper limit on the number of variations applies across all your targets as a whole allocation.