Technical Terms

Single-Tenant

An architecture where each customer runs on a dedicated instance of the software with its own isolated infrastructure.

Single-tenancy gives each customer their own dedicated environment — database, server, and sometimes codebase. This is the model favoured by security-sensitive enterprise customers who require physical data isolation, custom compliance configurations, or the ability to run the software in their own cloud account. Single-tenancy offers stronger isolation guarantees than multi-tenancy but at significantly higher operational cost: each tenant requires its own infrastructure, monitoring, and upgrade cycle. Scaling a single-tenant product means scaling operational complexity linearly with customer count. This is why single-tenancy is typically reserved for enterprise tiers where the ACV is high enough to justify the overhead. Some vendors offer a hybrid: multi-tenant by default with single-tenant available as an enterprise add-on.