The Mirth Connect License Change
Buy, hold or migrate: what the choice involves
What changed
Until 2025, Mirth Connect was available under an open-source license alongside commercial offerings. In March 2025 NextGen Healthcare announced that it would no longer maintain that dual-license model: from version 4.6, Mirth Connect is distributed only as a commercial product. Community forks followed, including Open Integration Engine (announced in April 2025) and BridgeLink.
If you run a free 4.x install, nothing stopped working on the day of the announcement. What changed is that the build you have will not receive further open-source releases, and every organisation now owns a decision.
The three paths
| Path | What it means | Where the work is |
|---|---|---|
| Buy | License a commercial Mirth Connect release and upgrade to it | The upgrade itself: Java, database and behaviour changes across your channels |
| Hold | Stay on the version you run today | Security patching around an engine that no longer changes, Java and OS support, and the risk of the one person who knows it leaving |
| Migrate | Move channels to Open Integration Engine or BridgeLink | Extension and connector compatibility, parity testing, cutover and rollback |
None of these is free, and none is automatically right. Holding can be reasonable for a small, stable estate with a clear end date. Buying is often the cheapest answer for a large estate with heavy custom code and little appetite for change. Migrating makes sense when license cost matters and the estate is well understood, or can be made so.
How we help you decide
The Channel Estate and License-Exposure Assessment inventories what runs in each environment and puts effort ranges on each path. We are not a reseller and have no stake in which path you choose. Once you have chosen, the upgrade or fork migration is the engineering.
We also write about the details in Tutorials, starting with a longer guide to the decision.
Sources
- NextGen Healthcare's March 2025 announcement ending the dual-license model, as reported by the Open Integrator community forum.
- The Open Integration Engine project announcement, April 2025.
- Licensing terms change; read the current terms from NextGen Healthcare and from each fork project before you commit to a path.
Chartferry is independent. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a reseller of NextGen Healthcare, and we use the name Mirth Connect only to describe the product we work on.