Changes to the Rasa X Community Edition (Free Version)

Announcements
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Hey Everyone,

We wanted to give you all an update about the changes we are making that involve Rasa X Community Edition.

We have decided that we will no longer maintain or support Rasa X Community Edition. Note that this change does not impact paying Rasa Enterprise customers, Rasa Enterprise will still be maintained. Also note that this change also does not impact Rasa Open Source. We remain committed to Rasa Open Source as an Apache 2.0-licensed product and will continue to invest in it. In fact, we have multiple open roles for development of our core framework as well as an open role for a developer advocate.

You can read more about our decision here, but we wanted to make sure we explain to all of you community members why this decision has been made, and make it very clear what that means for those of you currently using Rasa X Community Edition.

What is the reason for the decision to no longer maintain or support Rasa X Community Edition?

We believe it is no longer economically viable to offer Rasa X for free. Our mission at Rasa is to make great assistants easy to build, so we want to be fully invested in the development of the next generation of Rasa Enterprise, as well as our open source framework.

What changes will take effect today, June 8th, 2022

  • Rasa will no longer maintain or support a free version of our tooling (‘Rasa X’).Version 1.1, released on March 29 2022, was the last minor release.
  • Rasa X users may continue with their current version or upgrade to 1.1 (which is compatible with Rasa Open Source 3), please note that the Rasa X docs will move to legacy docs on June 8th, 2022.
  • A trial version of Rasa Enterprise will be available for evaluation. Please contact sales if you are interested.
  • The Rasa X forum section will remain open, but we will set it to read only at the end of 2022.
  • We will close all issues on the RasaHQ/rasa repo related to Rasa X.

What to do now if you use Rasa X Community Edition

If you’re currently using Rasa X Community Edition, here are your options:

  • Consider switching to the paid version of our tooling, Rasa Enterprise. The next minor version, 1.2, is in the works and is expected to be released this summer.
  • Use Rasa Open Source on its own. We are fully committed to Rasa Open Source and will continue investing in it.
  • Keep using Rasa X in its current form (Please note that we don’t recommend this as we won’t support Rasa X any longer going forward so there won’t be any updates or security patches).

What to expect in the future

Right now, we are developing the next generation of Rasa Enterprise that will help make great AI Assistants even easier to build and support enterprise teams practicing Conversation Driven Development (CDD) at scale.

We also want to thank everyone in the community for your ongoing support and contributions. Our framework now has more than 25 million downloads, and we’re extremely grateful for our fast-growing developer community with 15,000+ forum members and 750+ contributors. Thank you for working with us to push the limits of what conversational AI can do.

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Sorry to hear, though that all makes sense. I think it’s a good move for Rasa as a profitable, sustainable company. I will now be more likely to switch to Rasa Enterprise. Good luck.

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Yet another blow to the Rasa platform, it feels. After the departure of key/visible people in the last month, still only workaround solutions for the Apple Mx chips, others like Botpress innovating seemingly drastically with an intent-less offering, I wonder where this is all going. I like(d) Rasa particularly because of the open source approach, with the manyfold options that custom actions allow so easily, as a true niche competior of the otherwise typical players in the market. So I wonder where this is all going, just another webinar on how to improve customer service RoI isn’t going to do the trick, though.

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Hey, thanks for the heads up, have to admit it makes sense.

Will the best practices guide for hosting rasa open source bots be updated such that it will no longer rely on rasax, now that it won’t be free?

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Thanks for your message @Pattkopp!

As mentioned in our post above, we remain committed to Rasa Open Source and will continue to invest in it. As a company, we will further drive innovation in conversational AI and believe that this change will give us more focus to achieve this. We will keep you posted with any new product announcements and innovations for Rasa Open Source and Rasa Enterprise going forward. As everyone in the community, we’re sad that some members of our developer relations team decided to move on but we will continue to invest in this team and are currently hiring a developer advocate.

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Thanks @JanL ! We’re working on updating our documentation to no longer rely on Rasa X. Could you please help me point me to the specific best practises guide that you’re referring to?

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Thanks for the quick reply!

I misremembered the “best practices” part, but it was this article I meant, the one called “deploying your assistant”.

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Thanks for clarifying! We’re working on updating this page in the docs. I’ll let you know once it’s live.

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Sorry to hear, but i understand the situation :frowning:

Has any chance the Rasa team publish the last Rasa X Community source code on GitHub?

Maybe community still make some contribution for this version with some forks

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Hey @itsjhonny, thanks for your understanding. At the moment, we don’t plan to open source the Rasa X Community Edition, but we’ll keep you posted if that ever changes.

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IMHO, this is a big shot in the foot. :roll_eyes:

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Pedro, and I understand your concern. We believe though that this decision is the right one for us at this point in time to focus on further driving innovation in conversational AI in both Rasa Open Source and Rasa Enterprise.

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Another bad news… It would be much more difficult to persuade people to join the community or even the subscription given the lack of support and viable alternatives on the market… At least for my team

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This is disappointing news. It would have been nice to know that this was the future of the project from some time ago, although one could have guessed given the problems that have been raised about Rasa X + the associated silence over the past few months.

I’m sure you all have looked at the numbers and decided there is no other option. You do need to make money. Some of the issues that occurred could have been avoided with better communication, but that might not have changed the decision in the end.

Is there an option to just license the software without the support? We have already invested a huge amount of time getting the community edition working with the existing helm charts. If not, we will have to look elsewhere and hopefully find something that can be used to at least review conversations.

Is there any indication about general pricing that could be communicated more broadly?

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Thanks for sharing your thoughts @arthurchan! As mentioned above, we’re committed to invest in Rasa Open Source and our community. For example, we have multiple open roles for development of our core framework as well as an open role for a developer advocate. We’re happy to see that so many community members are supporting each other on the forum as well.

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Thanks for the feedback @nyejon! I understand that you have invested a lot of work into Rasa X Community Edition already and suggest that you get in touch with our sales team directly. We have different levels of subscriptions and I hope one of the fits for your use case. We don’t share subscription pricing publicly.

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Dear Rasa team,

will I still be able to download Rasa X 1.1 for a while for testing Rasa as a university student?

I’m currently writing my master’s thesis on chatbots and planned to use Rasa Open-Source in combination with Rasa X (as I already identified the Rasa Stack to be the best solution for my research :slight_smile: ). I aimed at conducting user tests using Rasa X in August.

Looking forward to your reply!

Kind regards, Max

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Thanks for your message @Maximilian-Ka ! We’re happy to hear that you’re using Rasa for your master thesis. Yes, Rasa X Community Edition 1.1 will be available to download for now.

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This transformation makes sense, and I appreciate your intent to continue developing the open source chat engine, along with the enterprise stack.
On the other hand, I have to admit that this transformation, including its side effects - deprecation of Rasa Ephemeral Installer (rei) and rasactl, and a heavy mashup in the documentation, caught me in the middle of my first deployment process, and made it very difficult to figure out the current open source/enterprise best practices, or even a working solution.
I have to mention that the bot development process was delightful, yet in terms of deployment we feel a bit hung up for dry, due to the documentation issue I previously mentioned, as well as low availability of human support.

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Thanks for the feedback @ybm11 - our product team has been working on fixing the documentation to reflect the new situation. They’re live now here: Deploying a Rasa Assistant

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