# Aiqbee Hive Server | Aiqbee Academy

Aiqbee Hive Server

Choose a sectionWhen to use Hive ServerDeploy Hive with DockerConfigure storage and identityBrain access controlService accounts and MCPAudit, back up and upgradeUse the management APIIntegrate an applicationMove Brains between environmentsFinal quiz

# When to use Hive Server

## What you'll learn

Estimated time: 9 minutes

Hive Server runs the same knowledge-graph model as the Aiqbee Platform, on infrastructure you operate yourself. The decision to self-host rarely comes down to price; it comes down to which controls your organisation actually needs and which operational load you are willing to take on.

-   Compare Platform and Hive on features, not just hosting location.
-   Name the Hive-exclusive controls that justify the extra operational work.
-   List what Hive shifts onto your own team: Postgres, identity and upgrades.

Video lesson

The animation walks a fictional compliance team through a requirements checklist and lands on Hive because of groups, per-neuron-type access and an audit trail.

## Two products, one graph, different jobs

Aiqbee ships two products from two different codebases. The Platform is a.NET SaaS application at app.aiqbee.com, with a chat assistant called Bea, a Marketplace and a wizard that builds a brain from uploaded files. Hive Server is a Python application you run yourself, in Docker or Kubernetes, against your own PostgreSQL database.

Some capability sits on only one side. Do not expect a Platform screenshot in someone else’s demo to match your Hive instance, or the reverse: the two products diverge on purpose, and this course only teaches what Hive itself does.

## What Hive gives you that the Platform does not

Four capabilities exist only on the self-hosted side:

-   User groups: grant read or read-write access to a whole team at once, without handing anyone ownership.
-   Per-neuron-type access: restrict specific neurons to specific people, service accounts or groups, even inside a brain that is otherwise open.
-   Audit history: a queryable record of who created, changed or deleted what, retained for a configurable number of days (28 by default).
-   A management API and a richer MCP prompt set built for automation, covered in the rest of this course.

## What you take on in return

Self-hosting means you now run the database. Hive stores everything it holds (brains, neurons, embeddings, users, the audit log) in the PostgreSQL instance you point it at; nothing is copied to Aiqbee. That is good for control and inconvenient in practice: backups, point-in-time recovery and disaster planning become entirely your responsibility, a point this course returns to directly.

The container is also intentionally minimal. TLS termination, a web application firewall, DDoS protection and rate limiting are not built in; they belong at your edge, such as a reverse proxy, an API gateway or a cloud front door. Licence keys set your own ceilings on users, brains and neurons; the published free-tier numbers differ between documents, so check the current licensing page rather than trust a specific figure here.

## Before you continue

Platform-only and Hive-only features are listed correctly, not guessed.

At least one real organisational requirement points specifically to a Hive-exclusive control.

The operational load of self-hosting (Postgres, edge security, upgrades) has been named, not assumed away.

* * *

Source: https://www.aiqbee.com/learning/en/course/aiqbee-hive-server