True annual subscription. All installations — campus, staff workstations, faculty laptops, and student home use — function while the subscription is active. If the subscription lapses, the licenses stop working across the institution. That's the trade-off that makes the price so low: $995/yr Gold or $1,995/yr Platinum vs from $4,995 one-time for perpetual Enterprise Unlimited. Renew annually to keep coverage active and to add unlimited new users at no extra cost.
Core archive · AES-256 · password manager · .PA codec
Encryption Suite · Backup · Office add-ins · Secure FTP
Pro + Virtual ISO · Full burner · Secure FTP
Single registration key for an entire lab. Push via GPO / Intune / SCCM / JAMF, lock administrative settings so students can't disable encryption or change file associations. Deploy once, image refreshes carry the license forward.
Office add-ins (Outlook / Excel / Word) for faculty handling student data, grant submissions, and committee work. Encrypted attachments by default for FERPA-aligned communications. Home use included for personal devices.
Educational Unlimited explicitly covers home use for students — install on personal laptops without per-device licensing. Students working remotely or hybrid get the same product as the lab workstations.
FIPS 140-2 validated encryption for research data subject to NIST requirements (NIH, NSF, DoD-funded). PACL command-line for scripted batch encryption of dataset archives. Audit-ready key management.
Med schools, nursing programs, public-health departments, and university hospitals handle PHI under HIPAA. FIPS 140-2 validated AES encryption is the technical safeguard most institutions rely on to demonstrate reasonable-methods compliance for PHI at rest and in transit.
Section 508 compliant — public VPAT (PDF) available. Required for federally-funded institutions and increasingly mandated by state-level education accessibility laws. 30+ language localizations for international student bodies.
Public, private, and charter K-12 schools and districts. Whether single school or multi-campus district, Educational Unlimited covers your active student / faculty / staff count under one annual license.
Degree-granting universities, community colleges, technical institutes. Site-license style coverage with home use for students. Most institutions deploy via existing GPO / Intune / JAMF infrastructure.
Government research labs, university-affiliated research centers, public-sector research institutions. FIPS 140-2 + DFARS for sensitive workflows; federally-funded research often requires this — both are included in Educational Unlimited's Enterprise feature set.
Public, university, and special libraries. Public-sector institutions delivering educational programming. Same eligibility structure as accredited institutions where the public-service mission applies.
/qn; admin lockdown via MSI properties. Educational Unlimited customers can publish the installer to authorized students for home use.Everyone at the institution. Distributed freely on all campus, staff, and student computers. Both Home Use for Employees and Home Use for Students are included — meaning faculty, staff, AND students can install PowerArchiver on their personal devices at no extra charge. No site or country limitations. License counting is not required — you don't need to track who's installed. Up to 10,000 users (Gold) or 100,000 users (Platinum); add more anytime while maintenance is active.
The two products use fundamentally different licensing models — pick by what your procurement and budgeting teams prefer.
Educational Unlimited is a true annual subscription. All installations function while the subscription is active and stop working if it lapses. The trade-off: dramatically lower price ($995/yr Gold, $1,995/yr Platinum) and explicit home use for students on personal devices, which Enterprise Unlimited doesn't cover. Best for K-12 districts, universities, and colleges with annual operating budgets — pay each year, cover everyone (campus + staff + students at home), keep adding users for free.
Enterprise Unlimited is a perpetual license. One-time purchase (from $4,995 depending on tier) — keeps working forever, even if you never renew PA Select. No student-home-use entitlement. Best for research institutions and labs where perpetual licensing is a procurement requirement, or where the deployment is staff-only without a student-home-use need.
For a complete educational organization that wants student home use included, Educational Unlimited is almost always the right answer despite being subscription-based.
Use the 50% off individual .edu discount. Verify your .edu email at order time, choose Business / Professional / Professional Toolbox, get 50% off list. Personal license, on your own hardware. Perpetual — no annual renewal. For institutional deployment (covering labs, student fleets, faculty workstations), the institution should buy Educational Unlimited instead — much better economics at scale.
Free alternatives don't include FIPS 140-2 validated cryptography (required for federally-funded research and many state DOE compliance regimes), don't have admin lockdown (you can't enforce encryption policies on student workstations), don't ship Section 508-compliant accessibility documentation, and don't provide telephone support during semester rollouts. PowerArchiver is the answer when "free" isn't free in compliance terms.
PowerArchiver doesn't store or transmit student data — we're not a SaaS service. The product encrypts data at rest and in transit using FIPS 140-2 validated cryptography, GDPR-aligned. That makes it compliant with FERPA's reasonable-methods requirement for protecting personally identifiable information when transferred or stored. We provide compliance documentation for your data-privacy officer's records on request — contact via support.
Educational Unlimited is a true annual subscription, so the licenses stop working across the institution if the subscription lapses — campus installs, staff workstations, and student home use all rely on an active subscription. The low annual price ($995/yr Gold, $1,995/yr Platinum) is the trade-off for the subscription model. In practice almost every institution renews — the math is favorable: $995/yr is roughly the cost of two individual Pro licenses while covering thousands of users including student home use. If your procurement strictly requires a perpetual license that survives without ongoing payment, look at Enterprise Unlimited (from $4,995 one-time) instead, with the caveat that it doesn't cover student home use.
