Sonargraph-Explorer Reborn

Admittedly we had a rough week for Sonargraph-Explorer and its users. After we lost several paying customers because they downgraded to the free Explorer license we first decided to pull the plug and kill the product. After all the original idea was that the product would ease introducing the commercial variant Sonargraph-Architect and help us to win more paying customers.

After a lot of talks with users and our own development team we decided to soften that decision by removing two features from the original Explorer variant, but otherwise continue the free product. In particular we removed the cycle view and the exploration view.

While that reduces the usefulness of Sonargraph-Explorer it still remains a good entry level tool to collect quality metrics and detect cyclic dependency groups. We think it balances our need to pay our bills with the interest of users who would like to explore the technical quality of their systems without being forced to pay for a license.

One hint if you currently have an explorer license. You need to upgrade to the newest version. The Explorer license only works with Sonargraph versions released after Oct 4th 2023.