Keylight vs LicenseSeat — done-for-you SDKs vs universal reach

LicenseSeat and Keylight start from the same idea: license keys, offline Ed25519 checks, no cut of your revenue. The split is reach vs done-for-you. LicenseSeat licenses everything — Unity, Unreal, audio plugins, Rust, Electron, Swift. Keylight ships finished SDKs for Swift, Rust, and JavaScript with the licensing glue and payments already wired. If your stack is one of those three, that’s the whole decision.

What LicenseSeat gets right

LicenseSeat is broad and serious about it. First-class SDKs for Unity, Unreal, Godot, JUCE, C#, C++, Rust, Tauri, Electron, and Swift. The offline crypto is Ed25519 and the core is open source, so you can see exactly how a license verifies. It’s processor-agnostic — Stripe, Paddle, Gumroad, PayPal all plug in — and it takes no cut and adds no markup. Node-locked, floating, metered, trial, and feature licenses are all there.

Ship across engines and platforms — a game on Unreal, a plugin in JUCE, a desktop app in Rust — and that breadth is the point. One licensing backend for all of it. LicenseSeat is built for exactly that.

Where Keylight is different

The difference is what you wire up after the key exists.

LicenseSeat hands you a verify call — three lines, any language. What surrounds it is yours: catch the payment, issue the key, store the lease, run the trial countdown, decide what the app shows on launch. Reasonable when you’re spanning five platforms and can’t be opinionated about any one of them.

Keylight is opinionated about the stacks it covers. The Swift SDK is a state machine — and the Rust and JavaScript SDKs follow the same pattern on their platforms. Activate once, then check on launch and switch on the result:

await licensing.checkOnLaunch()

switch licensing.state {
case .licensed:
    enablePaidFeatures()
case .trial(let daysLeft):
    showTrialBanner(daysLeft: daysLeft)
case .expired:
    showRenewalPrompt()
case .invalid:
    showActivationSheet()
}

That’s the integration. No licensing glue to write.

And payments are done, not pluggable-but-yours. A Stripe charge mints the license — Keylight catches the webhook, you write nothing. Other processors connect by webhook too; Stripe is just the path that’s already built. Feature flags ride inside the Ed25519 lease, so you gate Pro offline without another call.

When LicenseSeat is the better pick

Be honest about it. LicenseSeat covers platforms Keylight has no SDK for yet — Unity, Unreal, JUCE, C#, C++, Windows builds, audio plugins. If you need one licensing layer across all those engines, that’s LicenseSeat. Same if you need floating or metered seats, or you want licensing kept fully independent of any single processor.

Keylight ships Swift, Rust, and JavaScript and isn’t stopping there. But today is what you ship against. If your stack goes beyond those three, LicenseSeat is the honest fit.

Where Keylight fits

Building on Swift (Mac, iOS), Rust (Tauri, CLI), or JavaScript (Electron, Node) and want licensing that drops in? That’s Keylight. The SDKs handle activation, offline leases, trials, expiry. A payment mints the license. Feature flags ride in the lease, readable offline. Multi-product and multi-tenant are built in.

Both verify offline. Both take none of your revenue. The difference is whether you want a licensing primitive for every engine, or the whole licensing layer done for your stack.

Plans start at $19/month, with a free tier. Test the whole payment-to-app flow before you pay.