Multi-Tenancy: Serving Many Clients from One System
If you sell software to multiple businesses, you face a key decision: should each customer get their own separate system, or should they all share one cleverly partitioned platform? This is the question of multi-tenancy.
The approach you choose shapes your costs, your security model and how easily you can grow, so it deserves careful thought early on.
The Core Trade-off
Sharing one system is efficient and cheap to maintain, but every tenant's data must be rigorously kept apart. Fully separate systems offer the strongest isolation but cost far more to run and update.
Keeping Tenants Safely Apart
- Every query is scoped to a single tenant by default.
- One tenant can never see another's data.
- Branding and settings can differ per tenant.
Why Most SaaS Products Share
A shared platform means one codebase to maintain, one set of updates to deploy and far lower running costs — savings you can pass on to customers or reinvest. The trade-off is that data separation must be watertight, which we enforce at every level so a slip is simply not possible. For a small number of highly regulated clients, fully separate systems may still be the right call.
| Model | Cost | Isolation | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shared | Low | Logical | Most SaaS products |
| Separate | High | Strong | Highly regulated clients |
If you need a hand with any of this, your Progressive Robot delivery team is ready to help. Raise a ticket from the Support area of your client portal or speak to your account manager and we will guide you through the next steps.