In the modern workplace, communication drives productivity. Whether it’s team emails, calendar scheduling, or document collaboration, every organization needs a platform that’s secure, scalable, and easy to manage.

Zimbra, one of the world’s leading open-source email and collaboration solutions, fulfills these needs with its two distinct offerings — the Business Service Provider (BSP) Edition and the Network Edition (NE).While both versions share Zimbra’s strong foundation of reliability and user experience, they serve different audiences and business goals. Understanding their differences will help you choose the edition that best supports your organization’s communication strategy.

What Is Zimbra BSP Edition?

The Zimbra BSP (Business Service Provider) Edition is designed for hosting providers, managed service providers (MSPs), and resellers who want to deliver branded, multi-tenant email and collaboration services to their clients.It allows service providers to manage multiple customers under a single Zimbra environment while offering custom branding, flexible pricing, and advanced administrative control.

Types of BSP Editions

  • Professional Edition: Ideal for large-scale hosting providers. Offers the full collaboration suite, including Zimbra Office, S/MIME encryption, two-factor authentication (2FA), and Zimbra Chat & Video.
  • Standard Edition: Best suited for mid-sized providers. Includes advanced communication tools, mobile synchronization, and granular administrative controls.
  • Business Email Plus: Designed for small businesses or resellers offering feature-rich email services. Includes essential collaboration tools such as email, contacts, and shared calendars.
  • Business Email: The entry-level edition for basic business communication needs. Perfect for startups or organizations seeking cost-effective email solutions.

What Is Zimbra Network Edition?

The Zimbra Network Edition (NE) is ideal for enterprises, government organizations, and institutions that prefer to manage their own on-premise or private cloud infrastructure.It provides a complete, enterprise-grade collaboration suite that integrates email, calendar, file sharing, chat, and video — all under the organization’s control.

Key features include:

  • High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) support
  • Advanced administration and role-based access control (RBAC)
  • Integration with Active Directory / LDAP
  • Zimbra Mobile Sync (Exchange ActiveSync)
  • Zimbra Backup & Restore
  • Delegated administration and hierarchical storage management

BSP vs Network Edition: A Comparison

Which Edition Should You Choose?

  • Choose Zimbra BSP Edition if you are a service provider or MSP looking to deliver branded, hosted email services to multiple clients under a single environment. It’s ideal for scaling your business, offering flexible plans, and minimizing infrastructure management overhead.
  • Choose Zimbra Network Edition if you are an organization that requires full data ownership, tighter integration with internal systems, or adherence to compliance mandates. It’s the best fit for in-house IT environments and private deployments.

Why Tetra Information Services?

Tetra Information Services Pvt. Ltd. is one of India’s leading Zimbra partners, with proven expertise in implementing, migrating, and managing Zimbra BSP and Network Edition environments across large enterprises, government organizations, and service providers.

Tetra has successfully delivered thousands of mailboxes across multi-site, high-availability architectures, and provides comprehensive support, monitoring, and migration services for both cloud-hosted and on-premise deployments.Our team brings deep experience in Zimbra architecture design, performance tuning, and integration with third-party tools such as SORBS (email security), ELK (SIEM/SOAR), and LDAP/AD for enterprise authentication.

Whether you’re an enterprise looking to modernize your email infrastructure or a service provider aiming to launch your own hosted email business, Tetra can help you design, deploy, and support the right Zimbra edition for your needs.

Get in touch today at sales@tetrain.com or visit www.tetrain.com to discuss your requirements and explore a free Zimbra assessment for your organization.