Consul editions and tool binaries

This page describes the editions, binaries, and packages of Consul that are currently available. For a complete and up-to-date list of all HashiCorp releases, refer to releases.hashicorp.com.

Introduction

There are two main releases of Consul:

Consul Community Edition (CE)
Consul Enterprise

To run Consul Enterprise, you must configure Consul agents with an Enterprise license. The following table summarizes the major differences between Consul CE and Consul Enterprise:

Supported features	Consul CE	Consul Enterprise
Service discovery support	✅	✅
Service mesh support	✅	✅
KV store support	✅	✅
Multi-tenancy support	❌	✅
Additional resiliency & scalability	❌	✅
Complex topology support	❌	✅
OIDC and JWT authentication support	❌	✅
FIPS 140-2 Compliance	❌	✅
Consul-Terraform-Sync	❌	✅

To learn more about Consul Enterprise and its features, refer to Consul Enterprise.

HCP Consul Dedicated

HCP Consul Dedicated is the networking software as a service (SaaS) product available through the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP). This service provides simplified workflows for common Consul tasks and the option to have HashiCorp set up and manage your Consul servers for you.

On November 12, 2025, HashiCorp will end operations and support for HCP Consul Dedicated clusters. After this date, you will no longer be able to deploy new Dedicated clusters, nor will you be able to access, update, or manage existing Dedicated clusters. Refer to Migrate Consul Dedicated cluster to self-managed Enterprise for more information.

Additional tool binaries and maintained repositories

We make several additional Consul CLI tools available as separate binary releases. These tools can simplify operations and processes for certain runtimes, cloud providers, or complex network requirements.

The following is a current list of Consul releases with active support:

Binary package name	Consul tool name	Description
`consul-aws`	Consul AWS	Syncs the services in an AWS CloudMap namespace to a Consul datacenter. Enables native service discovery between Consul and AWS CloudMap.
`consul-cni`	Consul Container Network Interface (CNI)	Plugin for Consul on Kubernetes to allow configuring traffic redirection rules without escalated container privileges.
`consul-dataplane`	Consul Dataplanes	A lightweight process that manages Envoy for Consul service mesh workloads on Kubernetes and ECS.
`consul-ecs`	Consul ECS	Used by the `hashicorp/consul-ecs` Docker image to install and operator Consul on ECS.
`consul-esm`	Consul External Services Manager (ESM)	A daemon to run alongside Consul to manage services on external nodes and run health checks on them.
`consul-k8s`	Consul on Kubernetes CLI	A dedicated tool for managing Consul that does not require direct interaction with Helm, the Consul CLI or `kubectl`.
`consul-k8s-control-plane`	Consul on Kubernetes Helm manager	Manages Helm components for the `consul-k8s` CLI. The version should match the Helm chart version you want to use.
`consul-lambda-extension`	Lambda extension layer plugin	Enables Lambda functions to send requests to mesh services.
`consul-lambda-registrator`	Lambda registrator	Automates and manages Consul service registration and de-registration for Lambda functions.
`consul-replicate`	Consul Replicate	Long-running daemon for KV data replication between datacenters.
`consul-template`	Consul Template	Use templates to update Consul configurations dynamically using Go syntax.
`consul-terraform-sync`	Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS)	Dynamically manage network infrastructure, nearly in real-time.

The following is a list of Consul tools that were used by previous versions of Consul. Some tools may be useful when performing Consul updates with especially large release gaps, while others were deprecated entirely.

consul-api-gateway. This feature was fully integrated into the consul package in v1.16.
consul-telemetry-collector. This tool was developed to support HCP Consul Central.

Consul also supports integrations with tools developed by our community. Refer to Community tools for more information.

Next steps

To continue learning about Consul and its fundamental operations, download and install Consul. Then run a Consul agent in developer mode so you can learn how to use the 3 main Consul interface: Consul HTTP API, Consul CLI, and Consul web UI.