boundary/website/content/docs/community/index.mdx

---
layout: docs
page_title: Boundary Community Edition
description: An introduction to Boundary Community Edition
---

# Boundary Community Edition

Boundary provides secure remote access to critical systems with fine-grained
authorizations based on trusted identities. While HCP Boundary provides a
managed solution, Boundary Community Edition is a self-managed distribution that organizations
can deploy on-premise to manage access to infrastructure endpoints. The source
code for Boundary Community Edition is freely available on GitHub. The following sections
contain information on the use case for Boundary and how to install and
configure self-managed Boundary environments.

Traditional approaches like SSH bastion hosts or VPNs require distributing and
managing credentials, configuring network controls like firewalls, and exposing
the private network. Boundary Community Edition provides secure access to hosts and critical
systems without having to manage credentials or expose your network, and is
free.

Boundary Community Edition is designed to be straightforward to understand, highly scalable,
and resilient. It can run in clouds, on-premise, or within secure enclaves.
Boundary does not require an agent to be installed on the end host.

![How Boundary Works](/img/how-boundary-works_light.png#light-theme-only)
![How Boundary Works](/img/how-boundary-works_dark.png#dark-theme-only)

## Tutorial

Refer to the [Get Started with self-hosted Boundary](/boundary/tutorials/oss-getting-started) tutorial series to learn how to install and configure Boundary.