How Standard vs Premium licenses work in SNL

The  key concept on how licencing works when you have multiple packages in your SNL, and the part most people misunderstand is:

All SNL setups are built on Standard licenses, so every user always starts with a Standard license.

The Standard licence always contains the core CAD (parts, assemblies, drawings) functionality.

Premium (or Professional) is NOT a full standalone license, it’s an add-on layer on top of Standard 

The Premium (or Professional) license only gets pulled when needed 

When you open SOLIDWORKS the system checks out a Standard license first, and you work normally in base CAD. If you then enable an add-in (e.g. Simulation, Routing) the server checks out a Premium license, and when you close or disable it, the Premium license is returned to the pool.

It is by design that SOLIDWORKS often “starts as Standard” because SNL tries to minimize license usage, and most often only a limited number of Premium licenses are available, so they are only used when explicitly needed. That’s why you don’t “launch in Premium”, you trigger Premium by activating any of its features.

One important rule is that you cannot use Premium without Standard. Add-ins require first a Standard license then a Premium license.

A typical example setup

Let’s say your company has purchased a total number of 10 SOLIDWORKS licenses with the following distribution:
6 × Standard
3 × Professional
1 × Premium 

In reality this means that up to 10 users can run SOLIDWORKS at once, and out of those 3 can use Professional features and 1 can use Premium features, so far most users agree.

But when looking into the SNL Manager with this setup it states:
10 × Standard
3 × Professional
1 × Premium 

This is because Premium and Professional are only add-ons to the Standard License, as mentioned above. But this is confusing to many users as they think they all of a sudden have a total number of 14 licenses, which is not the case.

Common confusion / issues

“I have Premium but only get Standard”. This is normal since you haven’t activated a Premium feature.

“Premium features missing”. All Premium licenses might already be in use. 

“Why do I need Standard if I have Premium?”. Because Premium is not standalone in SNL.
 

Simple mental model

Think of it like this:

Standard = entry ticket 

Premium = VIP upgrade (only when needed)