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---
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layout: docs
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page_title: Get started
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description: >-
Understand the difference between HCP Boundary, Boundary Enterprise, and Boundary Community Edition to determine which is best for your needs.
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---
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# Get started
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This section walks through how to get started with Boundary. You’
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Boundary provides secure access to private endpoints.
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There are three options to get started with Boundary:
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- **HCP Boundary** is a managed offering of the Boundary product, and is the
easiest way to get started. It streamlines deployment and operations, and is
available as a freemium service. HCP Boundary allows users to run their own
worker proxies, preventing exposure of your network to HashiCorp or clients.
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HCP Boundary has features that are not available in the Community Edition of the product, as well as support.
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It has full feature-parity with Boundary Enterprise.
Review the [Get
started with HCP Boundary](/boundary/docs/getting-started/deploy-and-login) section to
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learn more.
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- **Boundary Enterprise** is a customer-hosted offering of Boundary with Enterprise support.
It has full feature-parity with HCP Boundary.
The Enterprise version is self-managed in your environment, making it the perfect choice for agencies that are not able to use SaaS products for compliance or regulatory reasons.
The [Install Boundary](/boundary/docs/install-boundary) section can help you build a self-managed production environment using Boundary Enterprise.
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- **Boundary Community Edition** is a free distribution of Boundary that users can run
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in their own environments. The [Dev Mode quick start](/boundary/docs/oss/installing/dev-mode) section discusses running Boundary
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in Dev mode on your local machine, allowing you to get started with the Community Edition distribution quickly.
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We recommend you use the Boundary model that best meets your intended use case.
If you’ ’
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started with HCP Boundary](/boundary/docs/getting-started/deploy-and-login) section.
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## Key concepts
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Before getting started with Boundary, it's important to understand a few key
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concepts. Please consult our [Boundary concepts](/boundary/docs/concepts) page to
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familiarize yourself with Boundary's architecture and terminology.
