Akka License Migration, Handled by Engineers Who've Done It
Akka license migration is a decision every team running Akka in production eventually has to make: pay Lightbend for continued use of newer releases, or move to Apache Pekko, the open source fork built before the license changed. Either path has real technical tradeoffs, and we help you work through both before writing a line of code.
Why this isn't a find and replace
Renaming packages is the easy part.
Swapping "com.typesafe.akka" for "org.apache.pekko" across a codebase is mechanical work, tedious but not risky. The real decision shows up in the places a simple rename can't reach: how a live cluster gets cut over, what happens to years of persisted data, and which of your dependencies even have a Pekko-compatible version yet. Get any of those wrong and you're debugging a production incident instead of running a migration, which is backend engineering work whether or not it involves a license at all.
What's actually involved
The four things that determine how this migration goes.
01
The License Decision
Akka's newer releases run under the Business Source License, which requires a paid Lightbend subscription past a revenue threshold. Pekko is Apache 2.0, maintained by the Apache Software Foundation, forked from the last open source Akka release. Which one is right depends on your compliance requirements and your appetite for a vendor relationship, not just cost.
02
Cluster Compatibility
Akka and Pekko nodes can't generally form a cluster together, so a live system can't just roll new nodes in gradually. The cutover needs a real plan, not an assumption that it'll behave like any other dependency bump.
03
Persistence and Serialization
Data written with akka-persistence reads fine under pekko-persistence, that part is a relief. Custom serializers, Kryo in particular, need their Pekko-specific equivalents, and that's the kind of detail that gets missed until it breaks in staging.
04
Everything Downstream
Every library built on top of Akka, connectors, management tooling, custom plugins, needs its Pekko equivalent confirmed to exist before the migration starts, not discovered mid-cutover. We check this first.
We've made this call before.
Let's make it for your system.
Tell us what you're running and what's driving the decision. We'll walk through both paths honestly, including the one that isn't migrating at all.