# Flex vs SimpleFlex

Open iT strongly recommends default Flex collection directly on the license servers for many reasons.

SimpleFlex, which does not require license files, has the following limitations:

No support for Packages and Components
Missing full support for feature version (only actively used versions can be reported at a given time)
No support for token-based license usage (only token pool data is reported)

Since SimpleFlex treats every license as a basic feature, many products will work fine without reading the license files. However, the data quality may degrade quickly with more advanced licenses. This is especially true when a license (feature) can be of multiple types. For example, features that are present both as a regular feature and token feature in the same license file.

In addition, collecting directly on the license server guarantees that:

The license file Open iT reads is never out of data
The base data will not be lost due to network instabilities between the collector and the license server

The impact of the Open iT agent collecting license data is negligible. However, if installation on the license servers is not an option, the best solution is to:

Use Flex configuration
Set up automatic syncing of license files from license servers to the Open iT client collecting the data. At least for any product that includes:
- Tokens
- Packages and Components
  
  Packages defined with OPTIONS=SUITE is the only real Packages in FlexNet. Multiple methods are available depending on platforms. Robocopy (Windows) and rsync (Unix) are two common ones.