07/07/2026
If you're a KNX integrator on the ETS6 dongle license, this solves a problem you've almost certainly hit.
A bit of context first. Last year, someone described this on KNX forum: their dongle sits in a NAS and gets shared across the network — and it works over VPN. The comment went nowhere, buried in a thread about cloud vs. dongle licensing. But it points directly at something a lot of integrators need and don't realize is possible.
Here's the problem.
ETS6 Professional on a dongle license requires the stick to be physically plugged into the PC running ETS. No dongle, no license — ETS drops to demo mode. That's by design, not a bug.
The switch from dongle to cloud is also one-way. Once you activate a dongle license, you cannot revert to the cloud. That decision is permanent.
Three situations follow from this, and most KNX shops hit all of them eventually:
You're on site, and the dongle is at the office. The classic — and it costs you a full trip back.
You have more engineers than dongles. Three people, one license, one stick passed around like a house key.
You've bought ETS Apps. Apps are bound to a specific dongle and can't be moved. Whoever needs those features needs that exact dongle.
The fix.
Donglify forwards the USB dongle over the network. The dongle stays physically in one place — a server, your office PC, a NAS. Every other machine — laptop, site PC, VM — sees it as if it were plugged in directly.
You keep one license. You keep working offline when you need to. You simply stop being tied to the physical location of the stick.
Setup takes five minutes: install on the host machine, install on the client machine, share the device. It runs over LAN and over the internet, encrypted. It also works with ETS6 inside a VM — the exact scenario the KNX Association officially flags for USB passthrough, and where Donglify is more reliable than native VM forwarding.
Is it license-compliant?
Worth stating plainly: the license is single-user, and Donglify enforces that. Only one machine connects to the shared dongle at a time. It's functionally identical to carrying the stick between machines — without carrying it.
7-day free trial. Link in the comments.
If you've run into any of these, drop a comment!
