I bought the crossgrade from finale to dorico 5 . Do I need to purchase dorico 6 now if i want to upgrade?
If you first activated your Dorico 5 license on or after Wednesday 27 March 2025, you are eligible for a free grace period update to Dorico 6, and you should have received an email informing you of that.
If you’re not eligible for a grace period update, then yes, you will need to buy an update. You can see the price for your country here:
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well that sucks,
if i known that there will be upgrade later I would have waited.
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There was always going to be a new version of Dorico at some point. You could have chosen to wait for it, but it might have been a year or two away. As it is, for your very low special crossgrade price, you’ve gotten 8 months of Dorico, and now the upgrade is only $100. Unless you want to wait two years for Dorico 7…
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There will always be an update later!
You have to judge whether the additional functionality added in Dorico 6 is worth the modest update price we are asking for it.
If you bought Dorico 5 as a crossgrade from Finale, you paid only $149 for a product that would normally cost at least $299 (if you bought the regular Finale crossgrade) and for which many people paid as much as $579, so you got a great deal.
Do the features added in Dorico 6 provide $99 worth of value for the things you do with the software? If so, great. If not, eventually (though not for a good while) it will be possible to buy an update to Dorico 6 at a special price or a sale, and you can jump on then.
In the meantime, your copy of Dorico 5 works just as well today as it did yesterday, and will continue to do so.
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Shawn, there is no need to buy an upgrade just because it is there. Dorico 5 is a fantastic application and is working just fine.
At some point, if you like, you could use a 60-day free trial of Dorico 6. If you like it and you feel it is worth the upgrade price, you can decide and buy it at a later time.
If you are a very patient person, you could theoretically wait until around autumn and grab a discounted upgrade for probably 79 (instead of 99) dollars. These Steinberg sales are never announced early and are never at the same time - so besides you being patient, it also has an element of gambling…
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You could try to save up $20 a month for 5 months, and then buy it, regardless of any sale. That would still give you about a year and a half before another paid update was likely.
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I’m a new Dorico user via the Finale crossgrade, and just upgraded to Dorico 6 (loving Dorico so far). How often does Steinberg typically do major Dorico upgrades (e.g. 5 to 6)? I assume that’s when they charge for upgrading (and not point releases). I seem to recall Finale issuing them on a yearly cadence.
The major updates, 4 to 5, 5 to 6 etc. are paid. Then for Dorico there are minor (point, 6.1, 6.2 etc.) releases (are free) where, a few other features are added, bugs fixed etc.
Dorico is not necessarily every year, just when they determine it justifies an upgrade.
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Thanks!
I also did the cross grade to version 5, and I’ve downloaded/installed all the components, but I’ve apparently not activated the software yet.
Should I activate v5 now, wait for an email, and then grace-period upgrade to v6; or should I use the Download Assistant application to install v6, and then activate the software?
Welcome to the forum, @dashingdave. I looked up your account details, and you redeemed your Dorico Pro 5 Download Activation Code in September 2024, so I’m afraid you’re not eligible for a grace period update. However, it does look as if you’ve never actually activated the software on any computer – is that correct?
I thought I’d ‘activated’ it when I used my access code to originally download the software, but I can’t find any evidence in my Steinberg account or in the Activation Manager application that I’ve activated anything. I know I’ve never actually opened the application (yet to find a good week/month/…year 
to dive into music creation).
Thanks for the reply, though—now I know where I stand in terms of upgrading if/when I choose to do so! 
Hi there, I have education license for pro 5, is there a reduced education upgrade price, or the same as all?
No, after buying Dorico with an educational discount a first time, later upgrades have the same price for everyone.
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thanks
Hello! If I bought the crossgrade from finale to dorico 5 TODAY - do I need to purchase dorico 6 now if i want to upgrade?
Welcome to the forum, @Mateusz_Debski!
If you bought the crossgrade today, then the activation code you get should be valid for Dorico 6. (It will also let you run Dorico 5, if you have a need to run an older version.)
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I don’t think it’s possible to buy Dorico 5 anymore unless you’re purchasing a pre-owned license from an individual (though you can still run 5 with a 6 key). If an individual sells you a key from a product they’ve already activated, then you’ll be stuck with the version they sold you unless it happens to fall in a grace period, or you purchase an upgrade.
Grace Periods: Sometimes people buy and activate a product shortly before a new version comes out. Sometimes Steinberg will automatically give those customers the next version when it rolls out. If you have something that falls in such a grace period, your key gets upgraded automatically. There’s nothing special you have to do other than grab the newer version of the product at your convenience from the Steinberg Download Center. I.E. Not too long ago I responded to a sale for Steinberg’s SpectraLayers 11 Pro product and immediately Activated and started using it. Version 12 came out less than a month later, and the servers automatically upgraded my key to version 12. I did need to open Download Center and grab the new version, but there was nothing I had to do to get the new key…that was done automatically in the MySteinberg account. I remember getting notifications pop up from my OS (Windows 11) desktop, and an email from Steinberg letting me know I’d been awarded the upgrade through the grace period, along with instructions to open Steinberg Download Center and install SpectraLayers 12.
From Dorico 4 forward, any time you enter a brand new registration code of a product for the first time I believe you get the latest version. I.E. If you purchased 6 today, but do not activate it until a year or two later….I think you should get whatever the latest version is whenever you do choose to activate it. I.E. If someone had purchased Dorico 5 years ago, but never activated it….registering it now should give them the latest version.
Once activated, you can always roll back and use any older versions that are supported by the Steinberg Activation Center. You can even keep and maintain and use several different versions of Steinberg hosts on the same system and in most cases they shouldn’t conflict.
Steinberg plugins like HALion and Groove Agent are a bit different in that you can only maintain one version of those at a time. I.E. If I want to roll back to HALion 6 and Sonic 3, I’d need to remove HALion and Sonic 7 first, and plug in my old dongle.
\[Invalid: Corrected In Next Post by mducharme\] Older Versions already activated by a user and stored on Dongles…
Versions of Dorico older than 4 that required a Steinberg USB dongle or used the older soft eLicencer system are no longer supported as the old servers for that process were taken down. While you can still use keys on the old Dongle, it’s not possible to add, upgrade, or move keys on old eLicensers anymore. I.E. If you found an old boxed version of Dorico 3 that’d never been registered, I’m not sure if it’s possible to get those old codes activated anymore (certainly not possible without contacting support and working something out to get replacement activation codes for the new system). If the code for a product that old is accepted at all when entered into Download Assistant and/or Activation Center, it’ll end up unlocking the latest version of the product.
If you buy a used dongle from someone with keys for older versions on it (Dorico 4 and older I believe), it’s no longer possible to purchase ‘upgrades’ for those old keys, as the servers that did that have gone offline. You can roll back to earlier versions, but to get to Dorico 5 or newer you’d start all over with full purchase on a new license, and such a purchase would jump you to whatever the newest version is at the time of activation, and if it’s close enough to a new release, a grace period might cover that as well.
A couple corrections there. Dorico 4 was the first release to no longer use the eLicenser dongle, not Dorico 5. And Steinberg figured out a way to allow upgrades from eLicenser versions without the server, so a couple months before the deactivation, they announced you no longer needed to upgrade before the server shutdown and could still upgrade anytime in the future.
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