What is the main difference between an environment and an instance in Archer?

Understanding the Archer hierarchy is fundamental to system administration. As detailed in the Archer Administration II curriculum and the Archer Control Panel (ACP) guides, an Environment refers to the overall installation of the Archer software on a set of servers (Web, Services, and Database).

Within a single environment, an administrator can host multiple Instances . Each instance represents a logically isolated "tenant" with its own unique Instance Database , File Repository (for attachments), and set of users. For example, an organization might have one environment that hosts a "Production" instance, a "UAT" instance, and a "Training" instance. This architecture allows organizations to share the same server hardware and software binaries while keeping the data and configurations of different business units or development stages completely separate and secure from one another.