--- title: "What Mersive Polaris Can Do - and Which Tier Does It | Mersive" canonical: https://www.mersive.com/resources/blog/6-things-solstice description: "Eight capabilities, plainly stated, with the tier boundary marked on each one. The short version: Essentials and Pro run the same software, and only two…" published: 2021-10-12 language: en-US publisher: Mersive Technologies --- [Home](https://www.mersive.com/) /[Blog](https://www.mersive.com/resources/blog) /PLATFORM GUIDE PLATFORM GUIDE # What Mersive Polaris Can Do - and Which Tier Does It Eight capabilities, plainly stated, with the tier boundary marked on each one. The short version: Essentials and Pro run the same software, and only two things separate them. October 12, 20218 min read A capability list is only useful if it says where each capability stops. This one does, and the honest version turns out to be simpler than a feature matrix: Polaris Essentials runs the same software as Polaris Pro - the same workspace, the same cloud, the same security posture - so almost nothing on this list is tier-dependent at all. What does differ traces to hardware, in exactly two places. Read the list, then read the tier boundary at the end, and you can specify a room without a spreadsheet. THE SHORT ANSWER - The workspace, web-join, native casting, the mobile app, cross-network sharing, meeting parity and cloud management are platform capabilities: every tier has them. - Two things separate Polaris Essentials from Polaris Pro, and both are the chassis. Memory sets the simultaneous-share ceiling - 5 on Essentials, 10 on Pro - and the smaller chassis has no USB input. - That missing USB input is why true wireless BYOM and Polaris Link are Pro capabilities: both need the room's camera and microphone attached to the pod. - Polaris Host, shipping Q4 2026, runs on both tiers. On Essentials the peripherals cable to the Host, which means a cable to the table. - Link is released and Host ships Q4 2026; Route and Engage ship Q1 2027; classrooms shipping now run Essentials or Pro. Both tiers ## *01* The workspace: what the rest of the platform feeds. The display is not a screen the last laptop won. It is a live composite of every share in the meeting, side by side, laid out automatically as sources join and leave and rearranged from any seat rather than only the presenter's. A deck from a laptop, a guest's browser tab, photos from a phone and a dashboard from another building can sit on it at once. It belongs to the room, which is the part that changes behavior: the workspace is rendered by the room's own Polaris hardware, so closing a laptop does not take the meeting with it, and the content can be picked up again later. The tier line: Essentials composites up to 5 simultaneous sources, Pro up to 10. Same compositor, same software - the ceiling is memory on the smaller chassis rather than a license. Launch, which is pre-launch, is share-first hardware for displays that only ever need one source up. Every tier ## *02* Web-join: the front door, with nothing to install. Web-join is browser-based screen sharing with no client, no download and no admin rights. It is what makes the rest of the platform usable by a guest who walked in ninety seconds ago, and it is why IT has no client to package, approve, patch or manage. The room key on the display is six characters, globally unique, and expires ten minutes after it is issued. Phones share through the Polaris app instead. Once you are in, the Dock - layout, participants, source handoff, end meeting - rides in the same browser tab you joined from. ![Web-join, four steps and zero software: open a browser, enter the room key shown on the display, land in the workspace, and run the room from the same tab.](https://www.mersive.com/blog/poc-web-join.png) Web-join, four steps and zero software: open a browser, enter the room key shown on the display, land in the workspace, and run the room from the same tab. Every tier ## *03* The other doors: native casting and the mobile app. Web-join is the predominant path, not the only one. Native casting from the devices your users already carry lands on the same workspace, and so does the Polaris app for iOS and Android - screen, photos, a live whiteboard, and workspace control from your seat. One limit worth designing around: native casting reaches the room over the local link only - the room's network, a peer-to-peer session or the receiver's own access point - and its discovery is link-local, so it stops at the first VLAN boundary. Web-join and the Polaris apps do not. All of these compose together. An AirPlay share, a native Windows share, a browser guest and a phone can sit side by side on one display. Every tier ## *04* Cross-network sharing, without a VPN. Subnets, VLANs, guest Wi-Fi, LTE, the building across town: the source and the display do not have to be on the same network, and no route between them is created to make it work. The two endpoints open outbound TLS sessions on TCP 443, the cloud introduces them, and they negotiate a direct, encrypted connection between themselves. In practice that is the board member on LTE who presents in under a minute with zero access to your network, the segmented enterprise whose corporate, guest, AV and OT networks must never route to each other, and the campus sharing from Building C to Building A without spinning up a call just to move pixels. The tier line: there isn't one. Cross-network sharing runs on every Polaris tier. Every tier ## *05* Meeting parity: no second-class seats. The workspace on the room display is mirrored live to every participant's own browser. Everyone in the meeting - in the room or remote - sees the same content on their own screen, at their own zoom. No craning at a display, no "can you re-share that", no camera pointed at a projector. It is a platform behavior rather than a feature of the large room, which matters most in the places nobody budgets for: the overflow room, the student on the bus, the colleague dialing in from a hotel. Pro, and here is why ## *06* True wireless BYOM - and Link behind it. Bring your own meeting means your call - Teams, Zoom, Webex, Meet - borrows the room's camera and microphone instead of your laptop's. True wireless BYOM does it with no cable on the table, and it is multi-user, so the second presenter never waits for a dongle. This is one of the two capabilities that is genuinely Pro-only, and the reason is physical rather than commercial: bridging the room's own camera and microphone into a call means those peripherals have to be attached to the pod, and the smaller chassis has no USB input to attach them to. Polaris Link, shipping Q3 2026, follows from the same fact, though the function is the better way to say it: Link is a software bridge between the laptop in BYOM and the pod, and the pod is what controls the room's cameras and peripherals. On this platform that pod is the Pro. Both tiers, Q4 2026 ## *07* Host: the room runs the meeting. Polaris Host is the step past BYOM - the room starts, controls and shares the meeting, with no user device load-bearing at all. It ships Q4 2026, and it extends either tier, because Host is a separate unit that can carry the room's peripherals itself. The trade-off is worth knowing before you specify the room, and it is not hidden here. With Pro, the peripherals connect directly to the pod and the cables stay at the front of the room. With Essentials, they cable to the Host, which pairs with the Essentials unit - and that means a cable to the table. Larger rooms will usually want a Pro anyway, which is the constraint pointing at the right product rather than costing anyone a sale. Every tier ## *08* Fleet operations, signage and an open API. Every room joins the same management plane: usage analytics by room, building and hour; activation and licensing in one view; bulk configuration with templates, so a room profile defined once applies to every room you assign it to, and editing the template re-applies it; staged firmware rollouts; and alerts for the offline room, routed to whoever carries the pager. Signage lives in the same portal rather than a second stack: idle displays run signage managed alongside the meeting fleet, one login and one set of policies, included rather than licensed separately. There is also a REST API out of Polaris Cloud, enabled per organization: reboot a device, sleep or wake a display, read display and device information, set the signage URL on a room, and read or write room calendar events - enough to pull the fleet into monitoring and automation tooling you already run. Not yet, and we say so ## What is on the roadmap rather than in the box. - Polaris Link is released. Polaris Host ships Q4 2026. Both are hybrid additions to rooms running today. - Route - student screen routing and teacher moderation - and Engage, which adds polling, both ship Q1 2027 and pack onto Essentials or Pro. Classrooms shipping now run Essentials or Pro without it. - Launch, the share-first tier, is pre-launch. Everything in sections 01 through 08 above is capability you can buy a room for today, on the tier noted. The whole boundary, in one place ## Two differences. That is the list. Essentials is not a lite tier and not a reduced build: it runs the same Polaris software as Pro, joins the same cloud, and carries the same security posture. Every capability difference traces to the chassis, and there are two - memory sets the share ceiling at 5 against 10, and no USB input means no true wireless BYOM and no Link. Ports are the other honest difference, and they are ports rather than platform features: Essentials has one HDMI output and no HDMI input, so no dual display and no wired ingest; Pro adds a second HDMI output, an HDMI input, USB host ports and an analog audio out. On the network both tiers authenticate with 802.1X, and Pro additionally documents a dual-network posture - corporate on the wire and guests on Wi-Fi at the same time, kept isolated. Which is why the buying question is short. What does the room have to do, does anyone need the room's camera and microphone inside their call, and how many people share at once. The answers pick a chassis; the platform underneath is the same either way. [Open the glossary *›*](https://www.mersive.com/resources/glossary) [‹ All blog posts](https://www.mersive.com/resources/blog)