MediatR Goes Commercial: Implications for Clean Architecture

[axtox]

First of all, I want to thank @ardalis for this template, I can only imagine the depth of personal experience required to develop such a foundational tool for countless development teams — it’s truly inspiring. As a Technical Lead myself, I deeply understand its purpose and value and I am about to create/edit project templates for my team as well, using this template as a solid starting point because it has demonstrated its value across numerous projects I have led.

Some time ago, there was a decision to include MediatR as a dependency in the Clean Architecture template, even within the Core layer, which is fine and discussed. I considered suggesting the use of MediatR.Contracts in the Core project, but the package lacks INotificationHandler and IRequestHandler, making it unsuitable for this scenario. Unfortunately, the situation has worsened — on April 2, 2025, jbogard, the author of MediatR, announced in a GitHub discussions that "MediatR is going commercial."

This announcement raises concerns, as it appears that the Apache License may no longer be applicable to the project. If true, this would mean that MediatR is no longer suitable for commercial projects with closed-source licensing. Given this, two questions arise:

1. What is the future of the Clean Architecture template in the scope of MediatR usage?
2. Is there any information about MediatR-like functionality being introduced as a built-in feature in .NET itself?

Thank you!

[ardalis]

We don't have a lot of information at the moment. For similar things in the past like Moq and FluentAssertions we've replaced the packages with pure FOSS alternatives, but those were both only used in tests and not a key component of the system itself.

To give you my opinion regarding MediatR, I don't have any current intention of taking action, since a lot of things are up in the air, still. So the answer to 1. is, no changes are currently planned.

As for 2. this is still up in the air and if it happens, and its functionality includes pipeline behaviors, I'll certain consider using it directly instead of a third party dependency. But the soonest that would happen would be November for .NET 10 and I'd be surprised if anything shipping then would have feature parity with MediatR today.

I'm open to ideas, suggestions, feedback.

[ChristPetitjean]

Hello, I am currently looking into Wolverine. This package seems to have similar functionnalities. The major difference is that Wolverine seems to be more built around "conventions" where MediatR is more built around types inheritance.

But, anyway, you could look at Wolverine. :p : https://wolverinefx.net/