One building, separate homes
Residents share a building and its maintenance, but each flat is private. In a multi-tenant SaaS product, customer organisations share the software and servers. Each organisation is a tenant.
Tenants can have their own users, permissions, branding, and settings. In a single-tenant setup, each customer has a separate copy of the application.
Tenant data may live in separate records in one database or in separate databases.
Sharing needs safeguards
Every user action and automated task must be linked to the right tenant to keep customers’ information separate. Shared software can simplify updates, but one customer’s heavy use can slow others.