Unable to login free edition

[dmptiprabhakar]

Hello Team,

I hope you are doing well.

I have been a long-time user of the Databricks Community Edition and have actively used it over the years to build and maintain several notebooks for learning and experimentation.

Recently, I understand that Databricks has migrated the legacy Community Edition to the new Free Edition. Since this migration, I have not been able to access the legacy Community Edition, and unfortunately, I can no longer see or access the notebooks that I had previously created.

when I login to free edition with my existing user, getting the error message(attached) plz help here.

Getting the same error when tried from signin option.

[Ashwin_DSA]

Hi @dmptiprabhakar,

Databricks announced that Community Edition would be retired at the end of 2025, and that after that date, Community Edition accounts would no longer be accessible. Official community guidance now is that legacy CE workspaces are no longer available and cannot be accessed, which includes the notebooks stored there. Before retirement, users had a one-click "Move to Free Edition" migration path and the option to manually export notebooks and re-import them into Free Edition. Once CE was shut down (Jan 1, 2026), any CE workspace that hadn’t been migrated or exported stopped being accessible, and there is no supported way now to recover notebooks from that retired CE environment. That means your old CE notebooks will not appear there unless they were explicitly migrated or exported before retirement.

Free Edition is a separate, modern environment that you access via the Databricks login flow (e.g. login.databricks.com with the Free Edition option). If sign-up with the old CE email keeps failing, try creating a new Free Edition account with a different email (you’ll get a fresh workspace either way). If you still hit the same error, or if you believe you did successfully migrate earlier but don’t see your content, the official escalation path for Free Edition is to email free_edition_help@databricks.com with the email address you used for CE/Free Edition, approximate dates you last used CE and when you tried to migrate/sign in and a screenshot of the error you’re seeing.

Hope this helps!

If this answer resolves your question, could you mark it as “Accept as Solution”? That helps other users quickly find the correct fix.

[edonaire]

Hi @dmptiprabhakar,

I have seen a few cases like this recently after the transition from Community Edition to Free Edition, and there are actually two different things happening here that are often mixed together.

First, about the notebooks:
Community Edition was never designed with strong persistence guarantees, and during the transition to Free Edition, Databricks did not perform a full workspace migration. In practice, that means most CE workspaces were not carried over, so notebooks are typically not recoverable unless they were exported beforehand.

Second, about the login error:
From what you described, this does not look like a simple browser issue. It is more likely an account state mismatch between the legacy Community Edition identity and the new Free Edition account system.

Free Edition is tied to the newer Databricks account model, and I have seen situations where:
- the same email exists in different accounts
- the user is partially registered in the new system
- the workspace is not fully provisioned after first login

A few things you can try:

1. Force a clean authentication flow
Use an incognito window and log in directly via:
https://accounts.databricks.com

2. Avoid reusing the same session path
Do not use bookmarked Community Edition URLs, start from the Free Edition entry point instead

3. Validate if it is account-specific
Try creating a new Free Edition account with a different email
If that works, it strongly indicates your original account is in an inconsistent state

At that point, there is no real workaround on the user side.
This needs to be fixed by Databricks support, because it is tied to account provisioning.

Suggestion going forward:
If you plan to continue using Free Edition for experimentation, I strongly recommend exporting notebooks or backing them up to Git. CE and Free Edition are both best treated as non-durable environments.

Hope this gives you a clearer direction 🙂