The term multi-tenant describes software architectures where a single instance of the very same software is shared among several users, called tenants. The application is developed with the aim of maintaining a virtual separation between data and configurations of tenants; each one can be customised in terms or graphical interface, but the underlying code is shared.

A multi-tenant approach, called multi-tenancy, is the opposite of single-tenancy, where each user has a dedicated instance. The choice of multi-tenancy allows to reduce costs as the number of tenants sharing the platform grows.