What is CohortHarbor?

CohortHarbor is a self-hosted web application designed for enterprise HR, administrators, IT staff, and new employees to manage the complete onboarding lifecycle. It combines employee account management, policy document versioning and preview, learning material distribution with ZIP downloads, online exam creation with question banks and retake support, automated welcome emails with templates and attachments, and a visual onboarding portal editor. The platform enforces role-based access control with SUPER_ADMIN, ADMIN, and EMPLOYEE roles, stores files in private storage with server-side authorization and watermarking, and uses SQLite via Prisma for data persistence. It runs on Node.js 24 with pnpm, can be deployed behind a reverse proxy with HTTPS, and optionally integrates with SMTP for email and local tools like LibreOffice, pdftoppm, and Tesseract for document processing. The project is MIT-licensed and actively developed.

Should you self-host CohortHarbor?

CohortHarbor scores 40/100 on selfhost.directory (how scoring works) and ranks #13 of 14 in Learning Management System. It has 195 GitHub stars.

There was no stable release in the past 12 months, so check the repository's recent activity before you rely on it.

Setup is moderate: expect some configuration beyond a single command. It is MIT-licensed and written mostly in Typescript.

Its closest alternative on selfhost.directory is Moodle (71/100). It scores higher overall, so compare the two before you pick. See CohortHarbor vs Moodle side by side.