Open Source Intranet Software
An intranet holds the material a company would never publish outside its own walls: org charts, internal policies, and the half-private conversations that actually run the place. That makes hosting it on a vendor's cloud an odd bet for your most sensitive internal collaboration. Open source portals bring the wiki, the social feed, and team spaces together on a server inside your own network, so the internal life of the company stays on infrastructure your IT department actually controls. It also means the access model, the search index, and the identity integration are yours to adapt as the org reshuffles, instead of waiting on a roadmap you cannot see.
HumHub
Open source intranet and community software for communication, collaboration, and shared content
Twake
Privacy-first open source digital workplace for chat, files, calendar, tasks, and documents
Elgg
Open source PHP framework and CMS for building socially aware web applications
Our picks
A small but distinct set: a ready-made intranet, a collaboration-first workplace, and a framework for teams building their own.
Ready-made intranet and community: HumHub HumHub is the most complete intranet of the three, organizing people into Spaces for departments and projects, then layering wiki pages, posts, tasks, and threaded discussion with an advanced permission and notification system. Around eighty installable modules cover the integrations an internal portal needs, including advanced LDAP, JWT single sign-on, a REST API, and mass user import. It is responsive on phones and tablets and localized in more than thirty languages, which suits a mixed workforce.
Chat-first digital workplace: Twake Twake approaches the intranet from the collaboration side, bundling team chat, file storage, a shared calendar, task management, video calls, and real-time document editing into one workplace so conversations and files stay connected. Built by Linagora and released under the AGPL, it runs as a hosted service or as your own Docker Compose instance, keeping data on infrastructure you control. Pick it when day-to-day communication matters more than heavy publishing.
Framework for custom social apps: Elgg Elgg is not a finished intranet but a PHP and MySQL framework for building socially aware applications, giving you user accounts, groups, content, and fine-grained access control as extendable building blocks. A pluggable module system lets you reshape core behavior, and a catalog of over a thousand community plugins extends it further. Governed by the nonprofit Elgg Foundation, it suits a team with developers that wants to construct something specific.
Fitting an intranet to how your company communicates
The three projects here solve the intranet problem from different angles, so the first decision is which shape of internal platform you need. HumHub is the closest to a ready-made intranet: it organizes people into Spaces for departments and projects, layers a wiki, posts, tasks, and events on top, and ships around eighty installable modules for things like LDAP and single sign-on. Twake comes at the same goal from the collaboration side, bundling team chat, file storage, a shared calendar, tasks, and real-time document editing into one workplace. Elgg is not a finished intranet but a PHP framework for building socially aware applications, which suits a team that wants to construct something specific rather than adopt someone else's model.
Whichever you lean toward, weight the access model as heavily as the features, because an intranet lives or dies on who can see what. Broad read access, narrow publishing rights, and private HR or leadership areas all need to hold up after a reorganization, not just on launch day. HumHub's advanced permission system and its LDAP, single sign-on, and user-import modules exist precisely so accounts stay accurate as people join and leave, and Elgg's access-control and user-group model is a core part of the framework rather than a bolt-on. Confirm how permission inheritance behaves before you commit, since page-by-page exceptions turn every later audit into manual work.
This is a small, curated set rather than a crowded field, so be realistic about the gaps. None of these will match a large proprietary suite feature for feature, and Twake in particular is as much a chat-and-files workplace as a publishing-heavy intranet. Decide early which system is authoritative for profiles and documents, and confirm you can export pages, attachments, and user data in a form you can parse.
Related categories
Frequently asked questions
What makes intranet software different from a wiki or a document manager?+
A wiki is page-centered and a document manager is file-centered, but an intranet has to combine publishing, an employee directory, announcements, navigation, and permissions for the whole organization at once. HumHub illustrates the difference: it pairs wiki pages and posts with user profiles, Spaces, and an advanced permission system, so news and durable policy content can live side by side without blurring together. If a tool cannot separate the two, it turns noisy fast.
Can an intranet serve staff who do not have a company email address?+
Frontline, retail, and plant-floor workers often lack a corporate mailbox, so plan identity and notifications around that from the start. Check whether the platform supports mobile access, shared or kiosk devices, and sign-in that does not assume email is the password-recovery channel. HumHub is responsive on phones and tablets and localized in more than thirty languages, which helps a mixed workforce, but confirm how those users authenticate before you promise them access.
Which identity integrations should we verify before rollout?+
At a minimum, confirm how users are provisioned and deactivated, not just how they log in. SAML, OIDC, LDAP, and SCIM are the common pieces, but implementation quality matters more than the acronym. HumHub covers this through installable modules for advanced LDAP and JWT single sign-on, so directory accounts can drive membership. Test group sync, name changes, and what happens the day someone leaves, because stale local accounts quietly become a governance problem.
Will intranet search actually find policies, announcements, and people?+
That depends on the indexing model, and it is worth testing with real employee queries rather than demo keywords. Good intranet search respects permissions, indexes attachment contents, and ranks current authoritative pages above old discussion. HumHub includes filtering and search across its mixed content and people records, but no engine rescues weak metadata, so budget time for consistent tagging and clear page ownership. Search quality usually exposes a thin taxonomy faster than anything else.
When would we build on a framework like Elgg instead of adopting a ready-made intranet?+
Choose a framework when your requirements are specific enough that no packaged intranet fits, and you have developers to carry the build. Elgg is a PHP and MySQL framework for socially aware applications, giving you user accounts, groups, content, and access control as building blocks, plus a large catalog of community plugins. HumHub or Twake make more sense when you want a working platform out of the box rather than a foundation to construct one on.
Do we have to self-host an open source intranet?+
Not always, but the sensitive nature of intranet content pushes many teams toward it. HumHub and Elgg are self-hosted PHP applications, while Twake can run as a hosted service from Linagora or as your own instance with Docker Compose, so you can weigh operational effort against data control. If you self-host, budget for patching, backups, TLS, and directory integration, since an intranet outage blocks people from the information they need to work.
How should permissions handle content of mixed sensitivity?+
An intranet routinely mixes all-hands announcements, department-only pages, and tightly restricted HR or legal material, so look for role-based publishing, inherited section permissions, and private spaces. HumHub's Spaces each carry their own permission and notification settings, which keeps a leadership area genuinely separate from the general feed. Avoid any setup where every exception becomes a one-off page rule, because reorganizations and audits then turn into slow, error-prone cleanup.