Open Source Education ERP, Free for Schools & Universities
OpenEduCat is a free, open source education ERP for schools, colleges, and universities. Students, courses, attendance, fees, timetables, exams, all in one system with zero per-student licensing costs. Deploy on your own servers or use managed cloud. 30,000+ institutions in 130+ countries already run it.
No credit card required. LGPL v3 licensed. Full source code on GitHub.
Why Open Source for Education Management?
Proprietary education software charges per-student or per-seat fees that scale with enrollment. Your growth becomes their revenue. Open source changes that equation. You pay for hosting and support if you want it, but the software itself costs nothing whether you have 200 students or 20,000.
Zero Licensing Costs
No per-student, per-teacher, or per-seat pricing. A 500-student school and a 50,000-student university pay the same for the community edition: nothing. That budget goes to classrooms, not software licenses.
Full Source Code Access
Customize workflows, reports, and interfaces to match how your institution actually works. Add custom fields, build new modules, modify existing ones. Your IT team can read and change every line of code. No waiting on a vendor to maybe add your feature request to next year's roadmap.
No Vendor Lock-in
Your data sits in your PostgreSQL database. Export it anytime. Host anywhere. If you ever want to switch systems, your data leaves with you. No vendor can raise prices, discontinue features, or push unwanted upgrades on your schedule.
Community-Driven Development
Bug fixes and features come from institutions, developers, and ed-tech professionals around the world. When a university in India builds a better hostel management module, everyone benefits. New features come from real classroom needs, not marketing slide decks.
Data Sovereignty & Compliance
Host student data in your country, your state, or on-premise behind your firewall. You pick the jurisdiction, not the vendor. This makes FERPA, GDPR, and local data residency compliance straightforward because you control where the data lives.
Enterprise Support Available
Open source does not mean you are on your own. Enterprise support packages give you SLA-backed response times, a dedicated account manager, and managed cloud hosting. Use the free edition until you need more. Upgrade when it makes sense for your institution, not because your trial expired.
Complete Education Management, Every Module Included
Most education tools do one thing. Moodle does LMS. PowerSchool does SIS. Then you spend years stitching them together. OpenEduCat is a complete education ERP. Every core module below is included free in the community edition. No upsells, no module-by-module pricing.
| Module | What It Does | Free | Learn More |
|---|---|---|---|
| Student Information System | Student records, enrollment, demographics, academic history, and document management | View details → | |
| Learning Management (LMS) | Online courses, quizzes, assignments, gradebook, and SCORM content delivery | View details → | |
| Attendance Management | Manual, digital, and mobile check-in with daily and session-based tracking | View details → | |
| Fee Management | Tuition billing, online payment collection, receipts, and fee structure configuration | View details → | |
| Timetable Management | Class scheduling, room allocation, teacher assignments, and conflict detection | View details → | |
| Exam Management | Exam creation, scheduling, grading, and results publication | View details → | |
| Parent Portal | Real-time access to grades, attendance, assignments, and direct teacher communication | View details → | |
| Gradebook & Report Cards | Auto-generated report cards with customizable templates and grading scales | View details → | |
| Admission Management | Online applications, document uploads, merit lists, and enrollment workflows | View details → | |
| Transportation | Bus routes, vehicle tracking, transport fee management, and driver assignment | View details → | |
| Library Management | Book catalog, issue and return tracking, fine management, and digital library | View details → | |
| HR & Payroll | Employee records, leave management, payroll processing, and contract tracking | View details → |
Plus 60+ additional modules including hostel management, placement & career services, alumni management, and more. See all 73 modules →
Free vs Enterprise, What's Included?
The community edition is a working education ERP, not a trial or a crippled demo. Enterprise adds advanced capabilities for institutions that need them. Here is exactly what you get in each.
| Feature | Free Community | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Student Information System | ||
| LMS (courses, quizzes, gradebook) | ||
| Attendance (manual + digital) | ||
| Fee management (basic) | ||
| Timetable management | ||
| Parent portal | ||
| Exam management | ||
| Admission management | ||
| Library management | ||
| HR & Payroll | ||
| Biometric attendance | ||
| Face recognition attendance | ||
| Anti-cheating (quiz proctoring) | ||
| Advanced analytics dashboards | ||
| Multi-campus management | ||
| Custom branding & white-label | ||
| Priority support with SLA | ||
| Hosting | Self-hosted | Cloud or self-hosted |
| Support | Community | Dedicated with SLA |
| Price | Free forever | View pricing |
Built for K-12 Schools
Small and mid-size schools get the worst deal in ed-tech. Commercial platforms price them out. Free tools lack the depth to replace the spreadsheets and paper binders. OpenEduCat gives you a complete management platform that costs nothing to license. Your IT budget stays focused on infrastructure, not software fees.
Enrollment & Admissions
Accept online applications from parents, track document submissions, generate merit lists, and convert applicants to enrolled students. No more chasing paper forms. Schools that managed admissions through email and spreadsheets can digitize the whole process in a few days.
Admission management →Daily Operations
Automate attendance, generate conflict-free timetables, manage bus routes and transport fees, track library books. The goal is simple: teachers spend less time on admin work, and administrators get dashboards instead of filing cabinets.
Attendance management →Parent Communication
Parents get a portal to check grades, attendance, homework, and fee balances on their own. Fewer phone calls to the front office. Fewer paper notices going home in backpacks. Front-office staff reclaim hours each week that used to go to answering the same questions over and over.
Parent portal →Fees & Finances
Configure fee structures by grade, term, or scholarship. Collect payments online and send automated reminders for overdue fees. Generate financial reports for your board. It replaces both the manual ledger and that expensive standalone billing software you have been meaning to cancel.
Fee management →Designed for Colleges & Universities
Universities are not just big schools. You have multi-department structures, credit-based academics, research programs, hostel management, placement coordination, and compliance requirements spanning federal, state, and accreditation bodies. OpenEduCat handles all of it from one platform.
Multi-Department & Multi-Campus
Run separate faculties, departments, and campuses from a single platform. Each department keeps its own academic calendar, fee structure, and workflows. Central administration gets consolidated reporting across everything. The multi-campus module is enterprise-only, so keep that in mind if you have satellite campuses.
Multi-campus management →Credit-Based Academics
Credit-hour systems, GPA calculations, elective registration, prerequisite enforcement, and transcript generation. Students register for courses online, and the system checks credits, prerequisites, and schedule conflicts before confirming enrollment. No more registrar staff manually cross-referencing spreadsheets during add/drop week.
Student information system →Thesis & Research Management
Track thesis submissions, assign advisors, manage review committees, and monitor research milestones. Faculty see all their advisees' progress on one dashboard instead of drowning in email threads. Graduate coordinators can finally answer "where is student X in their thesis?" without making three phone calls.
Thesis management →Placement & Career Services
Coordinate campus recruitment drives, manage company relationships, track placement outcomes, and generate the placement statistics that accreditation bodies and prospective students care about. Your placement office gets a structured pipeline instead of scattered spreadsheets and sticky notes.
Placement management →Hostel & Accommodation
Room allocation, hostel fee collection, mess management, visitor logs. Track occupancy rates, handle maintenance requests, and give students an online portal for accommodation preferences and complaints. Wardens see everything in one place instead of juggling paper registers.
Hostel management →Convocation & Alumni
Plan convocation ceremonies, handle degree verification requests, and maintain your alumni network. Track alumni career outcomes and engagement. That data feeds back into placement statistics and fundraising, so the system actually gets more useful over time.
Alumni management →Deployment Options
Pick the deployment model that fits your IT team, your data policies, and your budget. Both work with the same codebase.
Self-Hosted (On-Premise)
Install OpenEduCat on your own servers. You control your data, your infrastructure, and when updates happen. Best for institutions with an IT team and strict data residency requirements. Runs on a $20/month VPS for small schools or on your existing server infrastructure.
- Full control over data and infrastructure
- Supports Linux, Docker, AWS, Azure, GCP
- Update on your own schedule
- Meets FERPA and GDPR data residency rules
Cloud-Hosted (Managed)
We handle the servers, updates, backups, and security patches. You get instant setup with no server management. Best for schools without dedicated IT staff who just want the system to work without thinking about Linux kernel updates.
- Instant setup, no server configuration
- Automatic updates and daily backups
- 99.9% uptime SLA with enterprise plans
- Free trial available
Trusted by 30,000+ Institutions Worldwide
Single-campus schools, multi-campus university systems, and everything in between. Institutions across 130+ countries use OpenEduCat to run their daily operations.
“We looked at three proprietary systems before finding OpenEduCat. The cost savings were obvious, but honestly what surprised us was how much it actually does. Our IT team had SIS, attendance, and fee management running in two weeks. We saved over $15,000 in year one on licensing alone.”
Dr. Sarah M.
IT Director, International K-12 School, Kenya
“12,000 students, three campuses. We needed multi-department academics, hostel management, and placement coordination all in one system. Ellucian quoted us a number that made our CFO laugh. OpenEduCat gave us what we needed at a fraction of the cost, and because it is open source, our developers built custom integrations with our existing library and finance systems without waiting on anyone.”
Prof. Rajesh K.
CTO, Technical University, India
Getting Started in 4 Steps
Download to a running system in days, not months. No multi-year implementation project. No consultants billing by the hour for a year.
Download
Grab the community edition from the download page. You get all core modules, documentation, and installation scripts in one package.
Download now →Deploy
Install on your Linux server, spin up a Docker container, or request managed cloud hosting. Step-by-step guides cover Ubuntu, Debian, Docker, AWS, Azure, and GCP.
View guides →Configure
Add your departments, import student records from CSV, set up fee structures, define academic calendars, and adjust workflows to match how your school actually operates.
See a demo →Go Live
Start using the system. Basic setup takes 1-2 days for a small school. Full deployment with historical data migration runs 1-4 weeks depending on how much data you are bringing over.
Talk to an advisor →Open Source Licensing
The community edition uses the GNU Lesser General Public License v3 (LGPL v3). In plain English, here is what that means for your institution:
- Free to use: deploy it for any number of students, teachers, and staff at zero cost
- Free to modify: change the source code to fit your workflows, add custom modules, integrate with other systems
- Free to distribute: share it with other institutions in your district, contribute improvements back to the community
- No hidden costs: the community edition has no feature restrictions, time limits, or student caps
Enterprise modules are separately licensed for institutions that need biometric attendance, face recognition, multi-campus management, or priority support. The enterprise license is optional. Plenty of institutions run the community edition in production without ever upgrading.
Compare with Other Education Software
If you are comparing options, here is how OpenEduCat stacks up. We tried to be fair. Where another platform is stronger in a category, we say so.
| Dimension | OpenEduCat | Moodle | Fedena | PowerSchool |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| System Type | Full Education ERP | LMS only | School Management | SIS + LMS |
| Open Source | Yes (LGPL v3) | Yes (GPL) | Partial | No |
| Free Edition | Full-featured | Full-featured | Limited | None |
| SIS (Student Records) | Included | Not included | Included | Included |
| LMS (Courses & Quizzes) | Included | Core strength | Basic | Via Schoology |
| Finance & Fees | Included | Not included | Included | Separate product |
| HR & Payroll | Included | Not included | Limited | Separate product |
| Self-Hosted Option | Yes | Yes | Yes | Cloud only |
| Per-Student Pricing | No | No | Yes | Yes |
| Typical 5-Year TCO (1K students) | $12K-$25K | $10K-$30K | $15K-$40K | $50K-$150K |
Moodle is a great LMS, but it is not an ERP. It does not include student records, finance, or HR. PowerSchool is a solid SIS but is proprietary with per-student pricing that adds up fast at scale.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is OpenEduCat really free?
Yes. The community edition costs nothing. No student limits, no time limits, no feature walls on the included modules. Download it, install it on your servers, run it forever. Enterprise features like biometric attendance, face recognition, anti-cheating, and advanced analytics require a separate enterprise license, but the community edition is production-ready on its own.
What's the difference between the free and enterprise editions?
The community edition gives you SIS, LMS, attendance, basic fee management, timetable scheduling, parent portal, exams, and gradebook. That covers most of what a single-campus school needs day to day. Enterprise adds biometric and face-recognition attendance, quiz anti-cheating, advanced analytics dashboards, multi-campus management, SLA-backed support, and managed cloud hosting. The community edition is not a stripped-down trial. It is a working system.
Can I host OpenEduCat on my own servers?
Yes, and most institutions do. Install it on any Linux server, spin up a Docker container, or run it on a VM from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud. A $20/month VPS handles a small school. Self-hosting means you control your data, your backups, and your update schedule. Nobody pushes an update to your production system at 2 AM without your say-so.
How many students can the system handle?
We have schools running 50 students and universities running 50,000+. The underlying framework handles concurrent users and multi-campus academic structures without breaking a sweat. That said, performance depends on your server specs. A 4-core, 8GB RAM server comfortably handles 5,000 students with room to grow.
Is there support available for the free edition?
For the community edition, you have documentation, community forums, and GitHub issues for bug reports and feature requests. The community is active and most questions get answered within a day or two. If your institution needs guaranteed response times, enterprise customers get SLA-backed support with phone, email, and a dedicated account manager.
Can I customize the system to fit my institution?
Yes. You have full source code access. Your IT team can modify workflows, add custom fields, create reports, build dashboards, and write integrations with your existing systems. If you need help with something complex, like a custom admissions workflow or integration with your government reporting portal, OpenEduCat also offers professional customization services.
Is student data safe in an open source system?
Open source does not mean less secure. It means the code is publicly auditable, so vulnerabilities get spotted and patched faster than in systems where only the vendor sees the code. OpenEduCat has role-based access control, encryption at rest and in transit, audit logs, automated backups, and FERPA-aligned data handling. You can also run your own security audits on the source code, something you cannot do with proprietary software.
Ready to Go Open Source?
30,000+ institutions already run OpenEduCat. Download the free community edition and try it on your own server, or request a demo and we will walk you through it.
No credit card required. Free forever. LGPL v3 licensed.