Introduction
Open Intranet is an open source intranet platform that brings together news, knowledge, documents, people and data from your existing systems — with full data ownership and unlimited customisation. It is free, self-hostable, and built as a Drupal distribution, which means it inherits the entire Drupal ecosystem.
Who is it for?
Section titled “Who is it for?”Open Intranet is designed for organisations that need:
- Full control over their data and infrastructure — on-prem, private cloud, or any hosting that supports PHP
- No per-user licensing fees — the software itself is free and always will be
- Enterprise features out of the box — SSO/OIDC, must-read tracking, engagement analytics, AI-assisted content, room booking, knowledge base
- Long-term extensibility through Drupal’s ecosystem of contributed modules — built for 5+ year deployments without vendor lock-in
It scales from small teams (50–100 employees) running it as-is, to enterprises with 7,000+ users running heavily customised implementations.
Open Intranet installation is a Drupal distribution - what that means
Section titled “Open Intranet installation is a Drupal distribution - what that means”Open Intranet is technically a Drupal install profile bundled with a curated set of contributed modules, a starter theme and a collection of recipes (reusable Drupal config + content bundles). When you install Open Intranet, you are installing a regular Drupal site that has been pre-configured to behave as an intranet.
Drupal is a fantastic foundation for intranets because it offers:
- Fine-grained permissions — combine roles, per-entity access, per-group and per-department visibility to model any organisational structure.
- Battle-tested security — governments, banks and public institutions have run Drupal for 20+ years; the Drupal Security Team triages CVEs and ships advisories on a fixed schedule.
- Unlimited extensibility — pick from ~50,000 contributed modules, or write your own with Drupal’s plugin types, hooks, events and services to bend the platform to any internal process without rebuilding from scratch.
Open Intranet is a Drupal website
Section titled “Open Intranet is a Drupal website”Once installed, Open Intranet behaves exactly like any other Drupal site. The administrative UI is Drupal’s, the content model uses Drupal entities (nodes, users, media, taxonomy terms, files, groups), the templating layer is Twig, the configuration system is Drupal’s YAML-based configuration management, and the command-line tooling is drush.
There is no proprietary admin layer sitting on top of Drupal. There is no closed format, no parallel data store, no SaaS API contract. Everything is in the database and the codebase that you own.
The practical consequence is that everything you can do on a Drupal site, you can do on Open Intranet:
- Add custom content types, fields, taxonomies, views, blocks and menus through the admin UI
- Override Twig templates and CSS in your own theme to match your brand
- Use Drupal’s permission and role system for access control
- Hook into events with ECA (no-code business rules) or with custom modules
- Manage configuration in code with the standard Drupal config-export workflow
- Run any standard Drupal contrib module alongside Open Intranet’s stack
You can use thousands of Drupal modules
Section titled “You can use thousands of Drupal modules”Drupal.org has roughly 50,000 contributed modules. Most are GPL-compatible, security-tracked and trivially installed with Composer. Because Open Intranet is just a Drupal site, all of these are available to extend it.
What is already in the box
Section titled “What is already in the box”Open Intranet ships with around 80 contributed modules pre-selected and pre-configured for an intranet workload. Names you may recognise:
The full list lives in composer.json on drupal.org.
What you can add yourself
Section titled “What you can add yourself”Beyond what is already shipped, you can composer require any of the ~50,000 modules on drupal.org. Categories that come up often on intranet projects:
| Category | Common modules to add | Use case |
|---|---|---|
| AI extensions | additional ai_provider_* packages, custom agents on top of ai_agents | Swap from OpenAI to Anthropic / Mistral / on-prem LLM, add domain-specific agents |
| Identity / SSO | simple_oidc, samlauth, ldap | Microsoft Entra ID / Azure AD, Okta, Google Workspace, Keycloak, on-prem AD |
| Authentication | tfa, password_policy | Two-factor auth, enterprise password rules |
| API / decoupled | jsonapi_extras, simple_oauth, graphql, rest_api_authentication | Mobile apps, headless front-ends, third-party integrations |
| Multilingual | Drupal core + tmgmt | Global organisations, translation workflows |
| Compliance / GDPR | gdpr, auditfiles, auto_purge | Right-to-be-forgotten, data retention, audit logs |
| Search | search_api, search_api_solr, search_api_meilisearch | Solr / Meilisearch / Elasticsearch swap-ins |
| Workflow / BPM | workflows, content_moderation, bpmn_io | HR approval flows, document review, change requests |
| Integrations | google_api_client, microsoft_graph, migrate_plus | Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, HR/CRM/ERP imports |
| Performance | redis, memcache, big_pipe | Caching layer for thousands of concurrent users |
| Backup / DR | backup_migrate | Scheduled DB + files backups |
Finding modules that meet your need can be achieved by browsing drupal.org/project/project_module/ pages, but often a Google search or LLM discussion will give you what you what you need faster.
To add new modules to your isntallation run: composer require drupal/<module> then enable in the admin UI or via drush en <module>.
You can use Drupal recipes for repeatable customisation
Section titled “You can use Drupal recipes for repeatable customisation”Open Intranet ships several optional recipes (e.g. Room Booking, Courses, FAQ, Ideas, Inventory, Kanban, Kudos, SSO Keycloak, Demo Content) that bundle config + content + dependencies for a specific use case and can be applied with one click at /admin/modules/browse/recipes.
You can author your own recipes for company-specific configuration (e.g. “internal-policies-suite” — your own content types, workflows, default permissions and demo content) and apply them to any Open Intranet instance — staging, production, a new department site — without copy-pasting configuration.
You can host Open Intranet anywhere PHP runs
Section titled “You can host Open Intranet anywhere PHP runs”Because Open Intranet is “just” a Drupal site:
- Self-host on your own Linux server (Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL — see Installation)
- Docker / Kubernetes in your private cloud
- Managed Drupal hosting like Pantheon, Acquia Cloud, Platform.sh or Amazee.io / Lagoon
- Generic PHP hosting with MariaDB / MySQL / PostgreSQL — typically requires SSH + Composer
There is no SaaS lock-in: you can move between hosting providers by moving the codebase, the database and binary files.
You patch and update with Composer
Section titled “You patch and update with Composer”Updates are the same as any Drupal project — composer update, run database updates with drush updb -y, clear caches with drush cr. Security advisories are tracked at drupal.org/security and apply to every component in the stack.
You can pin versions, apply patches with cweagans/composer-patches (already included), and run staging/production from the same composer.lock.
Where to learn
Section titled “Where to learn”Read this documentation. It focuses on Open Intranet specifics and some Drupal basics. It specifically tries not to duplicate Drupal documentation and does so only when it is required to maintain logic and understanding. For general Drupal mechanics (entities, fields, views, plugin types, hooks, services), follow the links to drupal.org
Because Open Intranet is a regular Drupal site, the entire upstream Drupal documentation applies. Useful starting points for non-Drupal teams:
- drupal.org/docs — official user, admin, and developer guides
- Drupal User Guide — comprehensive end-to-end manual
- api.drupal.org — full API reference for developers
- drush.org — the command-line tool you will use a lot
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- Installation — production install on Linux, plus a quick local-dev path with DDEV
- Configuration — site name, email, recipes, SSO, theme
- User Guide — how end users interact with the intranet
- Features — deep dives into Engagement Analytics, Must-Read, Room Booking and more
- REST API — JSON:API reference for integrating with external systems