Hitobito

Hitobito is an open-source web application for managing organizations and communities with complex group hierarchies. It provides contact and member management, event and course administration, mailings, invoicing and role-based permissions in a plugin-oriented architecture.

Key Features

• Hierarchical group model with customizable group and role types via a plugin (wagon) system, allowing flexible organisational structures and permission scopes.
• Member and contact management with role assignments, membership data and multi-level access controls.
• Event and course management including registrations, waitlists and organisation-specific qualifications.
• Integrated mailings and communication features for sending newsletters and transactional emails.
• Billing and payment-related features for invoicing and financial tracking tailored to organisations.
• Extensible plugin (wagon) framework to add organisation-specific functionality and integrations.
• Production-ready artifacts and tooling visible in the repository (Dockerfile, JS build tooling, Procfile) and an official public demo environment.

Use Cases

• National or regional associations needing federated member and role management across multiple sub-organisations.
• Clubs, youth organisations and sports/music federations managing courses, events, registrations and membership fees.
• Political parties or NGOs that require structured permissioning, mailings and invoicing for large, multi-level membership bases.

Limitations and Considerations

• Core Hitobito does not ship predefined group/role types; at least one organisation-specific wagon/plugin is required to define group types and enable a usable configuration for a specific organisation. This demands some developer setup for initial organisation modelling.
• Primary user documentation and many architecture/developer docs are available in German; non-German-speaking operators may face additional effort to onboard without translation.

Hitobito is community-driven and licensed under an AGPL-family license; it is intended for organisations that need a flexible, extensible membership and event management platform and are able to maintain or adapt plugins for their specific structures.