CKAN is a free, open-source data catalog and portal platform that governments and organizations worldwide use to publish, search, and share open datasets.
CKAN is a free, open-source data management system built to power open-data portals and data catalogs. Originating from the Open Knowledge Foundation in the mid-2000s, it has become one of the most widely used platforms behind government open-data initiatives, including data.gov and data.gov.uk.
Rather than being sold as a hosted product, CKAN is self-hosted software: organizations install it on their own infrastructure or work with a third-party vendor for managed hosting and support. It is written in Python, backed by PostgreSQL for storage and Solr for search, and released under the AGPL-3.0 open-source license.
At its core, CKAN lets publishers register datasets with rich metadata, attach or link data files in formats like CSV, Excel, GeoJSON, and PDF, and expose everything through a searchable, filterable public catalog.
A RESTful JSON Action API gives developers programmatic access to datasets, organizations, and search, making CKAN suitable for automated pipelines and third-party integrations rather than just manual browsing.
Extensions — more than 60 are publicly available — add capabilities such as harvesting datasets from other catalogs, a queryable DataStore for tabular data, analytics, custom theming, and federation between multiple CKAN portals.
CKAN's software has no license fee: the source code is free to download, modify, and self-host under the AGPL-3.0 license. The real cost of running CKAN comes from infrastructure (servers, database, search index) and, optionally, support or managed hosting contracts from vendors such as Datopian or Link Digital.
There is no official paid tier or managed SaaS offering from the CKAN project or the Open Knowledge Foundation, so organizations evaluating CKAN should budget for either in-house DevOps capacity or a third-party hosting partner.
Yes. CKAN is open-source software released under the AGPL-3.0 license, so there is no fee to download, modify, or self-host it. Costs come from hosting infrastructure and any optional third-party support.
Government agencies, research institutions, NGOs, and other organizations that need to publish structured datasets publicly or internally, including operators of national open-data portals such as data.gov and data.gov.uk.
The CKAN project itself does not sell hosting. Organizations either self-host on their own infrastructure or contract third-party vendors, such as Datopian or Link Digital, for managed CKAN hosting and support.
Yes. CKAN has a modular extension system with more than 60 publicly available extensions covering harvesting, visualization, theming, and more, and organizations can also build custom extensions.
CKAN is built in Python, uses PostgreSQL for data storage, and uses Apache Solr for search indexing.
It can be challenging without technical expertise, since self-hosting requires managing servers, a database, and a search index; smaller teams often use a managed-hosting vendor instead.