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CKAN

Powerful platform for publishing, sharing, and managing open data

Data Catalogs & Governance

CKAN enables organizations to create data portals, catalog datasets, provide APIs, and visualize data, supporting robust data discovery and reuse across governments and NGOs.

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Overview

Overview

CKAN is a mature data‑management system used by governments, NGOs, and research institutions to build public data portals. It provides a searchable catalog, dataset versioning, and a user‑friendly web interface that makes data discovery straightforward for both technical and non‑technical audiences.

Core capabilities

The platform ships with a rich front‑end, a complete RESTful API for both metadata and raw resources, and built‑in visualization widgets. Its plugin architecture lets developers add custom authentication, storage back‑ends, or domain‑specific extensions. Documentation covers installation, configuration, and scaling, and the community offers support via mailing lists, Gitter, and Stack Overflow.

Deployment

CKAN runs on Python and PostgreSQL and can be deployed on‑premise or in containers. Detailed installation guides are available in the official docs, and continuous‑integration pipelines ensure code quality. Organizations can start with a basic instance and extend it over time to meet evolving data‑governance needs.

Highlights

Rich searchable catalog with versioning
Full RESTful API for metadata and resources
Built‑in data visualisation widgets
Extensible plugin architecture for custom extensions

Pros

  • Mature community and extensive documentation
  • Scalable architecture with PostgreSQL backend
  • Comprehensive API enables programmatic access
  • Highly extensible via plugins

Considerations

  • Requires Python and PostgreSQL expertise to deploy
  • Initial UI can feel complex for casual users
  • Self‑hosting demands server administration
  • Out‑of‑the‑box visualizations are limited

Managed products teams compare with

When teams consider CKAN, these hosted platforms usually appear on the same shortlist.

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Alation

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Ataccama

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Atlan

Modern data catalog and collaborative metadata platform for data discovery and governance

Looking for a hosted option? These are the services engineering teams benchmark against before choosing open source.

Fit guide

Great for

  • National or municipal open‑data portals
  • NGOs needing to share humanitarian datasets
  • Research consortia publishing reproducible data
  • Developers building data‑driven applications

Not ideal when

  • Simple static sites with few datasets
  • Teams without system‑administration resources
  • Real‑time streaming data pipelines
  • Non‑technical users seeking drag‑and‑drop site builders

How teams use it

National open data portal

Provides a centralized catalog, public API, and searchable interface for all government datasets, improving transparency and citizen engagement.

Humanitarian crisis data hub

Enables rapid ingestion and sharing of emergency datasets, allowing responders to discover, download, and visualize critical information in real time.

Academic research data repository

Offers versioned storage, metadata standards compliance, and API access, facilitating reproducible research and cross‑institutional data discovery.

City services dashboard

Feeds municipal applications with up‑to‑date datasets via the API and visual widgets, supporting data‑driven decision making for urban planners.

Tech snapshot

Python58%
CSS19%
HTML11%
JavaScript7%
SCSS4%
Shell1%

Tags

catalogdigitalpublicgoodspythonsdg16ckandpgopen-dataapickanextdata

Frequently asked questions

What programming language is CKAN built with?

CKAN is written primarily in Python and uses PostgreSQL for data storage.

How can I install CKAN?

Installation instructions are provided in the official documentation and cover manual setup, Docker deployment, and configuration of required services.

Does CKAN support authentication and access control?

Yes, CKAN includes built‑in user management and can be extended with plugins for SSO, LDAP, or OAuth integration.

Can I extend CKAN with custom functionality?

CKAN’s plugin architecture allows developers to add new storage back‑ends, visualizations, authentication methods, and other domain‑specific features.

Under what license is CKAN released?

CKAN is released under the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) v3.

Project at a glance

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Repo age14 years old
Last commit6 days ago
Primary languagePython

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