HumHub

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 747 words

HumHub is for the 20-to-500-person organisation that wants a private, Facebook-shaped intranet: spaces, an activity feed, profiles, a wiki and a calendar behind its own login. It is not a public social network and not a fediverse node; for those, Mastodon or Lemmy. Get that scope right and HumHub is the most complete option in its niche. Get it wrong and you will spend a week trying to make an intranet behave like Twitter.

Spaces are the unit everything hangs off

A space is a group with its own stream, members, permissions and set of enabled modules. A sports club has one per team, a company has one per department and one per project, a school has one per class. Users have profiles, follow each other, post to their own stream or a space's, and get notifications in the header and by email. Modules add wiki pages, tasks, polls, a calendar, file folders and meeting minutes to any space that switches them on. The mental model is a private Facebook Groups, and if that is what your organisation wants, the fit is exact.

The two cron jobs are not optional

HumHub is a PHP application on MySQL or MariaDB, and it needs two crontab entries running every minute:

* * * * * php /var/www/humhub/protected/yii queue/run >/dev/null 2>&1
* * * * * php /var/www/humhub/protected/yii cron/run >/dev/null 2>&1

Without them, emails do not send, notifications pile up, the search index goes stale, and the admin panel shows a warning most people miss. Every "HumHub is broken" thread I have read comes back to this. There is no official Docker image; the community mriedmann/humhub image is the one most people use, and it runs the cron entries inside the container for you, which is the main reason to prefer it over a bare-metal install.

The free and paid module line

The community edition is AGPL-3.0 and most of the marketplace is free, including the modules you would call essential: wiki, tasks, calendar, polls, file management, LDAP login. A minority carry a Professional Edition price: some branding and theming, some reporting, some enterprise integrations. The marketplace labels them, so you will not install one by accident, but do not plan a deployment around a module until you have checked its licence line. LDAP is built into the core, and OIDC and Keycloak connectors exist in the marketplace, so plugging into Keycloak or another identity provider is a configuration exercise rather than a project.

The default look is plain, and that is fixable

Out of the box HumHub looks like a competent Bootstrap site from the mid-2010s. Colours, logo and fonts are configurable in the admin panel; a properly branded instance needs a theme module or a custom theme, which is a CSS job, not a development one. For an internal tool the plain look is honestly fine, and users care far more about whether the mobile experience works, which it does, both in the browser and through the official mobile apps. Push notifications on those apps route through HumHub's own relay, which is one of the few pieces of the setup that depends on infrastructure you do not run.

Where it stops and other tools start

HumHub's messaging is direct messages and comment threads, not real-time chat; teams that live in chat pair it with Mattermost or Rocket.Chat rather than expecting the feed to carry that load. Its wiki is fine for a club and thin for a company that already runs a proper one. And for a discussion-first community, where threads matter more than people, a forum like Flarum serves better. The rest of the social category is mostly public-facing, which is exactly what HumHub is not.

What I'd do

For a club, school, church or company of 30 to 300 people that would otherwise be pushed toward Workplace from Meta or a Yammer successor, HumHub on a 2 GB VM with MariaDB, the community Docker image, LDAP or OIDC from day one so that offboarding is automatic, and the free module set only. Make one space per real-world group and seed each with a post before inviting anyone. If your organisation is 5 people, or your community is strangers on the internet, this is the wrong tool and the alternatives above are where to look.