// the find
chiefonboarding/ChiefOnboarding
Free and open-source employee onboarding platform. Onboard new hires through Slack or the web portal.
ChiefOnboarding is a self-hosted employee onboarding platform built in Django. It handles the full new-hire lifecycle — pre-boarding pages, to-do sequences, knowledge resources, account provisioning via webhooks, and Slack bot interaction. Aimed at small-to-medium companies that want to own their onboarding data and not pay per-seat SaaS prices.
The integration manifest system is genuinely useful — you define OAuth flows, API calls, and user provisioning steps in JSON without writing code, and the tracker gives you a per-hire audit trail of what ran and what failed. Sequence drip-feeding (items unlocked by day or by completion of another item) maps well to how onboarding actually works, avoiding the day-one information dump. The Slack bot and web dashboard are parity features, not afterthoughts — both surface the same to-dos and forms, which matters when half your team lives in Slack. CI coverage badge is backed by real tests with factory-boy fixtures, not just smoke tests.
The migration history is a mess — sequences app has 26+ migrations including rename chains that exist purely because of earlier mistakes (content → content_json → content_no_json → content). This is a yellow flag for long-term maintainability. No multi-tenant support: one installation, one company, which means self-hosters at larger orgs can't partition by department or subsidiary. The custom integration builder is powerful but underdocumented — the template test UI is fragmented across 20+ partial templates and there's no schema reference in the repo itself, so you're reading source to understand the manifest format. 900 stars for a six-year-old project suggests it's useful but never found strong organic traction, possibly because the self-hosting setup (Celery, Redis, Postgres, Django) is four moving parts to keep alive for what many orgs see as a one-time workflow.