// the find
horilla/horilla-hr
Horilla is a free and open source HR and CRM software.
Horilla is a Django-based HRMS covering recruitment, attendance, leave, payroll, asset management, and performance reviews. It's built by Cybrosys Technologies and targets small-to-medium businesses that want a self-hosted alternative to BambooHR or similar SaaS tools. The tech stack is Django + HTMX + jQuery + PostgreSQL, which is a reasonable choice for a data-heavy admin app.
The module separation is clean — each domain (attendance, leave, asset, recruitment) is its own Django app with its own migrations, models, and views, so you can understand one area without tripping over another. HTMX is used throughout for partial page updates, which keeps the UI responsive without a full SPA framework and avoids the usual Django form-reload tax. The feature breadth is genuinely impressive for an open-source project: biometric device integration, IP restrictions, geo-fencing for clock-in, rotating shift schedules, and overtime tracking are all there. Docker support plus a `.env.dist` template means you can be running in under 30 minutes.
The primary language is listed as HTML, which tells you most of the logic is scattered across templates rather than in well-tested Python — that's a maintenance debt that compounds fast in a codebase this size. There's essentially no test coverage worth mentioning; the test files exist but are largely empty stubs. The default `.env.dist` ships with a hardcoded `SECRET_KEY` and `DB_INIT_PASSWORD`, which will end up in production instances run by people who don't read carefully. The roadmap (chat app, project management, calendar) suggests the team is widening scope rather than hardening what's there, which is a concern for anyone betting a real HR workflow on it.