// the take
OfficeLife is a self-hostable Laravel/Vue+Inertia app that bundles HR, project management, time tracking, and team culture tools (1:1s, wikis, 'rate your manager', e-coffees) into one system. It's aimed at 10-500 person companies that would otherwise stitch together half a dozen separate SaaS tools for HR, PM, and timesheets.
Genuinely wide functional coverage (ATS, project management, timesheets, expenses, hardware/license tracking, wikis, performance reviews) in one coherent codebase rather than forcing teams to integrate multiple vendors. Built on a boring, well-understood stack (Laravel, VueJS, InertiaJS) with CI running build/test and Cypress e2e, plus SonarCloud coverage tracking. Domain-specific exception classes (NotEnoughSoftwareSeat, SurveyNotActiveAnymoreException, DurationExceedingMaximalDurationException) suggest actual business-rule modeling rather than generic CRUD scaffolding. Same two-person core team previously built and sustained Monica, an open-source CRM, so there's precedent for keeping a project like this alive.
No commits since July 2024 on a codebase handling HR data, expenses, and PTO is a real liability — security patches and PHP/Laravel compatibility bumps aren't happening. The README's 'state of the project' section is dated September 2021 and still calls the product 'beta,' and several headline features (onboarding/offboarding, PTOs, OKRs) are still tagged 'coming soon' years later, suggesting development stalled before the feature set was finished. PostgreSQL is listed as a supported database but hedged with 'should work, in theory' — MySQL/SQLite is what's actually exercised, so Postgres shops are on their own. The functional scope (ATS + PM + timesheets + expenses + reviews + wikis, all touching employee PII) is a lot of attack surface and operational weight for what looks like a two-person maintenance team.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →