Choosing a library system is a decision you live with for a decade. This is a direct comparison of Koha against the systems it is most often evaluated alongside — and, because it matters more than any feature table, an honest section on where Koha is the wrong answer.
The short version: Koha wins decisively on cost and on data ownership. It is behind on electronic resource management and on out-of-the-box discovery. Whether that trade works depends far less on your collection size than on who will operate the system.
The comparison at a glance
| Licence | Hosting model | ERM | Who supports it | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Koha | Free (GPL) | Self-host or any vendor | Basic | Competitive market of vendors |
| FOLIO | Free (Apache) | Self-host or vendor | Strong | Vendor market, smaller |
| Evergreen | Free (GPL) | Self-host or vendor | Basic | Vendor market, consortium-focused |
| Ex Libris Alma | Commercial | Vendor cloud only | Very strong | Single vendor |
| III Sierra | Commercial | Vendor or local | Moderate | Single vendor |
Cost figures are deliberately absent from that table. Commercial ILS pricing is negotiated per institution and rarely published, so any number quoted here would be a guess presented as a fact. Ask each vendor for a written quote against your own collection size and branch count.
Koha vs FOLIO
Both are open source, and libraries evaluating one usually look at the other.
FOLIO is built as a platform of separate apps rather than a single application, which makes it more extensible and considerably more moving parts to operate. Its electronic resource management is genuinely strong — it was designed with e-resources as a first-class concern, where Koha treats them as an addition.
Koha's advantage is maturity and install base. It has been in production for over two decades in roughly 20,000 libraries, which means most problems you will hit have been hit before and written up. FOLIO's community is smaller and its deployments skew toward larger academic institutions with technical staff.
Choose FOLIO if e-resource management is your central problem and you have the technical capacity to run a more complex stack. Choose Koha if print circulation is the core of your operation and you want the larger support market.
Koha vs Evergreen
Evergreen was built for consortia — multiple independent libraries sharing one catalog — and its design reflects that from the ground up.
Koha handles multi-branch and consortium arrangements too, but the architecture assumes a library first and a group second. For a large, established consortium with complex resource-sharing policies, Evergreen's model often fits with less configuration.
For a single library, or a small group, Koha is generally the lighter choice with the broader vendor market behind it.
Koha vs Ex Libris Alma
This is the honest one, because Alma is genuinely ahead in several areas.
Alma's electronic resource management, link resolution and knowledge base are stronger than Koha's, and its analytics are more capable out of the box. If your collection is predominantly electronic and your staff spend their days on licensing and access, Alma addresses that directly.
What you pay for it is cost and control. Alma is a commercial cloud product: you cannot self-host it, the annual fee recurs, and migrating away is a project. With Koha, the database is yours in an open format, and if you dislike your support vendor you change vendors without changing systems.
Both statements are true at once, and any comparison that only tells you one of them is selling something.
Koha vs III Sierra
Sierra is a mature commercial system with a large installed base, and many Koha migrations start from it. Libraries that move typically cite cost and the desire to control their own data; what they give up is single-vendor accountability, where one company is answerable for everything.
If your Sierra installation is heavily customised, budget seriously for the migration analysis. Custom fields and local practices are where migration effort actually lives — see our Koha migration guide.
Where Koha is the wrong choice
This section is here because a comparison without it is marketing. Koha is not right for every library.
- Your collection is mostly electronic. If your work is licensing, access troubleshooting and usage analysis rather than circulating physical items, a system built around e-resources will serve you better.
- You need one vendor accountable for everything, contractually. Some institutions require a single throat to choke, with penalties attached. That is a commercial product's model, not an open-source one.
- You have no technical capacity and no budget for managed hosting. This is the important one, and it is the most common reason a Koha project fails. Koha itself is free; an unmaintained Koha is a liability. If nobody will own the server, the licence saving is not a saving.
That last case is worth separating from the other two, because it is not really a software problem. The blocker is not which system you pick — it is that nobody on staff can run one. In that situation the answer is not a different ILS, it is having the whole thing set up and hosted for you, so there is no server to own in the first place.
Total cost of ownership over five years
Compare like with like. A five-year model should include, for every option:
- Licence or subscription fees
- Implementation and configuration
- Data migration from the current system
- Hosting — server, storage, bandwidth, backup storage
- Staff time or vendor retainer for maintenance
- Upgrades, twice a year
- Training, including for staff who join later
- The cost of leaving at the end
Open-source systems concentrate cost in the last five lines; commercial systems concentrate it in the first. A comparison that stops at the licence line always flatters open source, and libraries that budget that way are the ones who discover the shortfall in year two. Our installation cost breakdown and hosting cost guide cover the real numbers.
Migration effort between systems
Bibliographic records move well between any two systems — that is what MARC is for. What does not move cleanly is everything around them: local fields with no equivalent, circulation rules that behaved differently, fine histories, and the practices your staff built up over twenty years.
Budget for the analysis, not just the transfer. A migration is a mapping exercise, and the mapping is where the time goes.
How to choose
- Write down what actually breaks today. Not a feature wishlist — the specific things that cost your staff time this month.
- Decide who will operate the system before you shortlist. This eliminates more options than any feature comparison.
- Weight print versus electronic honestly by where your staff hours actually go.
- Get written quotes including implementation, migration and five years of support.
- Ask every vendor how you would leave. The quality of that answer tells you a great deal.
- Talk to a library like yours that made the switch two years ago, not two months ago.
Evaluating Koha for your library? We install, migrate, host and support it — and we will tell you honestly if we think another system fits you better. Get in touch and describe your collection.