[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Comparison to Koha?

[Don McMorris]

Hi Kevin:
There are a number of differences between Koha and Evergreen.  In
general, I think it's fair to say that Koha is more-or-less designed
for fairly small libraries, while Evergreen was designed for large
(note: in this case, size more-or-less deals with number(s) of
libraries in the system, not necessarily collection size).

Koha has a 100% web based interface for both staff and public.
Evergreen has a standalone staff client (although it is technically
online for the most part).

In the early stages of Evergreen, the developers' made OpenSRF, a
background mechanism allowing for seamless expandability in a cluster
environment.  (I believe) Koha is made to run on a single server, thus
having limited capacity.  Evergreen is made to run on virtually any
amount of servers (from a single server to theoretically hundreds) as
a load-balanced cluster.

Evergreen was made in the US, whereas Koha was made in (I believe)
Zimbabwe.  Although compliant with MARC21/UNIMARC/etc., this may cause
some issues in US libraries (For example, I couldn't use Koha because
of these internationalization issues).

Because of Evergreen's scalability and rigorous compliance to very
complex standards, there may be more administrative overhead than vs.
the somewhat simpler Koha.  Koha, as I recall, is mostly scripts and
MySQL.  Evergreen is pretty complex in that it involves several perl
dependencies, specialized Apache configuration, Jabber, and various
other things.  This may make troubleshooting more difficult in
Evergreen vs. Koha.

The age of the products may be of interest too.  Koha has been
developed and released for years.  Evergreen has been in development
for a couple years, and V1.0 was just released (US) labor day weekend
2006 (if I recall properly).  Evergreen has some features in the works
that haven't been completed yet (such as Acquisitions, Serials, etc.).
 The "map" can be found at the Evergreen wiki,
http://www.open-ils.org/dokuwiki/.

These are just a few examples.  I would suggest you check out the
demos.  Koha has a staff and OPAC demo at
http://www.koha.org/showcase/ (note: this demo is hosted and modified
by LibLime.  If you were to install it, your features may be
different).  The demo for the Evergreen staff client is at
http://www.open-ils.org/cvs.html and OPAC at http://demo.gapines.org.

Note that it has been a while since I've used Koha (about 2 years),
and I'm nothing more than a fan in regards to Evergreen.  As such, my
word shouldn't be considered authoritative.  Being a holiday time,
many people are AFK.  However, I would expect some responses from the
Evergreen staff (probably Mike) to give more details on Evergreen and
Josh from LibLime to give you more details on Koha in the next few
weeks.

If you have any more questions, please feel free to again contact the list.

Sincerely Yours,

Don McMorris

On 12/23/06, Kevin Riggle <kevinr at mit.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I saw the post about Evergreen ILS on Slashdot today, and I got
> curious, so I read through some of the material on your Web site.  You
> briefly mention Koha as another OSS ILS system in the FAQ, but you
> don't go into depth -- what differentiates Evergreen from Koha?
>
> - Kevin
> --
> Kevin Riggle (kevinr at mit.edu)
>