[Koha] Koha vs Liblime Koha

[Greg Barniskis]

Hi all,

As others pointed out, LLK and Koha are not the same. They were once upon a time, but speaking as someone whose employer (SCLS) chose LLK but who also watches the Koha community with great interest, I can confirm the products are divergent, and increasingly so.

Some key differences that are of note (and I'm sure there are others):

LLK is, technically, open source, but not nearly as open as Koha. Too many differences to get into in any great detail here, but in summary: very different. You can download it and use it, but you won't find many others who are hosting it and thus able to help in that area; your realistic choices for support are be a LibLime customer or Do It Yourself. Compare community, where one can download, bootstrap and get good help doing it.

LLK scales very high. SCLS pushes on average over one million checkouts per month, pitting nearly 500,000 patrons against 900,000 bibs and 3.4 million items. I believe that Koha can scale too, but so far as I know it really has not been battle-tested to the same degree. If/when it is, there may be some hurdles to clear (there definitely were for LLK when we started stomping on it).

LLK uses Solr to meet our demanding search requirements. Koha started down that path but (if I understand correctly) is now heading toward other solutions.

LLK fines and fees handling is now very different from Koha. Acquisitions too, I think, though I pay hardly any attention in that area...

LLK is said to be slated to merge functionality with another fork, LL Academic Koha, creating a new super fork (a spork? =). This is probably going to be good for most LibLime customers, I think, but after that point I think comparing the resulting  product to Koha is really going to be quite a stretch of the imagination.

Koha has a well-maintained manual, wiki, db schema map and other reference materials. While these were once also pretty valid sources of info for LLK, the fork divergence is continually eroding that value. It is not safe to read something in community resources and conclude that what you find there is also true for LLK. You can test, and you can validate in many cases that things are still similar if not identical under the hood, but you cannot just assume that they are comparable because in some cases they are not. For me, the fact that LLK lacks these documentation and info sharing resources is a real downside. On the upside, when we go to LL staff to get info, they do know or will find the answer, but IMO it would be better if the same scope and quality of reference material were there as exists for Koha. This is definitely a strike against the idea that you can just download LLK and Do It Yourself.


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Greg Barniskis, Computer Systems Integrator
South Central Library System (SCLS)
<gbarniskis at scls.info>, (608) 242-4716