Find your fit
Who it is for
For an internal hiring team, the central unit is a job order: describe the role, add candidates and follow their movement toward a hiring decision. A staffing agency can also organize companies and contacts around those openings and record recruiting activity over time.
OpenCATS makes most sense when a team wants direct control of its recruiting records and can operate a web server, mail setup and backups. The software is presented as free; the project does not provide a managed hosting promise, so include administration effort in the decision.
The work it supports
Core capabilities
Create a job order from a company record and fill in the role type, openings, salary range, description and internal notes. The guide distinguishes permanent and contract work. Before sharing a role publicly, review those fields as a candidate would see them.
A configured public job board can expose a job order marked Public and let candidates apply. The older guide warns that everything on the job-order form except Internal Notes may be visible, including salary. Verify the actual page for the installed release before turning on public visibility.
Add a candidate record, attach a resume and place the candidate in the pipeline of a job order. The homepage describes storing notes and status history too, so recruiters can return to the context behind a submission instead of relying on a folder of loose files.
Recruiting activity can be logged alongside candidates, companies and contacts. Job-order views include status filters such as active, on hold/full and closed/canceled, helping a recruiter distinguish open work from past requisitions.
The documented candidate list supports adding selected people to a hot list or job pipeline, sending an email and exporting a CSV. Treat bulk actions carefully: choose a small harmless selection first, inspect the recipients and export columns, and keep applicant data within your organization's policy.
A Career Portal provides a route for public applications. The current v0.11.1 release includes fixes to that portal, so a pilot should cover the candidate-facing form and the resulting candidate/job association in the precise version installed.
Mail can use PHP mail, Sendmail or SMTP, and it may be disabled during installation until configured. Test a controlled message before enabling candidate-facing notifications; a self-hosted server still needs a working transport and sender setup.
Resume indexing and text extraction depend on external utilities configured on the server. OpenCATS can run without them, but search over uploaded document text will be limited; test the resume formats your team actually receives.
Understand the offer
Pricing and getting started
OpenCATS is presented as free, open-source, community-maintained software. A team supplies its own infrastructure and operational work for database, attachments, mail and secure uploads, so budget for those even without a software subscription.
The project announced v0.11.1 in September 2026 as a security and maintenance release. Older documentation still labels an earlier build as current; use the official release announcement and version-specific notes when choosing or upgrading a package.
The project specifically urges a complete database-and-attachments backup before upgrades. Its backup guide adds configuration, pending-import uploads when used and local customizations; it also calls for a trial restore in a separate environment.
Look a little closer
Before you choose
Pilot one fictional role and applicant. Create the job order, inspect the public board, submit the test application, attach a harmless resume and confirm the candidate appears in the intended job pipeline. Check that internal notes and other fields are visible only where expected.
Define who may view and export candidate records, then rehearse a small CSV export and mail action with test data. Candidate files contain sensitive information, and a server under your control still needs access rules, upload restrictions and a tested recovery path.
Before depending on resume search or automatic communications, verify that the document-extraction utilities and mail transport are configured in the deployed version. If upgrading, back up both database and files and test the restore before moving real hiring work.
7 distinct sources behind this profile. Research observed Oct 19, 2026. Features and offers can change.
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