Introduction

Coworkee is modern, self-hosted HR and personnel-management software for one company (single-tenant), in the spirit of Personio and HR-Works. It is fully bilingual — German and English — and designed to run on your own infrastructure.

A public landing page lives at /; the application itself is at /dashboard after login.

"A workplace for everything human."

What Coworkee gives you

• A single place for the whole employee lifecycle: hiring, onboarding, day-to-day HR, absence, time, performance and offboarding.
• Data on your own server. Coworkee ships as a Docker image with a PostgreSQL database; you host it, you own the data.
• Bilingual throughout. Every screen is available in German and English; the language is stored per user.
• Light and dark mode, plus theming — style presets and a corporate identity (accent colour and logo).
• Role-based access control (Admin / HR / Manager / Employee), enforced on the server for every write.
• A real REST API and an MCP server, both authenticated with per-user tokens, so automation and AI clients act with exactly the token owner's permissions.
• An audit log for write operations.

Modules at a glance

Area	What it does
Employees	Directory (search / filter / pagination), detail profiles, create / edit, org chart
Absence	Leave balance, request → approval workflow, team overview, entitlement management
Time tracking	Clock-in / out, weekly overview + hours, manual entries, team times
Documents	Secure private storage, access-guarded download, HR upload, profile tab
Onboarding	Checklist templates + per-employee processes with checkable tasks
Performance	Goals (with self-service progress) + performance reviews (Draft → Submitted → Acknowledged)
Analytics	HR dashboard with KPIs + charts (headcount, contract types, new hires, absence days)
Recruiting	Job postings + applicant pipeline (Kanban, 6 stages)
News	Announcement feed + in-app notifications (top-bar bell)

Each module has its own guide — see Module guides.

Technology

• Next.js 16 (App Router, TypeScript, Turbopack)
• PostgreSQL + Prisma 7 (pg driver adapter)
• Auth.js v5 (NextAuth) — Credentials provider, JWT session
• next-intl (DE/EN, no URL prefixes; cookie-based)
• Tailwind CSS v4 + shadcn/ui (Base UI)
• Vitest for unit tests

Two ways it can run

Coworkee behaves differently depending on the DEMO environment variable:

• DEMO=1 — demo instance. On an empty database it seeds sample data on first boot, shows a public marketing landing page, and lists clickable demo logins on /login.
• DEMO unset / 0 — real install. An empty database opens the setup wizard to create your admin account and company. No sample data, no marketing page.

DEMO is read at runtime, so switching it needs no rebuild. See Installation for the full explanation.

Where to go next

• Just want to try it locally? → Quick start
• Deploying to a server? → Installation & self-hosting
• First boot on a fresh database? → Setup wizard
• Automating with the API or an AI client? → API & MCP