Cloud vs Self Hosting
LearnHouse is open-source software. You can use the managed LearnHouse Cloud platform or deploy the Community Edition on your own infrastructure. This page explains the differences so you can make an informed choice.
Comparison
| ☁️ LearnHouse Cloud | 🖥️ Self Hosting | |
|---|---|---|
| 🌍 Worldwide CDN | ✅ Included | ⚙️ Manual setup + additional cost |
| 🔄 Weekly updates | ✅ Automatic | 🔧 Manual |
| 🛠️ Maintenance | ✅ Managed by the LearnHouse team | 👤 Your responsibility |
| 🔒 Security patches | ✅ Applied automatically | 🔧 Manual |
| 📊 Threat & uptime monitoring | ✅ Included | ❌ Not included |
| 🔐 SSL certificate | ✅ Included | 🔧 Manual |
| 💾 Continuous backups | ✅ Included | ⚙️ Manual + additional cost |
| 📈 Scalability | ✅ Automatic | ⚙️ Depends on your provider |
| 🖥️ Direct SSH & DB access | ❌ Not available | ✅ Full access |
| 🎧 Product support | ✅ Email support | 👥 Community support |
| 💚 Where your money goes | ✅ Supporting the team and funding new features | 🏢 Third-party hosting companies |
☁️ When to choose LearnHouse Cloud
Best for: teams, organizations, and businesses that want to focus on content and learners — not infrastructure.
- Launch in minutes — no servers to provision, no DevOps overhead. Your team can start building courses immediately.
- Zero-maintenance operations — updates, security patches, SSL certificates, and backups are handled automatically by the LearnHouse team.
- Enterprise-grade reliability — global CDN, threat monitoring, uptime guarantees, and automatic scaling out of the box.
- Priority support — dedicated email support with faster response times for production issues.
- Invest in the product — your subscription directly funds development of new features and improvements for the entire LearnHouse ecosystem.
LearnHouse Cloud is the recommended option for most organizations. It eliminates operational complexity and lets your team focus entirely on creating great learning experiences.
🖥️ When to choose Self Hosting
Best for: enterprises, institutions, and teams with strict infrastructure requirements and dedicated engineering resources.
- Full data sovereignty — host on your own infrastructure with complete control over where data lives. Ideal for organizations with data residency mandates.
- Regulatory compliance — meet on-premises hosting requirements for HIPAA, SOC 2, internal security policies, or government regulations.
- Deep infrastructure access — direct SSH, database access, and full control over networking, storage, and compute resources.
- Custom integrations — connect to internal systems, private networks, SSO providers, and proprietary tooling without restrictions.
- Dedicated engineering teams — organizations with DevOps or platform engineering teams that prefer to own their deployment pipeline.
Self hosting requires your team to manage updates, backups, security patches, and scaling. Make sure you have the engineering capacity before choosing this path.
Both options give you access to the same core feature set. Self-hosted instances can be upgraded at any time by pulling the latest release from the Community Edition repository .
Next steps
- Ready to get started? Head to the Quickstart.
- Want to try the cloud platform? Visit learnhouse.app to create your account.
- Need help configuring a self-hosted instance? See the Self Hosting Guide.
