Cloud vs Self Hosting
LearnHouse is open-source software. You can use the managed LearnHouse Cloud platform or self-host the core platform on your own infrastructure using the LearnHouse CLI. This page explains the differences between the two.
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 and organizations that want to spend their time on content and learners rather than infrastructure.
- Launch in minutes: there are no servers to provision and no DevOps work. Your team can start building courses right away.
- No maintenance: the LearnHouse team handles updates, security patches, SSL certificates, and backups.
- Reliability: a global CDN, threat monitoring, uptime guarantees, and automatic scaling are included.
- Priority support: email support with faster response times for production issues.
- Fund the project: your subscription pays for development of new LearnHouse features and improvements.
We recommend LearnHouse Cloud for most organizations. You don’t have to run any servers, so your team can spend its time on courses.
When to choose Self Hosting
Best for: institutions and teams with strict infrastructure requirements and engineers available to run the deployment.
- Data sovereignty: host on your own infrastructure and decide where data lives. This matters for organizations with data residency requirements.
- Regulatory compliance: meet on-premises hosting requirements for HIPAA, SOC 2, internal security policies, or government regulations.
- Infrastructure access: direct SSH, database access, and full control over networking, storage, and compute.
- Custom integrations: connect to internal systems, private networks, SSO providers, and proprietary tooling.
- Your own pipeline: suits 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 include the same core features. Self-hosted instances can be upgraded at any time with learnhouse update, which pulls the latest release from the LearnHouse GitHub 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.
