CommCare is an open source digital platform that enables organizations to build and scale custom solutions on a professionally managed foundation. Most governments and organizations use CommCare as a cloud-hosted SaaS solution on Dimagi’s servers because it is simpler, more scalable, and easier to manage. Some organizations may choose to mirror their data locally or self-host CommCare due to internal policies or regulatory requirements.

CommCare Hosting Options

Cloud Hosting

Most popular, requires least technical expertise and set up. Sign up for CommCare here: Affordable CommCare Pricing for Nonprofits & Social Impact Orgs

By far the most popular and recommended approach is to use CommCare’s cloud hosting options rather than self-hosting. CommCare’s cloud hosting options provide fully managed hosting, maintenance, updates, backups, and reliability support, allowing organizations to focus on delivering services and using data effectively instead of managing servers and infrastructure internally. Most organizations choose CommCare’s cloud hosting options because they are more cost effective, easier to manage, more reliable, and more scalable than maintaining a self-hosted deployment, benefitting from the following.

Local Data Mirroring

Good option for organizations with specialized hosting requirements, while realizing benefits of CommCare. Read more about Local Data Mirroring here: Local Data Mirroring with CommCare

Local data mirroring realizes the benefits of CommCare’s secure, stable and scalable platform while also permanently storing data in-country on a designated data storage server.

Mirroring uses a cloud-based project space for application building, user management, temporary data storage, and synchronization & integration, while using tools like the open-source CommCare Data Export Tool (DET) to keep data synchronized to an in-country database which acts as a primary data store.

On-Premise Hosting

Requires most amount of technical expertise, set-up

Numerous organizations and governments have successfully transitioned their CommCare applications from being hosted by Dimagi’s SaaS platform to an independently hosted instance of CommCare.

Dimagi has developed this guide (Transition to On Premise Hosted CommCare) to support interested organizations in transitioning their cloud-hosted CommCare applications to self-hosted and administered servers. This is written specifically for organizations who are either directly overseeing the transition between environments or are supporting a third-party (often a government). 

CommCare Cloud is Dimagi's self-hosting toolkit for deploying and maintaining CommCare servers. Please refer to CommCare Cloud Documentation and GitHub, or reach out on the developper forum.

Comparison Table

The table below provides a comparison of the different hosting options.