About Madrona

Cultural heritage organizations have been underserved by software. Legacy systems built decades ago remain in use because replacements require massive migration efforts and offer uncertain improvements.

Madrona takes a different approach. We built a web-based platform from the ground up - not a wrapper around legacy architecture. Getty vocabularies, linked data, IIIF, and complete audit trails are native capabilities, not afterthoughts.

The platform is modular by design. Collections, Media, and Content can each stand alone or work together. Start with what you need, expand when you are ready. Your data lives in one central store with complete history, so nothing is lost as you grow.

In 2026 we released the whole of Madrona as open source under Apache-2.0. Not a limited community edition beside a real one — the public repository is the same code we run for our hosted customers. Any institution can install it, modify it, and run it forever without paying us anything.

We did that because the deepest problem in this sector is not bad software, it is captivity: collections systems that are expensive to leave, from vendors who know it. A platform you can take and run yourself cannot hold you hostage, and a vendor who knows you can leave behaves differently. We make our money hosting and supporting the institutions that would rather not run infrastructure, and migrating the ones still trapped on something older.