Uwazi

Plain verdict

A serious option for a long-lived human-rights collection when the organisation can design a data model, permissions, backups, and maintenance. It is not a quick AI notebook.

Good for

Court decisions, legislation, public reports, evidence catalogues, controlled metadata, relationships between records, and right-to-left interfaces.

Avoid for

A one-day workshop exercise with real data, importing an archive before fields are defined, or self-hosting without an administrator and incident plan.

Data lane

Self-hosted or managed. Self-hosting controls the server location but makes your organisation responsible for security updates, backups, encryption, logs, administrator access, and recovery. Managed service follows its contract.

Ten-minute safe trial

On a safe demo instance, create three synthetic records, two user roles, and one relationship. Confirm the lower-privilege role cannot open the restricted record. Delete the trial records afterwards.

Human check

Documentation staff approve field definitions, consent basis, role permissions, retention, backup recovery, and the process for correcting or deleting a record.

Safer or constraint-based alternatives

For temporary public-source research, use NotebookLM. For a small administrative tracker, use an approved spreadsheet with strict access control and no sensitive identities.