The software implements international standards such as METS, MODS and other formats maintained by the Library of Congress.

Kitodo consists of several independent modules serving different purposes such as controlling the digitization workflow, enriching descriptive and structural metadata, and presenting the results to the public in a modern and convenient way.

It is used by archives, libraries, museums, publishers and scanning utilities.

Until May 2016, Kitodo was known as Goobi (Abbreviation of Göttingen online-objects binaries).

While the Goobi community edition, now known as Kitodo, is cooperatively maintained by major German libraries and digitization service providers, the Intranda edition is developed by a single company.