The Karabo Control System was developed at the European X-ray Free Electron Laser (EuXFEL) starting in 2010 and was released as free and open-source software in June 2023. Karabo is a pluggable, distributed application management system forming a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) environment as part of a distributed control system. Karabo provides integrated control of hardware, monitoring, and data acquisition and can facilitate online and pipelined data analysis on distributed hardware. Services exist for access control, data logging, configuration management, and failure event recovery. European XFEL performed a survey in 2009 that looked at other well-known systems such as Tango, EPICS, and DOOCS as possible control solutions for the planned facility. At that time, neither of these systems anticipated the high data volumes produced at the European XFEL, and hence the development of Karabo, a control system tailored to the facility’s control and data acquisition requirements, was started. The seamless and built-in integration of large data processing is still a distinguishing feature of Karabo, which also today, the other systems frequently only offer as an extension.