Self-Host Huly: One Open-Source App to Replace Jira, Linear, and Notion

Count the tabs your team lives in. Jira or Linear for issues. Notion or Confluence for docs. Slack for chat. A separate app for calls. Each one is a login, a monthly per-seat bill, and a place where half the context lives while the other half lives somewhere else. Somebody asks "where was that decision made?" and the answer is always "check the other tool."

Huly is a bet that all of that belongs in one place. It is an open-source, self-hostable platform that folds project tracking, docs, team chat, calls, and more into a single workspace. I ran it, and it is genuinely impressive. It is also not free of trade-offs, so let me show you both sides before you point your team at it.

What Huly actually is

Huly is an all-in-one workspace, licensed under EPL-2.0, pitched as an alternative to Linear, Jira, Slack, and Notion at once. The pieces are not bolted-on afterthoughts either. They share one data model, so a task, the doc that specs it, the chat thread about it, and the calendar block to do it all live in the same system and link to each other.

Out of the box you get:

There is also two-way GitHub sync, plus modules reaching into CRM, HR, and applicant tracking if you want them. The team planner with time-blocking is the part that surprised me, because it turns your assigned issues into calendar blocks instead of leaving you to schedule the work by hand.

The honest trade-off: this is a real stack

Here is the part everyone glosses over. Huly does not run on a Raspberry Pi. Under that clean interface is a serious distributed system: CockroachDB for data, Elasticsearch for search, Redpanda for streaming, S3-compatible object storage for files, and Nginx out front. For anything beyond a demo you also wire in LiveKit for the video calls, Redis for real-time updates, and SMTP for email notifications.

The official minimum is 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM, and the recommendation is 4 or more vCPUs and 16 GB. That is not a knock on Huly. It is the cost of replacing five products with one, because you are now running the infrastructure that five vendors used to run for you. Go in expecting a real server, not a toy.

Deploy it without hand-assembling the stack

That stack is exactly where a "quick self-host" turns into a weekend of debugging why Elasticsearch will not talk to Redpanda. Deploying Huly on Elestio wires those services together for you on a right-sized VM, with TLS, automated backups, and updates handled, so you land on a working workspace at a URL instead of a stack of half-configured containers. Check the service page for current VM sizing, since Huly wants more memory than a typical single-app deploy.

What it saves you, honestly

Do not read "open-source" as "free." You are paying for a bigger VM than most self-hosted apps need, and that is a real line item. The math still tends to work, because the thing you are replacing is not one subscription, it is a stack of them.

Price out per-seat plans for an issue tracker, a docs tool, a chat app, and a calls tool across a ten-person team, and you are often past a thousand dollars a year before anyone has done any work. A self-hosted Huly serves those same ten people, and the same fifty, from one flat VM bill. The bigger the team, the more lopsided that comparison gets.

A few things to know before you commit

Give it the RAM. The single most common self-hosting complaint is running it on too small a box, then watching search break and calls stutter. Start at the recommended size, not the minimum.

Calls need LiveKit configured. The virtual office does not just work on a bare install. Budget time to stand up LiveKit and point Huly at it, and test with two accounts before you promise the team video.

Email needs SMTP. Notifications, invites, and password resets all depend on a working mail configuration. Set it up early so new-user onboarding is not silently broken.

It moves fast. Huly ships features quickly, which is great, but read release notes before major upgrades and make sure your backups cover the database and the object storage, not just one of them.

Is it for you?

If your team is scattered across four SaaS tools and tired of paying four bills to keep context fragmented, Huly is one of the most ambitious answers in open source right now. If you just need a lightweight issue tracker and nothing else, it is more machine than you need, and a smaller tool will serve you better.

For everyone in the first camp, spin one up on the Huly page, move one project in, and see how it feels to have the whole thing under one roof that you own.

Thanks for reading ❤️ See you in the next one 👋