Beehive

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 835 words

A rule in Beehive looks like this: when the RSS hive sees a new item in a feed, and the title matches a filter, post the link to an IRC channel. You build that in a web UI in under 2 minutes, it runs from a single Go binary with no database and no external services, and the whole thing idles at a few tens of megabytes. For that narrow shape of automation, Beehive is still one of the lightest tools available. The problem is that most people who arrive at it in 2026 want more than that shape, and the project has not kept up with them.

Hives, bees, chains

Beehive's vocabulary maps cleanly onto the usual event-action model. A hive is a module for a service or protocol: RSS, IRC, Telegram, Slack, Discord, email over SMTP and IMAP, HTTP webhooks, cron timers, GitHub, Jenkins, Philips Hue, Pushover, serial ports, shell command execution and a couple of dozen more. A bee is a configured instance of a hive, so one bee per Telegram bot or per IRC server. A chain connects an event from one bee to an action on another, with optional filters on the event's fields and template substitution into the action's parameters. That is the entire conceptual load. Compared with n8n's nodes, credentials, workflows and expressions, or Node-RED's flows and function nodes, Beehive is the version you can explain over a coffee.

Running it

The release page ships static binaries for Linux, macOS and Windows, and running one is:

./beehive -bind 0.0.0.0:8181

Configuration is written to a beehive.conf JSON file next to the binary by default, which is the only state and the only thing to back up. The Docker image exposes the same admin UI on port 8181:

services:
  beehive:
    image: muesli/beehive:latest
    ports:
      - "8181:8181"
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
    restart: unless-stopped

There is no authentication on the admin UI. Bind it to localhost or a Tailscale address, or put it behind a reverse proxy that does the login; do not expose 8181 to the internet with your bot tokens sitting in it.

What it is good for

Notification plumbing on a small box. The pattern I see most is a Raspberry Pi or a 512 MB VPS running Beehive to bridge things that do not otherwise talk: a cron bee that runs a shell script and posts the output to Telegram, a webhook bee that turns a home automation event into a Pushover alert, an IMAP bee that watches a mailbox and echoes matching subjects into a Discord channel. The exec hive means any script you already have becomes an action. The 128 MB minimum is plenty; in practice it idles well under that. For a "the hardware I have is a Pi Zero and I want IFTTT for 3 things" scenario, Beehive still beats every alternative on footprint.

Where it lost ground

Integrations. The hive list was strong for 2015, when Twitter was a hive and IFTTT was the thing to replace, and it has grown slowly since. There is no generic OAuth2 flow, so services that require it are missing unless someone wrote a hive. There is no visual data transformation; if the event's fields do not fit the action's parameters after template substitution, you are into the exec hive and a script. There is no branching, no error handling, no retries, no execution history you can inspect. n8n has all of that plus around 400 integrations, and Huginn, the other veteran in the automation category, has richer agents and a scraping story; the Huginn versus n8n comparison covers that end of the market. Beehive's 6,489 stars are largely historical; commits are sparse and issues can sit. It works, but expect to fix things yourself if they break.

The honest comparison

If your list of rules will grow, or any rule needs "if this field, then that action, otherwise something else", start on n8n and do not detour through Beehive. If your rules are a fixed handful and will stay a handful, Beehive will run them for years on hardware you have already forgotten about.

What I'd do

For a Pi or a tiny VPS with 3 to 5 notification-style rules, deploy the binary, bind it to a private address, back up beehive.conf, and leave it. For anything else, and for anyone who has not used Beehive before and is choosing fresh, install n8n; it is the bigger, active project and the one you will not have to migrate away from in a year. Beehive is the right answer for a small, fixed job and a poor bet as a platform.