Huly

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 858 words

Huly is the most ambitious project in the self-hosted project management category and the one I would least like to be paged for. It replaces Linear, a chunk of Slack, a chunk of Notion, and a video-call tool in a single interface that is genuinely the slickest of its kind. It also runs as roughly a dozen containers, wants 2 GB of RAM before anyone opens a browser, and reached its first release in 2023. Those three facts are the whole decision.

What you actually get in one login

Issues and projects are the core, and they are a close copy of Linear's model: fast keyboard-driven issue creation, cycles, milestones, sub-issues, and views you can slice by any property. Beside that sits a chat with channels and threads, a document editor with real-time collaboration, a lightweight CRM and HR module, and the virtual office, which is a persistent audio and video space where teammates see who is at their desk and drop into a conversation. Everything cross-references: an issue mentions a doc, a chat thread links a person, a person's profile shows their issues.

For a team of 5 to 30 people who currently pay for Linear plus Slack plus Notion, the consolidation pitch is real and the per-seat savings add up to a few hundred dollars a month at those tools' list prices. For a solo self-hoster, it is a great deal of surface area for one person's to-do list.

The deployment is a stack, not a container

There is no single huly image. The self-host repository provides a setup script that asks for your hostname and port, then generates a compose file with a front end, an account service, the transactor that handles the real-time data model, a collaboration server for documents, a document-parsing service, an object store (MinIO), a search index (Elasticsearch), a database, and a couple of supporting services. Expect 10 to 12 containers and a few GB of images on disk.

git clone https://github.com/hcengineering/huly-selfhost.git
cd huly-selfhost
./setup.sh
docker compose up -d

The script handles the plumbing correctly, and I would not hand-edit the generated compose until you have read all of it. Put a reverse proxy in front for HTTPS from the start, since the virtual office needs a secure context for microphone and camera access. Backups are the part the catalogue's "complex deployment stack" con is really about: you need the database, the object store, and the search index in a consistent state, and the project's documentation on that is thin. Plan a scripted stop, snapshot the volumes, start sequence rather than hoping.

Resources: 2 GB is the floor, 4 GB is comfortable

The catalogue's 2 GB minimum is accurate for an idle stack. Elasticsearch alone claims a large share of that. With a team using chat and documents and one or two people in a virtual office call, plan on 4 GB and 2 vCPUs, and put it on a machine with an SSD, because the transactor's write pattern punishes spinning disks. This is roughly 4 times what Plane needs for a similar issue tracker without the chat and video.

Young project, fast-moving data model

Huly has been shipping since 2023, is under EPL-2.0, and has well over 27,000 stars, which reflects how good the demo is. What the star count does not show is churn. The self-host stack has changed its underlying components at least once, upgrade paths have not always been documented before the release that needed them, and the mobile apps trail the web app. None of that is unusual for a project this age; all of it is a risk if a company's issue tracker is the thing riding on it. Read the self-host repository's recent issues before committing, and pin image tags rather than tracking latest.

Who should pick it over Plane or OpenProject

If your team wants issues only, Plane is lighter, simpler to back up, and mature enough to be boring. If your team wants classic Gantt-and-budgets project management, OpenProject has been doing that for over a decade. Huly is for the team that wants Linear's feel and is willing to move its chat there too, because the chat is where the consolidation payoff comes from; running Huly for issues while keeping Mattermost for chat gets you the operational cost without the benefit.

What I'd do

For a team of 10-plus that is actively paying for Linear and Slack and has one person comfortable operating a dozen containers: run the setup script on a 4 GB VPS, pin versions, script the backup on day one, and try it for a quarter with a real project. For a solo developer or a small team that just wants issues: Plane, and check back on Huly in a year. It is the most promising all-in-one in the category, and promising is exactly the word.