Huly Review 2026

Last updated: March 2026

Jira for tracking, Slack for chat, Notion for docs, Google Meet for calls, Toggl for time tracking. Five tools, five subscriptions, constant context-switching. Huly bundles all of these into a single open-source platform with one flat monthly price and unlimited users. 24,500+ GitHub stars and active development suggest this is not vaporware.

Everything in One Place

Issue tracking with customizable workflows. Team planner with a centralized calendar view of all tasks and time-blocking. Built-in chat for direct and group messaging. Virtual office with audio/video rooms. Collaborative documents with real-time editing and version history. Inbox for notification management. Two-way GitHub synchronization for issues and projects.

The pitch is simple: stop paying $8-$16/user/month for Linear, plus $7.25/user/month for Slack, plus $8/user/month for Notion, plus whatever you spend on video calls. Huly gives you all of it for one flat workspace fee regardless of team size.

Pricing: Flat Per Workspace, Not Per User

This is the most interesting thing about Huly's pricing. Every plan includes unlimited users and unlimited objects (issues, tasks, etc.). You pay for storage and video/audio traffic:

Common (Free): 10 GB storage, 10 GB video/audio traffic. Solid for small teams getting started.

Rare: $19.99/month. 100 GB storage, 100 GB video traffic. Good for freelancers and micro-agencies.

Epic: $99.99/month. 1 TB storage, 500 GB video traffic. For small businesses.

Legendary: $399.99/month. 10 TB storage, 2 TB video traffic. For large teams with heavy media usage.

For a 20-person team, Huly at $99.99/month total compares to Linear at $160-$320/month plus Slack at $145/month plus Notion at $160/month. The cost savings are real and scale with team size.

Self-Hosting: The Open-Source Advantage

Huly is fully open-source under EPL-2.0 and supports self-hosting via Docker Compose. Minimum requirements: 2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM (recommended: 4+ vCPUs, 16 GB RAM). The stack includes CockroachDB, Elasticsearch, Redpanda, MinIO, and Nginx, all containerized.

Quick start deploys locally with a single command. For production, you will need to configure external LiveKit for video calls, SMTP or Amazon SES for email notifications, and Redis for real-time updates. The self-hosted option gives you full data control, which matters for companies with compliance requirements that prohibit cloud-hosted project management.

The tradeoff: CockroachDB and Redpanda configurations are noted as potentially not production-ready for single-node deployments. If you are running this for a team of 50+, expect to invest time in infrastructure hardening.

The self-hosting option is increasingly rare in project management tools. Linear, Asana, and Monday.com are cloud-only. Jira offers a Data Center option but at enterprise pricing ($42,000+/year for 500 users). Huly gives you the same option at zero license cost. For government contractors, healthcare companies, and financial services teams with strict data residency requirements, this alone can justify choosing Huly.

How It Compares to Linear and Jira

vs. Linear: Linear is focused purely on issue tracking with a beautiful, fast interface. Huly adds chat, video calls, and documents. Linear charges per user ($8-$16/month). Huly charges per workspace (unlimited users). Linear is more polished for issue tracking specifically. Huly offers more breadth.

vs. Jira: Jira is the enterprise standard with deep ecosystem integration (Confluence, Bitbucket). Huly is simpler, faster to set up, and significantly cheaper for mid-size teams. Jira wins on enterprise features, compliance certifications, and marketplace integrations. Huly wins on simplicity, cost, and the self-hosting option.

Neither Linear nor Jira offers built-in chat or video calls. Both require Slack/Teams and Zoom/Meet as separate subscriptions.

What Works Well

• Flat pricing with unlimited users saves significant money for growing teams
• True all-in-one: issues, chat, video, docs in one platform
• Open-source with self-hosting option for data-sensitive organizations
• Two-way GitHub sync for development teams
• Keyboard shortcuts and fast interface (inspired by Linear)
• Active development (8,600+ commits, 24,500+ GitHub stars)
• Free tier is genuinely usable (10 GB storage, unlimited users)

Where It Falls Short

• Younger product (less mature than Jira or Linear)
• Smaller integration ecosystem (no Salesforce, no Zendesk, limited marketplace)
• AI features are listed as "TBD" across all plans
• Self-hosting requires infrastructure expertise
• Video calls depend on LiveKit infrastructure (less reliable than dedicated tools)
• Gmail is currently the only email integration
• No mobile app yet (web-only)
• Enterprise compliance certifications are limited compared to Jira

Our Take

Huly is the most promising all-in-one project management tool for teams that are tired of tool sprawl. The flat pricing model is genuinely disruptive: a 20-person team pays $100/month instead of $400-$600/month across Linear + Slack + Notion. The open-source foundation and self-hosting option add credibility. The risk is maturity. If you need enterprise compliance, deep third-party integrations, or mobile apps, Huly is not there yet. For dev teams and startups willing to trade ecosystem depth for simplicity and cost savings, it is worth a serious look.

How Huly works

Huly is an open-source everything app for teams that positions itself as an all-in-one replacement for Linear, Jira, Slack and Notion. It bundles project and issue management, a team planner with time blocking, chat and messaging, collaborative documents, a unified inbox, and a virtual office with audio and video conferencing. The GitHub repository also carries CRM, HRM, ATS, QMS and wiki modules. Huly MetaBrain is the knowledge layer that ties workflow objects together, with AI on top of it described as future work.

There are two ways to run it. Cloud: sign up at huly.io, create a workspace, add unlimited users, and pay by resource consumption rather than per seat. Self-hosted: the huly-selfhost repo provides a Docker Compose deployment under EPL-2.0.

Self-hosting is where the configuration burden lands. Minimum requirements are 2 vCPUs and 8GB RAM, with 4 vCPU and 16GB recommended, and the docs warn that servers below the minimum may stop responding or fail. Email requires wiring up your own SMTP server or Amazon SES. Web push needs VAPID key pairs. Real-time updates need the HulyPulse service uncommented plus nginx configuration, and HTTPS needs nginx with valid certificates. Optional add-ons each need their own credentials: LiveKit for audio and video calls, Gmail, Google Calendar, GitHub OAuth, OIDC for SSO, and an OpenAI API key for the AI chatbot. The flagship integration is bidirectional GitHub sync for Issues and Projects, including milestone migration and filtering. A desktop download is offered from the site.

Where Huly wins

• It is genuinely open source under EPL-2.0 with a public self-host repo, so you can run the whole stack on your own hardware with no license fee.
• Cloud pricing is per workspace, not per seat. Every tier including the $0 Common tier states unlimited users and unlimited Huly objects, so cost scales with storage and A/V traffic instead of headcount.
• GitHub sync is bidirectional for Issues and Projects with milestone migration, which is the integration most Linear and Jira migrations actually need.
• The free tier is usable rather than a demo: 10GB storage and 10GB video/audio traffic per workspace, with no user cap.
• The breadth is real, not just marketing. The repo ships project management, chat, docs, CRM, HRM, ATS and QMS modules alongside the virtual office.

Where it falls short

• AI is not shipped. Every pricing tier lists AI features as TBD, and the MetaBrain second-brain pitch is explicitly framed as coming soon.
• Self-hosting is a real ops project, not a one-click install: SMTP or SES, VAPID keys, nginx TLS, HulyPulse, and separate credentials per integration. Bare local installs cannot send email at all, which disables password recovery and email notifications.
• The self-host docs hedge on production readiness. They warn that the bundled CockroachDB and Redpanda deployments might not be production-ready and tell you to review them yourself before production use.
• Integrations beyond GitHub are thin on the marketing site. Gmail, Google Calendar and LiveKit appear only in the self-host configuration docs, and no import or migration tooling is mentioned for Jira, Linear or Notion despite the replacement positioning.
• Cloud metering is coarse and unexplained. Tiers meter storage and A/V traffic with no published overage behaviour, and the jump from $19.99 to $99.99 to $399.99 per month leaves little for a mid-size team.

Who should use Huly

Huly fits engineering-led teams that live in GitHub, want project management plus chat plus docs in one system, and either want a genuinely free unlimited-user cloud workspace or have the ops capability to self-host. The bidirectional GitHub sync and the no-seat-cap pricing are the two reasons to pick it over the incumbents, and both reward teams whose headcount would otherwise make per-seat tools expensive.

Skip it if you need AI features today, since they are marked TBD across every tier. Skip it if you are migrating off Jira or Notion and expect import tooling, because none is mentioned. And skip it if you want a managed product where no one on the team has to think about infrastructure, since the self-hosted path in particular assumes you will configure SMTP, TLS and each integration yourself.