from Hacker News

Huly – Open-source project management platform

by blacktechnology on 10/14/24, 3:16 AM with 205 comments

• by danpalmer on 10/14/24, 4:10 AM

  Reading the deployment information, there's an interesting tension here with applications that target self-hosting.

  Deploying this requires running 5 different open source servers (databases, proxies, etc), and 5 different services that form part of this suite. If I were self-hosting this in a company I now need to be an expert in lots of different systems and potentially how to scale them, back them up, etc. The trade-offs to be made here are very different to when architecting a typical SaaS backend, where this sort of architecture might be fine.

  I've been going through this myself with a hobby project. I'm designing it for self-hosting, and it's a radically different way of working to what I'm used to (operating services just for my company). I've been using SQLite and local disk storage so that there's essentially just 2 components to operate and scale – application replicas, and shared disk storage (which is easy to backup too). I'd rather be using Postgres, I'd rather be using numerous other services, background queue processors, etc, but each of those components is something that my users would need to understand, and therefore something to be minimised far more strictly than if it were just me/one team.

  Huly looks like a great product, but I'm not sure I'd want to self-host.

• by olebedev on 10/14/24, 6:49 AM

  As a person with russian background I am laughing on the name of the project. With all the respect to the effort, I can’t take it seriously.

  The «хули» (direct transliteration to huly) means “what a hell” or actually a bit spicier “what a f@ck”. This phrase is common for russian tradies who don’t bather to know anything but where is the nearest bottle shop and how much time left til the end of work shift.

  The name reminded me PizData project from the russian speakers.

  What. A. Joke.

• by ketzo on 10/14/24, 4:06 AM

  The general category of "project management software" is obviously a very crowded one. But it's a space where I'm always genuinely excited to see an even-slightly-new take; I think anybody who's worked in a modern workplace would agree that this is very much not a solved problem, and the returns on even small improvements are so huge.

  Best of luck to Huly, this seems pretty cool. I've never gone all-in on a fully-integrated stack like this (issue tracking + docs + chat + calls), but it seems like in an ideal world, that's what you would want? Huge integration with O365 seems like the one thing people do actually like about MS Teams, for example.

  Also, I'm a sucker for cool laser animations, so I'm saving the home + pricing pages to an inspiration folder for sure.

• by dcreater on 10/27/24, 11:16 PM

  Is there a way to export all your data from Huly?

• by dotty- on 10/14/24, 4:05 AM

  The pricing is very interesting. The company I work for pays $20k for Jira & Confluence and $20k for Slack every year. And this platform claims I can replace both of them for $3600/year? and it's open source? The marketing looks great, so I hope the platform is actually a good competitor. I'd be so curious to see what their revenue is every year.

• by qaq on 10/14/24, 4:20 AM

  Interesting naming decision it's actually a swear word in russian and given that top contributors are obviously familiar with the lang. that is not a coincidence.

• by gempir on 10/14/24, 6:27 AM

  My thoughts just from reading the landing page, not having tested it.

  I think trying to replace all these Apps

  > serves as an all-in-one replacement of Linear, Jira, Slack, and Notion.

  is not a wise move. I can see Linear and Jira and maybe Notion, but fighting with Slack just is an uphill battle. There are so many Chat platforms out there and many open source too.

  Why would yours be the one to be at least on par with the likes of Slack? Which hasn't really happend for the others either.

  JetBrains tried this with JetBrains Space [1] it used to be a knowledge platform and chat platform all with a code hosting platform, CI platform and a little more. But even an experienced dev company like JetBrains gave that up and focused on the core.

  I think they should remove the chat part and stick to being a Jira + Notion replacement.

  [1] https://www.jetbrains.com/space/

• by ikeashark on 10/14/24, 4:30 AM

  I can't believe Gavin Belson is rejoining Hooli!

• by Brajeshwar on 10/14/24, 3:54 AM

  I’m kind of, by default, against meaningless animation, but your reveals and the fiery ones on the Pricing page are awesome. The plans are also generous and made for someone or a small team who needs the features but is not ready to start using all the resources, right away.

  Best of Luck. Looking good so far from the first browse and scroll-around.

• by penguin_booze on 10/14/24, 7:38 AM

  Surely, I'm not the only one thought of Hooli and Gavin Belson?

• by maverickdev69 on 10/14/24, 8:23 AM

  We’ve been using Plane CE and are really happy with it. For those who need a serious project management tool, I’d definitely recommend giving it a try. Huly looks interesting-might explore it in the future. I did try self-hosting, but the experience wasn’t great.

  https://github.com/makeplane/plane

• by sixhobbits on 10/14/24, 8:17 AM

  I've long wanted something similar to this. I currently use Linear as both an ATS and a CRM, and most project management can be reduced to People/Companies, Tasks/Deals, and Pipelines.

  Linear is not quite flexible enough for what I need as it is too strongly in the task management camp, so I can't define a proper candidate pipeline without hacking what the "status" of each "issue" means and remembering that.

  Most small companies don't need dedicated solutions for project management, ats and crm, so I'd love to combine them. But I'd be looking for something more lightweight than this, maybe even local without cloud, but at least single service with sqlite or similar.

  Would be amazing if it was very customizable to let people build or customize their own pipelines from some basic building blocks, still keeping the slick and fast UI from Linear.

  I agree going after Slack at the same time is too ambitious.

• by zild3d on 10/14/24, 11:39 AM

  everywhere I look seems to mention a different product it's a replacement for

  Landing page: " serves as an all-in-one replacement of Linear, Jira, Slack, and Notion."

  Github repo: "alternative to Linear, Jira, Slack, Notion, Motion"

  Github org: "Alternative to Jira, Linear, Slack, Notion, Motion, and Roam by Huly Labs"

• by komali2 on 10/14/24, 1:12 PM

  I really like that you can self host an entire project management stack these days. For my co-op we use OpenProject for Issues / Kanban but it seems it has things like time tracking, wiki, and many other features we don't use because we prefer alternatives.

  For wiki / notion we use Outline. For slack, Matrix. For CRM, Espo. For code repositories, forgejo, but we don't self host it, we use codeberg.

  I think this stack would probably cost us a couple thousand of dollars a month if we paid for SaaS since we have around a hundred members. Instead we pay something like 30$/month for a couple hetzner servers through elestio.

  When I work full time and I get to use all the bells and whistles SaaS products like linear, sometimes I think it's cool that the tool will do something like point out I'm about to create a duplicate ticket... But thousands of dollars a month cooler? Not sure, but not my money!

• by DoesntMatter22 on 10/14/24, 4:14 AM

  idk if it's just me but if they don't' have a running demo of it I'm not even gonna spend any time unless I'm desperate

• by nearportland on 10/14/24, 7:03 AM

  Is there any option for self host that isnt attached to the boat-anchor that is 'docker'? I want to self host this on my public self hosted environment not my LAN side self hosted environment

• by wg0 on 10/14/24, 7:55 AM

  I am impressed by the laser border animations on the pricing page and that laser clock. Will check later how they are built. Amazing if CSS alone has advanced that far.

• by danielovichdk on 10/14/24, 12:08 PM

  Amazing. All my 25 year long professional programming career the shit around project management systems never fucking stops.

  Like ORMs, every programmer needs to write one.

  Pick one. Stick with it.

• by lucifer153 on 10/14/24, 8:59 AM

  Interestingly, Huly is also the sponsor of the Zig programming language[1].

  [1]: https://ziglang.org/

• by Havoc on 10/14/24, 8:55 AM

  Kinda curious about the requirements. 4GB minimum.

  Isn’t a PM platform mostly text-like?

  Not criticising (gitlab manages same) just curious what’s driving that.

• by avanttech on 10/14/24, 6:12 AM

  Site looks great and opensource moniker while replacing major products with self hosting got me really interested. Checked the github and understood svelte in frontend UI. All the best on your journey. btw, Is video & audio conferencing built from scratch or does it need MS Teams and Zoom or can integrate with 3rd party providers?

• by nearportland on 10/14/24, 7:02 AM

  Is there any option for self host that doesn't get attached to the boat anchor that is 'docker'??

• by whyowhy3484939 on 10/14/24, 9:23 AM

  Project management strikes me as one of those fuzzy complicated looking problems that, for some reason, are always approached as a single problem that needs one UI. In my mind it is not a single problem.

  I'd try a more modular approach because IMO a substantial part of the problem is "horses for courses": PMs and developers have very different skills and requirements. Even inside those categories there is substantial variation.

  I see no reason why the UI for developers has to be same as for PMs and higher ups. My ideal PM solution would involve the CLI and the notion of committing changes and being able to organize information cleverly. Efficiency, bare-boned, no fluff, no pixels that add zero information. These would all be things I am interested in.

  My boss' ideal PM solution would probably involve some unholy marriage of Salesforce, Excel and CSVs without any organization whatsoever in a screen that explodes with fireworks and deliberately slows everything down and adds lag and loading screens so you feel you are doing important work. You can tell I am jaded, but my point is, fine. Let them have it. I see no reason to approach this problem with one, fixed, set of interaction patterns.

  It's a common theme these days for me. Why does everything has to be so monolithic? Why is everything so samey?

• by mfld on 10/14/24, 11:31 AM

  When I read All-In-One PM and CRM platform I must think of bitrix24, which I think is still widely used. I personally didn't like it because feature creep made the UI quite confusing.

• by Brajeshwar on 10/14/24, 4:20 AM

  Ah! You guys were Huly.App and this is a relaunch. I had tracked your earlier progress a few months back but forgot about it. Nice, again, best of luck.

• by nubela on 10/14/24, 3:54 AM

  Is it just me that when someone sells something as "everything", I immediately feels like it does nothing well?

• by Separo on 10/14/24, 11:44 AM

  My company uses Linear, Slack, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Monday, GitHub, Discord and more. This, if it works well, would be a godsend.

• by nikolayasdf123 on 10/14/24, 4:15 AM

  the webiste sure looks flashy

• by j45 on 10/14/24, 12:00 PM

  Huly doesn’t seem to like to work on mobile.

• by farceSpherule on 10/14/24, 4:42 PM

  Why do this when you can pay for any number of SaaS products out there?

• by eclipxe on 10/14/24, 4:28 AM

  This looks really great and love that it can be self hosted. Nice!!!

• by mib32 on 10/14/24, 7:39 AM

  Huly tut tak malo?

• by lmc on 10/14/24, 6:07 AM

  Is anyone using this in a team? How is the perf?

• by byyoung3 on 10/14/24, 7:25 AM

  gavin belson signature edition

• by brainzap on 10/14/24, 10:01 AM

  where can I find the api docs

• by zuck_vs_musk on 10/14/24, 7:54 AM

  I see 'Node.js' and I see something that's going to be unwieldy pretty soon.

• by jacktheturtle on 10/14/24, 4:21 AM

  nice landing page, looks good.

• by hajimuz on 10/14/24, 6:55 AM

  looks pretty convincing!