Plane vs Huly

Plane and Huly both show up when someone searches for a self-hosted replacement for Linear or Jira, and both look like modern issue trackers in a screenshot. Underneath they are very different bets. Plane is a focused project management app on a familiar TypeScript, Python, PostgreSQL and Redis stack. Huly is a business-application platform where project management is one app beside chat, CRM, HR and recruiting, on a much heavier stack. On our test box the gap was large enough to decide the question for most small teams.

What you get

Plane Community Edition (AGPL-3.0) ships work items across five layouts: list, board, calendar, table and timeline. It adds cycles for sprints, modules for grouping work, saved views and wiki-style pages. Some AI and enterprise capabilities shown on Plane's hosted offering are limited to paid plans, so read the edition table before you plan around a feature you saw in a demo.

Huly (EPL-2.0) describes itself as a framework for business applications. The platform README lists Chat, Project Management, CRM, HRM and ATS applications in the one repository. That suits a team that wants a single sign-on and one data store for tracking issues, talking about them, and also keeping a sales pipeline or hiring board. It is more than you need if you only want a tracker.

Weight on the server

The stacks are the main practical difference. Plane's official installer brings up a Docker Compose stack of the web app, API, PostgreSQL and Redis. We list a 4 GB minimum and measured about 1.1 GB of RAM and about 4.5 GB of disk idle.

Huly's self-host compose runs nginx, CockroachDB, Redpanda, Elasticsearch, S3-compatible object storage and a set of Huly services. Upstream's minimum is 2 vCPUs and 8 GB of RAM, and our 2 vCPU test box used about 3.7 GB of RAM and about 9.8 GB of disk idle. We rate it 4 out of 5 to deploy against 3 out of 5 for Plane. A few containers restarted while the databases came up, and docker ps showed Redpanda as unhealthy even though the stack worked, because of an upstream healthcheck error. Give it a few minutes before you judge it.

Project health

This part should be read before you commit. The Huly platform README says the hosted Huly service has been discontinued because its hosting is no longer funded, so self-hosting is how you run it. The same README marks the hcengineering/platform repository as frozen and no longer actively maintained, and points to Platform-Collective/platform for current development. We tested the self-host repository pinned to a specific commit, so check which fork you want to follow before you build a team's workflow on it.

Plane, by contrast, is actively developed by the company behind it, with a hosted cloud alongside the self-hosted Community Edition.

Install notes from our test

Plane's installer needed one fix for our run: its default stable release lookup depends on parsing a GitHub API response in a way the current JSON breaks, so we pinned a known release. After that the installer's install and start steps gave a working site on port 80.

Huly's setup.sh asks questions interactively. We answered the host address, the HTTP port and left the volume paths empty so Docker uses named volumes. The first sign-up created the workspace.

Which to choose

Choose Plane if you want a fast issue tracker with sprints, boards and timelines on a 4 GB server, and a maintained upstream. It is the default pick.

Choose Huly if you really want chat, CRM and recruiting in the same product as your tracker, you have an 8 GB server to give it, and you accept the upstream repository and hosted-service situation described above.

Related

If you need classic portfolio planning, see Plane vs OpenProject. The Plane setup is in the deploy guide, the replacement landscape is on the Linear and Jira alternatives pages, and the Huly page is here.