# The Best Hudu Alternative Is the One You Control If you've been Googling "Hudu alternative," you've already seen the landscape: comparison sites with affiliate links, Hudu competitors pitching their own SaaS, and the occasional Reddit thread recommending ITGlue or Halo. None of them are writing from the perspective of the open-source, self-hosted option. That's the angle nobody is taking. This article does. --- ## What Hudu does well Before we get into trade-offs, it's worth saying plainly: **Hudu is a good product.** If you're an MSP that wants to sign up, onboard clients, and be documenting infrastructure within the hour, Hudu delivers that. Its UI is polished, its RMM integrations are broad (ConnectWise, Autotask, Datto, NinjaRMM, and more), and it has a mobile app. The team ships updates regularly, and there's an active community behind it. If you need deep PSA or RMM integration out of the box and have no interest in operating your own infrastructure, Hudu will serve you well. This article isn't about telling you Hudu is bad. It's about identifying who Hudu wasn't built for — and who Weavestream was. --- ## The structural problem with vendor-hosted documentation Every time you store documentation in a vendor's cloud, you're making a quiet assumption: that vendor will always be around, their pricing will stay sane, their API will stay available, and their policies will stay aligned with yours. That assumption has a price. With Hudu, it's a monthly per-seat subscription that scales with your team size. But the financial cost is almost the secondary concern. The deeper issue is **what you can't do**: - You can't audit what happens to your data at rest on their servers. - You can't control uptime. If Hudu has an outage, so does your documentation. - You can't migrate cleanly. Exporting years of structured asset data, encrypted passwords, and linked articles out of a SaaS platform is painful at best, and lossy at worst. - You can't customise the security model. Forced MFA, stricter session policies, custom encryption keys — these are either unavailable or locked behind higher tiers. For homelab operators and privacy-oriented sysadmins, this is a dealbreaker by default. For MSPs handling healthcare, legal, or financial clients, it increasingly creates compliance exposure. For small teams with an ops-minded engineer on staff, it's simply a suboptimal use of infrastructure budget. --- ## What the open-source option actually looks like [Weavestream](https://github.com/Weavestream/Weavestream) is a self-hosted IT documentation platform built to cover the same ground as Hudu — assets, credentials, articles, domain monitoring, client portals — without the vendor. It runs as three Docker containers (web, API, worker) on top of Postgres and Redis. One `compose.yml`. No cloud dependency. No telemetry. No paywalled features. ```bash curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Weavestream/Weavestream/main/compose.yml curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Weavestream/Weavestream/main/.env.example mv .env.example .env curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Weavestream/Weavestream/main/scripts/keygen.sh | bash >> .env docker compose up -d ``` That's the entire install. Your data lives in host-mounted directories you control. Back it up with `pg_dump` and `rsync`. Restore it the same way. No export API to wait on, no support ticket to file. The license is [AGPL-3.0-or-later](https://github.com/Weavestream/Weavestream/blob/main/LICENSE) — the source is public, the images are on GHCR, and the code compiles from scratch if you want to audit every line. --- ## Side-by-side comparison | | Hudu | Weavestream | |---|---|---| | **Pricing** | Per-seat subscription | Free (AGPL) | | **Hosting** | Vendor cloud | Self-hosted (Docker) | | **Data ownership** | Vendor-controlled | Fully yours | | **Asset management** | ✅ | ✅ 14+ field types | | **Password vault** | ✅ | ✅ AES-256-GCM, TOTP, breach detection | | **Documentation** | ✅ Rich-text | ✅ Rich-text + Markdown | | **Domain & SSL monitoring** | ✅ | ✅ WHOIS + DNS + TLS | | **IP Address Management** | Limited | ✅ Full IPAM with conflict detection | | **Client portal** | ✅ | ✅ | | **Audit log** | ✅ | ✅ Append-only, tamper-resistant | | **Forced MFA** | Optional | ✅ Platform-enforced | | **Open source** | ❌ | ✅ AGPL | | **No telemetry** | Undisclosed | ✅ Zero | | **RMM / PSA integrations** | Extensive (ConnectWise, Datto, etc.) | Growing (Action1, UniFi, NinjaOne) | | **Mobile app** | ✅ | ❌ (browser only) | The honest read: Hudu has a broader integration surface today, particularly for MSPs running ConnectWise or Autotask. Weavestream's integration catalog is smaller but growing. If your workflow depends on deep PSA sync, that gap is real and worth weighing. On every dimension that touches data ownership, security posture, and operational control — Weavestream is the stronger option. --- ## Who should choose Hudu - You need ConnectWise, Datto, or Autotask integration on day one. - You have no interest in running infrastructure — you want a login URL and nothing else. - Your team is non-technical and won't touch a terminal. - The per-seat cost fits comfortably in your budget. There's no shame in any of those reasons. Hudu is a polished product with an active roadmap. --- ## Who should choose Weavestream - You're an MSP, homelab operator, or internal IT team with the capability to run a Docker stack. - You need your documentation to be accessible even if a third-party has an outage. - You have compliance requirements that make vendor-hosted credential storage uncomfortable. - You want to audit, fork, or extend the codebase. - You're spending on SaaS tooling and want to reclaim the budget. - You care about where your clients' data lives. Weavestream was built specifically for this profile: operators who are technically capable and want genuine ownership over their documentation stack, not just a login to someone else's database. --- ## Security worth noting The security defaults in Weavestream are stricter than most platforms in this space by design. MFA enrollment is forced for every account — there's no per-user opt-out. Credentials are encrypted with AES-256-GCM with a key that lives in your environment, not on a vendor's key management service. The audit log is append-only and protected at the database-role level, meaning even a compromised application process can't retroactively alter records. HaveIBeenPwned breach detection runs on every credential. If you want to understand the full threat model before deploying, the [security documentation](/security/) and [encryption spec](/security/encryption/) lay it out. --- ## Getting started Deploy in under ten minutes with the [Quickstart guide](/getting-started/quickstart/), or read the [full Getting Started section](/getting-started/) if you're planning a production rollout behind a reverse proxy with TLS. The source, issue tracker, and release notes are at [github.com/Weavestream/Weavestream](https://github.com/Weavestream/Weavestream). If something is missing that's keeping you on a proprietary platform, open an issue — the roadmap is public and driven by what people actually need. Your documentation should be yours. Weavestream is how you get there.