We built a free, self-hosted alternative to IT Glue

Andy Raphael — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 23:38:37 +0000

A few years into managing IT for clients, you accumulate a strange kind of debt. Not technical debt — documentation debt. Every password, every static IP, every "oh, the backup job runs at 2am because the old guy set it up that way," scattered across spreadsheets, sticky notes, and whatever wiki someone half-set-up in 2019.

IT Glue exists to fix exactly this problem. So does Hudu. They're good products, genuinely — structured, relationship-aware documentation for clients, assets, credentials, the works. The IT industry mostly agrees this category of tool is necessary.

But here's the thing that started bugging me: I was renting the most important knowledge in my business, one month at a time, from a company that could raise prices, get acquired, or shut down a feature whenever they wanted. The data model that made my job possible lived entirely inside someone else's platform. I had exports, sure. I didn't have ownership.

So I built the thing I actually wanted: the same idea — clients, assets, credentials, domains, procedures, all wired together — except self-hosted, open source, and mine.

The part that's actually hard to replace

It would've been easy to build a glorified password manager with a notes field. That's not what makes IT Glue or Hudu valuable, though. What makes them valuable is that nothing lives in isolation — you open a client, see their assets; open an asset, see its credentials, its domain, the procedure for rebuilding it; open a credential, trace it back to every system that depends on it.

That's the part worth copying. Not the SaaS bill. The graph.

Why self-hosted, specifically

This wasn't really a cost decision, even though it's free. It was a control decision:

No license server checking in on me. The app doesn't care if it's online. It works air-gapped if it needs to.
No telemetry. Nothing phones home with client data.
No feature gates. I'm not going to build a "starter tier" and dangle the actually-useful stuff behind a paywall later. Everything's in.
A real database I can touch. PostgreSQL, not a proprietary export format. If I want to migrate away from my own tool someday, that's a pg_dump, not a negotiation.

The tradeoff, obviously, is that you run it. Docker Compose, your own server or VPS or homelab box, your own backups. For some people that's a dealbreaker. For the people this is built for — MSPs, IT pros, homelabbers who already run their own infrastructure for everything else — it's the whole point.

What it's called and where it stands

It's called Weavestream, AGPL-3.0 licensed, and it's genuinely new. I'm not going to pretend it's a polished six-year-old product with a marketing team — it's built by one person who needed this to exist, in the open, with the rough edges that implies. If you poke at it and something's missing or broken, that's expected right now, and I'd rather hear about it than have you quietly give up and go back to a spreadsheet.

If any of this sounds familiar — if you've got client knowledge trapped across five tools and a Google Doc, or you're paying monthly for documentation software you don't actually control — I'd genuinely like to know if Weavestream is worth your time.

GitHub: https://github.com/Weavestream/Weavestream
Docs: https://docs.weavestream.io
Site: https://weavestream.io

Happy to answer questions in the comments, including the "why didn't you just use X" ones — I've probably already asked myself that.

DEV Community: Andy Raphael

We built a free, self-hosted alternative to IT Glue

The part that's actually hard to replace

Why self-hosted, specifically

What it's called and where it stands