Open-source, self-hosted Frame.io alternative for reviewing and approving creative work.
Last verified · 2026-06-23 · by Moe Ameen
Shumai is an open-source platform for reviewing and managing creative work, positioned as a self-hosted alternative to Frame.io. It is published under the MIT license, built primarily in TypeScript, and developed in the open on GitHub by a small project (shumaiOne) that surfaced it through a Show HN post in 2026. You run it yourself — there is no hosted SaaS version to sign up for — so the appeal is owning your media, your storage, and your review pipeline instead of renting them.
The core of the product is collaborative review. You upload video and image assets and give precise feedback with frame-by-frame drawing tools and timestamped comments attached directly to the footage, the way editors and clients expect to leave notes. Around that sit the pieces a real production pipeline needs: secure public share links and curated collections for sending work to clients, granular team-level and project-level role-based access control, customizable asset metadata fields, and storage that runs on either a local filesystem or any S3-compatible backend (AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, MinIO). Heavy video transcoding is offloaded to a background worker pool orchestrated by Temporal.
Shumai also ships an AI layer it calls the Shumai Agent: a collaborative AI chat inside project workspaces, AI-powered metadata autofill via Google Gemini, and semantic search over your library powered by vector embeddings — which is why the install requires PostgreSQL with the pgvector extension. The agent supports custom skills and tools and runs them in an isolated sandbox. This is where it goes beyond a plain review board into something closer to an AI-assisted media library.
One thing to be clear about: Shumai is a review, collaboration, and asset-management tool, not a content generator and not a social publisher. It does not write captions, cut clips, or post to TikTok or LinkedIn. It is where finished or in-progress creative work gets organized, annotated, and approved before it ships somewhere else.
Shumai is an approval gate, not a content engine — and that is exactly where it slots next to Kompozy. The two solve opposite halves of the same pipeline. Kompozy is the generation and publishing engine: it turns one source asset into 25–35 finished outputs across video, image, text, blog, and newsletter — persona and avatar video, clipped shorts, carousels, quote cards, photo posts, blog drafts — all governed by your Persona Brief so they stay on-brand. Shumai is the room where a client or a teammate signs off on those outputs before they go out.
The clean workflow: generate a batch in Kompozy, push the cuts and carousels into your self-hosted Shumai instance, and let the client leave frame-by-frame notes and approve the ones that pass. Then take the approved versions back to Kompozy, which schedules and publishes them across all nine platforms — Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Pinterest, Threads, plus email and blog — from one queue. Kompozy makes the content and ships it; Shumai is the human checkpoint in the middle for teams and agencies that need a real sign-off step. If you self-host Shumai because you want to own your review pipeline, Kompozy is the production side that keeps that pipeline fed and the distribution side that gets the approved work out the door.
Shumai is an open-source, self-hosted platform for reviewing and managing creative work, positioned as an alternative to Frame.io. It offers frame-by-frame annotations, timestamped comments, secure share links, role-based access, S3-compatible or local storage, and an AI agent for semantic search and metadata. It is MIT-licensed and you host it yourself.
Shumai is free and open-source under the MIT license — there is no per-seat subscription. Because it is self-hosted, your real costs are the infrastructure you run it on (a server plus PostgreSQL with the pgvector extension and storage). There is no hosted version offered by the project.
The fastest path is Docker: download the project's docker-compose file and run docker compose up, then open it at localhost:3000. It can also be installed from npm as @shumai-one/shumai, which additionally needs PostgreSQL with pgvector and system tools like ffmpeg. Storage can be a local filesystem or any S3-compatible backend such as AWS S3, Cloudflare R2, or MinIO.
No. Shumai is a review, collaboration, and asset-management tool — it does not write captions, cut clips, or post to social platforms. It is where work gets annotated and approved. For generating the content and publishing it across platforms, you pair it with a generation engine like Kompozy.
Kompozy generates and publishes; Shumai is the approval step in between. Generate a batch in Kompozy, push the video and image outputs into Shumai for frame-by-frame client review, then bring the approved versions back to Kompozy to schedule and publish across all nine platforms.