An MIT-licensed creative review platform with frame-accurate annotations, distributed transcoding, and built-in AI search hit Show HN this week. You can deploy it with Docker Compose.
2026-06-24 · by Moe Ameen
Shumai, an open-source alternative to Frame.io for creative review and collaboration, was posted to Hacker News as a Show HN on June 23, 2026, the same day its latest version, v0.1.1, was tagged. The project is MIT-licensed and self-hosted: you can stand it up with Docker Compose in a few minutes, or install it from npm if you bring your own PostgreSQL instance with the pgvector extension. The public GitHub repository was created in mid-May 2026 and has moved quickly through a string of point releases.
Feature-wise, it covers the core review loop teams expect from Frame.io. Reviewers leave frame-by-frame annotations and timestamped comments on videos and images, share work through secure links and curated collections, and operate under role-based access controls scoped at the team and project level. Media lives in S3-compatible or local storage, and video transcoding runs as distributed Temporal workflows so large files process reliably in the background. Assets carry customizable metadata fields, and a CLI lets you manage projects, upload files, and push new versions from the terminal.
The newer angle is AI built into the review surface. Shumai includes a collaborative chat agent inside projects, semantic search over media using vector embeddings, and automated metadata generation via Google Gemini. The stack is almost entirely TypeScript, running on the Bun runtime with PostgreSQL and pgvector behind it. As an early-stage project moving through 0.0.x and 0.1.x releases, specifics and stability will keep changing, so treat any single version's behavior as a snapshot.
One boundary to keep clear: Shumai is a review and approval tool, not a generation or publishing one. It is where a team comments on and signs off a cut or an image. It does not create content, write captions, reframe for vertical, or post anything to a social platform.
Shumai and Kompozy sit on opposite ends of the same pipeline, and that is exactly why they pair well. Shumai is the upstream gate: your team and clients comment frame-by-frame, request changes, and approve the master cut or hero image. Kompozy is the downstream engine that takes an approved asset and turns it into a week of finished, on-brand posts. Once a video clears review in Shumai, bring it into Kompozy and Clipped Shorts finds the strongest vertical moments, burns in branded captions, and reframes each to 9:16 — while the same source seeds a carousel, a quote card, a thread, and a blog recap, all written in your voice through the Persona Brief and scheduled across the nine connected platforms from one queue. Shumai gets the asset signed off; Kompozy gets it published everywhere.
There is also a timely content play in the launch itself. "A self-hosted, open-source Frame.io alternative just shipped" is the kind of high-intent topic editors, agencies, and post-production teams are searching this week. Drop your take on it into Kompozy as a source — why self-hosted review matters, where it fits, what it does not replace — and the engine fans that single point of view into a blog post, a carousel breaking down the open-source-review trend, short captioned clips, and platform-native posts, then schedules and publishes them across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, X, and the rest. Being early and clear on a tool launch like this is how one opinion becomes a full content cycle.
Shumai is an open-source, self-hosted alternative to Frame.io for creative review and collaboration. It supports frame-by-frame annotations, timestamped comments, secure share links, curated collections, and role-based access, and it added AI features like semantic search and an in-project chat agent. It was posted to Hacker News as a Show HN on June 23, 2026.
Yes. Shumai is released under the MIT license, so it is free to use, modify, and self-host. You can deploy it with Docker Compose or install it from npm, though you provide your own PostgreSQL database with the pgvector extension. The running cost is your own infrastructure, not a license fee.
Frame.io is a hosted, paid SaaS owned by Adobe. Shumai is open-source software you run on your own infrastructure, which gives you control over data and cost in exchange for handling deployment, storage, transcoding, and updates yourself. Both center on the same review-and-approval workflow.
No. Shumai is a review and approval tool — it is where a team comments on and signs off an asset. It does not generate content, write captions, reframe video for vertical, or publish to any platform. Turning an approved cut into clips and posts across platforms is a separate job, which is where a generation-and-publishing engine like Kompozy fits.