IFTTT alternative: Beehive

I recently wrote a blog about how to schedule posts on Netlify using IFTTT. IFTTT is a proprietary service from a company that somehow has to make money (They earn money by charging other services that want to make their service available to the IFTTT platform).

However because of this business model, IFTTT is limited to services that have and are willing to pay the money to get on the platform. And if a service decides to stop paying to IFTTT it might disappear from IFTTT and your automation setups break.

But there’s an alternative to IFTTT that’s open source and available for self hosting on your own server: Beehive. It’s very minimal and lightweight (it’s written in Go, a bonus point in my eyes) but has all the features IFTTT has.

What are the benefits?

Full control: Services won’t disappear because they stop paying (unless they turn off their APIs etc.)

Privacy: all data stays with you

Open source: You can easily write and contribute own “bees” (services) to automate more things

Yesterday I installed Beehive on my home server and setup a “chain” (equivalent to applets on IFTTT) for the Netlify webhook. It was very easy to do so. The other applet I currently use on IFTTT is to tweet about new blog entries, but because Twitter has really complicated their API process, I wasn’t able to migrate that yet. (It’s probably also easier to tweet manually than adding an app in the Twitter developer center 😂)

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