Overview
StackStorm is an open-source platform for integration and automation across the services and tools you already run. Its main job is to take actions in response to events: a monitoring alert, a webhook, a timer, or an issue update can trigger a script or a multi-step workflow without a person in the loop.
It is aimed at DevOps and SRE teams who want to codify the manual steps they take during incidents and deployments. Sensors watch external systems and fire triggers, rules match those triggers to actions, and workflows stitch actions together into larger automations. Because rules and workflows are stored as code, teams can review, version, and share them the same way they handle application code.
Within the workflow-automation space, StackStorm sits on the operational side: it connects monitoring, chat, cloud, and config-management tools through a library of reusable packs, and runs as a set of microservices over a message bus so it can scale horizontally.
What it does
- Event-driven core: sensors capture external events and fire triggers, while rules map those triggers to actions or workflows
- Reusable actions: built-in SSH and HTTP actions plus integrations for OpenStack, Docker, Puppet, and custom Python or shell scripts
- Workflows that chain actions into multi-step automations with ordering, transition conditions, and context passed between steps
- Packs as shareable units of content, with a growing catalog on StackStorm Exchange and the ability to publish your own
- Full REST API, CLI client, and web UI, plus Python client bindings for operating StackStorm locally or remotely
- Audit trail recording every manual or automated execution, with hooks for LogStash, Splunk, statsd, and syslog
Getting started
StackStorm installs on a clean 64-bit Linux host using the official installer script; check the system requirements first, then bring up the services.
Provision a Linux host
Get a clean 64-bit Linux box that meets the StackStorm system requirements documented at docs.stackstorm.com before installing.
Run the installer
The install script sets up all StackStorm services and creates an initial admin user. Replace the username and password with your own values.
curl -sSL https://stackstorm.com/packages/install.sh | bash -s -- --user=st2admin --password=Ch@ngeMeRead the docs and join the community
Follow the installation and authoring guides at docs.stackstorm.com, and ask questions on forum.stackstorm.com or the StackStorm Slack community.
Commands and code are distilled from the project's own documentation — always check the official repo for the latest.
When to use it
- Auto-remediation: detect a hardware or service failure from Nagios, Sensu, or New Relic and run diagnostic and recovery actions automatically
- Incident response and ChatOps: post failure details and run troubleshooting steps from Slack, with PagerDuty escalation when something needs a human
- Continuous deployment: build and test with Jenkins, provision a cluster, shift traffic, then roll forward or back based on app performance data
- Cross-tool orchestration: tie OpenStack, AWS, Docker, and config-management tools together into shareable rules and workflows stored as code
How StackStorm compares
StackStorm alongside other open-source workflow automation tools AI/TLDR tracks, ranked by GitHub stars.
| Tool | Stars | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| n8n | ★ 193k | A self-hostable workflow automation tool with a visual node editor that connects 400+ apps and APIs and adds native AI steps, letting technical teams build automations without writing most of the glue code. |
| Huginn | ★ 49.5k | A self-hosted system of "agents" that watch websites, feeds, and events and take automated actions on your behalf, similar to a private IFTTT. |
| Kestra | ★ 27.1k | An event-driven orchestration platform that defines data, AI, and infrastructure pipelines as declarative YAML and runs them through a web UI. |
| Activepieces | ★ 22.8k | An open-source Zapier alternative where you build automations from reusable TypeScript "pieces", with support for AI agents and self-hosting. |
| Automatisch | ★ 13.9k | A self-hosted, open-source alternative to Zapier for connecting services and building no-code workflow automations with no execution limits. |
| StackStorm | ★ 6.5k | Event-driven automation that turns alerts into actions and workflows |
| Zapier | — | No-code automation platform that connects 8,000+ apps and lets you build AI agents and multi-step workflows across them. |
| Make | — | Visual automation platform for building workflows and AI agents across 3,000+ apps with a drag-and-drop scenario builder. |