About Tech Digest
A reference for people who run their own servers, built around the numbers that decide whether you still run them in a year.
What is Tech Digest?
Tech Digest is an independent reference for self-hosting. It profiles 105 self-hosted tools using the same fields for every one, including idle memory, an operational load score, licence class, identity support and the shape of the backup, then adds head-to-head comparisons, migration guides, cross-cutting operations guides and browser-based calculators built on the same dataset.
Self-hosting has an information problem, and it is not a shortage of writing about it.
The writing that exists is mostly lists. A list gives you thirty tools, each described in the words its own homepage used, with no way to tell which one will still be running in two years and which one will quietly become the reason you lose a weekend. The things that actually decide it are missing: what it costs in memory, what breaks on upgrade day, whether a backup of it can be restored, whether it will ever share a login with anything else.
That is the gap this site was built for.
What is here#
Profiles. 105 tools, each described with the same fields: licence and licence class, datastore, default ports, whether official arm64 builds exist, identity support, idle and typical memory, an operational load score against a published rubric, the derived shape of its backup, and three to five specific traps that people actually hit. Every profile carries the sources it was built from. Start at the tool directory.
Categories. 16 clusters, each with the editorial part a table cannot give you: what the real decision in that area is, a recommended default and its cost, and the mistakes people make. Backup and Identity are the two most people get wrong.
Comparisons. 40 head-to-head pages that end with a recommendation rather than a shrug, with a generated specification table so both sides are described identically.
Migration guides. What it actually costs to leave a cloud service, what you give up by leaving, how to export your data before you cancel, and the honest cases where you should stay. Replace Google Photos and Replace Gmail are the two extremes: one is a migration worth doing carefully, the other is one most people should not attempt.
Guides. 18 cross-cutting pieces on the things that apply regardless of what you run: Reverse proxy and TLS, Backups that actually restore, Remote access without port forwarding, Single sign-on for self-hosters, An update strategy that does not lose data.
Calculators. Five browser-based tools built on the same dataset, so a calculator can never disagree with a profile. The Stack planner sizes a server from the services you pick, and the Resilience scorecard is the fastest way to find out what is missing from a setup you already run.
Research. Original analysis computed from the index, including the finding that 81.9 percent of these tools cannot be safely backed up by copying files while they run, and that only 50.0 percent of those with user accounts support single sign-on natively.
The principles behind it#
Numbers over adjectives. Everything calls itself lightweight. The useful statement is that it idles at 40 MB, or at 900 MB, and that the difference decides what hardware you buy.
Name the tradeoff. A recommendation with no downside has not been thought through.
Say when the answer is no. Several pages here conclude that a reader should keep paying for the hosted service. That is not a failure of nerve, it is the correct answer often enough to be worth writing down.
Show the arithmetic. Every derived number on this site can be recomputed from the published dataset and the rules on our methodology.
Date everything. Software moves. A page carries the date it was last reviewed, and an old date is shown rather than hidden.
What is deliberately absent#
No benchmarks we did not run. No star counts or download numbers, which measure attention rather than quality. No security audits dressed up as reviews. No affiliate links. No sponsored entries, no paid placement, and no project reviewing its own page before it goes out. our editorial standards sets out the full list of things that cannot be bought here, and corrections is where the mistakes get logged.
Getting in touch#
Corrections, missing tools, and arguments with our verdicts are all welcome. Maintainers of covered projects: the fastest way to fix an entry is a link to the primary source that contradicts it. contact us has the details.
Questions#
Who is this site for?
People who run, or are about to run, software on hardware they control. That includes a first home server on a spare laptop, a household media and photo setup, a small business avoiding a per-seat subscription, and anyone migrating off a cloud service. It is written for a competent generalist rather than for a systems administrator, so it explains the mechanics where they matter without assuming you already know them.
What makes it different from the existing lists?
Consistency and honesty about cost. Most self-hosting coverage is a list of tools described in whatever terms each project's own homepage used, which makes comparison impossible. Every tool here is described with the same fields, so the comparisons are real. And every page states the operational cost, the traps and the restore path, not just the feature list, because those are what decide whether a service is still running in a year.
How many tools are covered?
105 across 16 categories, with 40 head-to-head comparisons and 18 cross-cutting guides. The index favours depth over breadth: a tool is included when it can be described properly with sources, and left out when it cannot. There is no target number and no ambition to list everything ever written.
Is the data available?
Yes. The full structured index is published as JSON and CSV under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, and every research page on the site is computed from it. If your analysis of it contradicts ours, we would like to hear about it.
Do you cover hosted services too?
Only as the thing being left, or as the honest alternative when self-hosting is the wrong answer. Several pages recommend a hosted service outright, which is not a hedge: for email, for a password manager belonging to somebody who will not do backups, and for anything a household depends on with no second administrator, the hosted option is usually correct.
Published . Last reviewed . Found something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it and log the change.