Categories
Self-hosting, one problem at a time
Sixteen clusters covering the whole practice, from the hypervisor underneath to the notification that tells you a disk is dying. Each one ranks its tools by how much work they actually are.
Platforms and container management
Hypervisors, container runtimes, NAS operating systems and the deploy tooling that sits on top of them.
Portainer, CasaOS, Docker Engine, Podman8 tools · avg ops 2.2/5Networking, DNS and remote access
Reverse proxies, certificate automation, DNS filtering and getting to your server from outside the house.
Caddy, AdGuard Home, Nginx Proxy Manager, Pi-hole7 tools · avg ops 2.6/5Backup and object storage
Snapshot engines, repository formats and the S3-compatible storage your other services expect.
BorgBackup, Kopia, rclone, restic6 tools · avg ops 2.5/5Passwords, SSO and identity
Password managers, OIDC providers, forward-auth gateways and the directory underneath them.
LLDAP, Pocket ID, Vaultwarden, Authelia11 tools · avg ops 2.1/5Media servers and libraries
Video, music, audiobooks, comics and the automation stack that keeps a library tidy.
Navidrome, Audiobookshelf, Calibre-Web, Emby6 tools · avg ops 2.3/5Photos, files and sync
Phone photo backup, file sync, and the groupware suites that try to replace an entire cloud drive.
File Browser, Syncthing, PhotoPrism, Immich7 tools · avg ops 2.7/5Documents, notes and knowledge
Paperless archives, wikis, note stores and collaborative editors you will still be able to read in ten years.
BookStack, HedgeDoc, Trilium Notes, Docmost8 tools · avg ops 1.9/5Monitoring and observability
Uptime checks, metrics, logs and disk health, sized so the monitoring costs less than the thing it watches.
Beszel, Dozzle, Gatus, Grafana5 tools · avg ops 2.6/5Home automation
The hub, the radios, the firmware toolchain and the camera NVR that make a house respond to itself.
ESPHome, Node-RED, Zigbee2MQTT, Frigate6 tools · avg ops 2.7/5Chat, mail and notifications
Federated chat, team messaging, the hardest thing in self-hosting (mail), and simple push alerts.
Gotify, ntfy, Mattermost, Stalwart6 tools · avg ops 2.7/5Git forges and developer infrastructure
Self-hosted git, CI runners, container registries and remote editors.
code-server, Forgejo, Gitea, Woodpecker CI5 tools · avg ops 2.4/5Security and update hygiene
Intrusion prevention, log-driven banning, vulnerability monitoring and how to handle updates without losing data.
Diun, CrowdSec, Fail2ban, Watchtower5 tools · avg ops 2.4/5Feeds, bookmarks and read-it-later
RSS readers, archival bookmarking and the read-later queue that outlives the services that used to hold it.
linkding, FreshRSS, Karakeep, Miniflux4 tools · avg ops 2.2/5Dashboards and automation glue
Start pages, service dashboards and the workflow engines that wire everything else together.
Glance, Homarr, Homepage, n8n6 tools · avg ops 2.2/5Tasks, recipes and personal finance
Task boards, meal planning, inventory and double-entry budgeting, plus honest notes on which ones people abandon.
grocy, Actual Budget, Mealie, Vikunja4 tools · avg ops 2.2/5Local AI and private search
Model runners, chat front ends and metasearch, with the hardware reality behind each one.
Ollama, Open WebUI, SearXNG, LocalAI