Editorial standards
A recommendation is only worth something if you know what could have bought it. Here is what does and does not influence what appears on this site.
Is Tech Digest independent?
Yes. No project pays for inclusion, placement, a score or a verdict, and no project sees its entry before publication. The site carries advertising, which is sold and served separately from editorial and has no input into what is written, scored or recommended. Where a link would earn money, we do not use one: outbound links to projects are plain links.
What we will not do for money#
This is the short version, and it is the part that matters:
- No project pays for inclusion in the index.
- No project pays for a position in a list, a table or a comparison.
- No project pays for a score, a verdict or a recommendation.
- No sponsored posts, no paid reviews, no "in partnership with".
- No affiliate links. Outbound links to projects, documentation and repositories are plain links with no revenue attached.
- No project reviews its own entry before it is published.
The site carries advertising. Advertising is sold and served separately from the editorial side, advertisers see nothing before publication, and no advertiser has any input into what is written, scored or recommended.
If any of this changes, it will be written on this page first, and anything affected will be labelled where it appears.
How a recommendation gets made#
Every comparison on this site ends with a recommendation, usually several, one per situation. That is a deliberate choice. A page that lists ten options and concludes that it depends on your needs has moved the work back onto the reader, who came here precisely because they could not do that work themselves.
The obligations that come with taking a position:
Name the tradeoff. Every recommendation costs something. A verdict that has no downside is a verdict that has not been thought through, and the page should say what you are giving up.
Say who it is wrong for. Every profile carries a "look elsewhere if" section, and those are real disqualifiers rather than polite hedging.
Be willing to recommend nothing. Several pages on this site conclude that a reader should keep paying for the hosted service, or should not attempt the migration at all. When not to self-host exists for that reason, and Replace Gmail spends its first section talking most readers out of it.
Change the verdict when the facts change, in public. When a recommendation reverses, the page says what changed and why. A page that has been quietly rewritten is worth less than one that admits it used to say something else.
Sourcing#
Facts are checked against primary sources: the project's own documentation, its repository, its LICENSE file, its release notes, its sample configuration, its published container manifests. Other people's articles are not sources.
Three rules follow:
- If it cannot be sourced, it is not printed. Some profiles say "not recorded" where a project's own history does not settle a question.
- Estimates are labelled as estimates. Memory figures, restore-time ranges and anything derived by arithmetic say so, and the arithmetic is shown.
- Old knowledge is re-checked, not assumed. A large share of the published writing about self-hosting is two or three years stale, particularly about licences, maintainership and current versions. Several entries in this index contradict widely repeated claims because those claims are out of date.
our methodology sets out the full rule set, including the scoring rubric and the derivations.
Dates, updates and staleness#
Every page carries the date it was last reviewed, not just the date it was written. The distinction matters: a page reviewed recently and left unchanged is a stronger signal than a page edited recently for no reason.
Software in this niche moves fast. A page whose review date is old should be treated as old. We would rather show you a stale date honestly than manufacture freshness.
Facts that go stale fastest get re-checked first: licences, maintainership, current major versions, and anything that has moved behind a paid edition.
Corrections#
Substantive errors get fixed and logged publicly on corrections with the date, what was wrong and what it should have said. That log is deliberately part of the site rather than a footnote, because a site with no corrections page is either perfect or not looking.
If something here is wrong, contact us is the fastest way to say so. Evidence is welcome and a link to the primary source is ideal.
Conflicts of interest#
The people producing this site run self-hosted software themselves, which is where a lot of the operational detail comes from. That is a source of knowledge and also a source of bias: familiarity with a tool makes it easier to write about and easier to like.
Two mitigations. First, everything is scored against the same published rubric, so a preference has to survive contact with a fixed set of criteria. Second, the reasoning behind every score is printed, so you can disagree with the specific argument rather than having to guess at it.
We hold no financial interest in any project covered here, and take no payment, equity, hardware or complimentary licences from any of them.
Accessibility and the reading experience#
The site is built to be readable rather than to be impressive. No tracking scripts, no consent walls, no pop-ups over the article, no auto-playing anything, no newsletter interruption, and no infinite scroll. Pages are semantic HTML that works with a screen reader, keyboard navigation, and JavaScript switched off. The calculators are the one exception, because they compute, and every one of them explains its arithmetic in prose on the same page so the answer is available without them.
Questions#
Does Tech Digest accept payment from the projects it covers?
No. Not for inclusion, not for placement in a list, not for a score, not for a comparison verdict, and not for a review at all. There is no sponsored content, and there is no arrangement under which a project can pay to be added, moved up, softened or removed. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before it appears anywhere else on the site, and any affected content will be labelled.
How is the site funded?
Advertising. Ads are sold and served separately from the editorial side, advertisers get no advance sight of content, and no advertiser has ever been told what a page will say. The practical safeguard is structural: the things that would be most valuable to sell, a favourable verdict or a place in a comparison, are exactly the things this page commits to never selling.
Do you use affiliate links?
No. Outbound links to projects, documentation and repositories are plain links with no tracking parameters and no revenue attached. This matters more than it sounds: affiliate revenue creates a quiet pressure toward recommending whatever pays, and toward recommending something rather than telling a reader to do nothing.
Can a project get its entry changed?
Through the same process as anyone else, and only with evidence. A maintainer who shows us that a fact is wrong gets the fact fixed and the correction logged, usually quickly, because they are often the best source available. A maintainer who dislikes a verdict gets a reply explaining the reasoning. Disagreement is not a correction.
What happens when you get something wrong?
We fix it, and we say that we fixed it. Substantive errors, anything that could have led a reader to a bad decision, get an entry in the corrections log with the date, the original claim and what it should have said. Typos and formatting get fixed silently. The review date on the page moves whenever the content does.
Do you take free hardware or licences?
No hardware, and no complimentary licences or accounts for review purposes. Where a paid tier is relevant to a verdict, the page says what is behind it based on the vendor's published pricing and documentation, and says plainly when we have not used it.
How do you handle a project you cannot recommend?
We say so, and we say why, with the specific evidence: an archived repository, a licence change, a stalled release cadence, a documented data-loss bug. Projects stay in the index after they are abandoned, marked as such, because people are still running them and still searching for them. Telling somebody their software is now unmaintained is more useful than deleting the page.
Published . Last reviewed . Found something out of date? Tell us and we will fix it and log the change.