15 of the Most Amazing Self-Hosted Apps You Can Run Today
5/27/2025
For developers, sysadmins, and privacy-focused power users, self-hosted apps are more than a hobby—they’re a gateway to ownership, customization, and control over your digital environment. Here’s a curated list of 15 of the most powerful, polished, and community-loved self-hosted applications you can spin up today on your own server, homelab, or VPS.
1. Nextcloud – https://nextcloud.com
A full-featured private cloud suite. Think of it as your self-hosted Google Drive + Calendar + Contacts + Office suite. With strong plugin support and mobile apps, it’s ideal for both personal and team collaboration.
2. Plausible Analytics – https://plausible.io
A lightweight, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics. It’s GDPR-compliant, script-light, and gives you full control over your website analytics without tracking your users.
3. Vaultwarden – https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
A lean and efficient alternative server for Bitwarden, the popular password manager. It’s perfect for self-hosters who want secure, encrypted password storage without the cloud dependency.
4. Gitea – https://gitea.io
A lightweight Git hosting solution similar to GitHub or GitLab, ideal for teams or solo developers who want control over their repos, issues, and CI integrations in a low-resource environment.
5. Uptime Kuma – https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma
A sleek monitoring tool that lets you track uptime and response times for websites and services. It comes with alerting, logs, and a beautiful status page—an essential for homelabs or production apps.
6. Paperless-ngx – https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx
Turn your scanned documents into a fully searchable archive. With OCR and tagging support, it’s perfect for organizing personal documents, receipts, and digital paperwork.
7. Home Assistant – https://www.home-assistant.io
The king of smart home automation. Control and automate everything from lights to thermostats to sensors with deep integration across hundreds of platforms.
8. Firefly III – https://firefly-iii.org
A powerful personal finance manager that’s ideal for budgeting, tracking expenses, managing accounts, and visualizing financial health—all securely on your own server.
9. BookStack – https://www.bookstackapp.com
A simple, modern, and elegant wiki-style documentation platform. Perfect for personal knowledgebases, IT team documentation, or even internal company wikis.
10. Plex (or Jellyfin) – https://www.plex.tv
/ https://jellyfin.org
Both are media server platforms that let you host and stream your movies, TV shows, and music. Plex offers polished apps with optional subscriptions; Jellyfin is completely open source.
11. Actual Budget – https://actualbudget.org
A privacy-first, open-source budgeting app with a clean interface and features that rival commercial alternatives like YNAB. Local-first and ideal for financial privacy enthusiasts.
12. Photoprism – https://photoprism.app
AI-powered photo management and browsing app. Automatically organizes your photos, performs facial recognition, and lets you run a private Google Photos-style service.
13. Ghost – https://ghost.org
A modern publishing platform for blogging or newsletters. Clean, fast, and highly customizable. Great for personal blogs or full content-driven businesses.
14. Freshrss – https://freshrss.org
A self-hosted RSS reader with multi-user support and a responsive interface. Great for aggregating blogs, news, and dev content while ditching centralized platforms.
15. Heimdall – https://heimdall.site
A beautiful and configurable application dashboard for your self-hosted environment. Pin your services, apps, and web tools with custom icons and metadata.
Whether you’re just starting your self-hosting journey or already deep in homelab territory, these apps offer powerful, private alternatives to their SaaS counterparts—backed by thriving communities and full administrative control. Start small, pick one, and enjoy the freedom of running your own digital stack.