Storing and serving files is all well and good but with a little effort, we can replace dozens of hosted services that don’t respect your privacy. Here are some of my favourite self-hosted app picks.

I would be remiss not to mention the awesome-selfhosted GitHub page before we get started. It is a list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted locally. There is also a Non-Free page.

Top 10 Apps

Jellyfin

Jellyfin is the volunteer-built media solution that puts you in control of your media. Stream to any device from your own server, with no strings attached. Your media, your server, your way.

Nextcloud

Nextcloud - The self-hosted productivity platform that keeps you in control.

Surely this pick needs no introduction. Think of Nextcloud somewhat like your own personal Dropbox replacement. Although, that is doing it a disservice because Nextcloud supports many more features than Dropbox. Nextcloud provide a demo if you’d like to try before you “buy” (Nextcloud is free).

Home Assistant

Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Home Assistant is a truly remarkable project. At the time of writing it has over 1700 integrations with all manner of devices, services and hardware supported. This is the true magic of Home Assistant.

A demo is available if you’re curious to see it in action.

Grafana

Grafana itself is graphing tool to display data stored elsewhere. It excels at displaying time-series data like the kind gathered by monitoring tools like Telegraf and Prometheus. It takes a bit of work to get a dashboard configured just the way you like it but is well worth the effort - after all, who doesn’t like a pretty graph?

Smokeping

Smokeping keeps track of your network latency. It pings things - both remote and local - and records how much latency there is between you and the target.

Lychee

Lychee proclaims to be “self-hosted photo-management done right”. It does certainly do a very good job at presenting images with a clean interface and makes dividing them up into albums relatively straightforward.

Librespeed

A speed test tool that can be run on your LAN or hosted in the cloud. This is available as a Self-Hosted container as well as at librespeed.org.

Gitea

A self-hosted, lightweight git service, Gitea is much more powerful than it might seem at first. Sure, it has all the obivous trappings you’d expect from a code hosting solution such as multi-user support, organisations and a similar merge/fork model to a certain well-known online hub for Git activity.

Wiki.js

WikiJS is an open-source, modern and lightweight wiki platform that allows you to create and manage content collaboratively. It provides a flexible and intuitive interface that allows users to easily create and organize content with rich text editing and multimedia capabilities. WikiJS supports multiple authentication methods, search functionality, and version control for efficient collaboration. It also offers a plugin architecture for easy customization and integration with third-party tools. Overall, WikiJS is a great choice for creating documentation, knowledge bases, or any other type of collaborative content.

Paperless.ngx

Paperless-ngx is a document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can keep, well, less paper.

A demo is available at demo.paperless-ngx.com using login demo / demo. Note: demo content is reset frequently and confidential information should not be uploaded.