Self-Hosted Platforms

Everything on this page runs on hardware you are responsible for. That is the only thing its 96 entries have in common, and it is why the page is harder to use than it looks: "self-hosted" is a deployment model, not a product category, and three unrelated kinds of software are filed under it.

The first kind replaces a hosting bill. Coolify (84/100, Coolify) is the clearest example — free self-hosted, Cloud from $5/mo, and our review reads it as the closest thing to Vercel-style convenience without the lock-in. Appwrite (82/100) and Trigger.dev (85/100) sit in the same group: managed-service ergonomics, your VPS. The second kind replaces a model API. Ollama (88/100) appears in 11 published stacks and 11 comparisons, more than any other tool among this page's twelve highest-demand members; Llamafile (79/100, Apache 2.0) ships a model as a single executable file; Unsloth (88/100, Apache 2.0) is for fine-tuning open weights on hardware you already own. The third kind is a self-hosted application — Open WebUI (88/100), LobeChat (85/100), AnythingLLM (86/100) and the server monitor Beszel (86/100), which is MIT-licensed and has no paid cloud tier at all.

The question that decides between them is not features. It is which failure you would rather own at 2am: a bill that grew, or a box that stopped. Choosing this shelf means choosing the second. Beszel exists on this page precisely because that trade has a cost, and our review of it notes a five-minute setup with automatic Docker container discovery — worth having before you accumulate services rather than after.

Licensing deserves a closer read here than in most categories. 87 of the 96 tools (90.6%) carry an open-source flag, but "free to self-host" and "open source" are not synonyms in 2026. Directus (85/100) is free to self-host under MSCL-1.0-GPL, a source-available licence with conditions an OSI licence does not impose, and it is one of the nine entries here without the open-source flag. If licence terms matter to your legal review, check the individual tool page rather than inferring from the price.

Only 29 of the 96 have a scored review, so a large share of this grid is indexed but not yet assessed. Use the picks below as a starting shortlist, and read the review before you commit a server to anything.