Michael Soto

I'm a senior content strategist & technical writer working for Elest.io. I turn complex self-hosted solutions into clear, actionable guides. 7 years crafting developer content. Coffee-fueled, deadline-ready, obsessed with finding the right words.

Comparison

Outline vs BookStack: Which Self-Hosted Wiki for Your Team?

You need a wiki. Maybe your team's knowledge lives in a mess of Google Docs, Slack threads, and "ask Sarah, she knows." You've narrowed it down to two self-hosted options: Outline and BookStack. Both are open-source, both are excellent — but they solve

Keycloak

Keycloak + Grafana: Set Up SSO for Your Monitoring Dashboard

If you're running Grafana for monitoring and Keycloak for identity, there's a good chance your team is still logging into both separately. That's fine for two people. It's a nightmare for twenty. Here's how to wire them together so your

Catalog Updates

Elestio Catalog Updates: 28 New Releases This Week (March 22-29, 2026)

Every week, the open-source projects in the Elestio catalog ship new versions — security patches, performance boosts, entirely new features. Keeping up is a full-time job. So we're doing it for you. Here's everything that shipped across our 400+ managed services during the week of

Databases

ClickHouse vs TimescaleDB vs InfluxDB: Which Time-Series Database for Your Analytics?

I've been running time-series workloads for years, and here's what nobody tells you upfront: picking the wrong database doesn't just slow things down — it shapes (and limits) every decision you make afterward. Your query patterns, your storage costs, even how your team thinks

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 13, 2026. KubeCon Drops Major Updates, Langflow Gets a CVSS 9.3, and OpenAI Buys Python's Best Tools

Another week, another round of "update immediately" advisories and corporate open-source acquisitions that make everyone nervous. KubeCon Europe happened in Amsterdam. Langflow got a CVSS 9.3. OpenAI bought the tools half the Python ecosystem depends on. Here's what you need to know. KubeCon Europe

Grafana + Prometheus: Set Up Production Monitoring on Elestio

You're running services in production. Something breaks at 2 AM. By the time you notice, users have already noticed. The fix isn't more coffee — it's knowing something broke before anyone else does. Grafana and Prometheus are the monitoring stack that most of the industry

PostgreSQL 18: The 5 Features That Actually Matter for Production

Every major PostgreSQL release gets a changelog the length of a novel. Most of it won't change how you run your database. PostgreSQL 18 is different — a handful of features here genuinely reshape what production looks like. I've been testing PG18 since the September 2025 release.

Keycloak

Keycloak + Nextcloud: Set Up Single Sign-On for Your Cloud Storage

You have Nextcloud for file storage. You have Keycloak for identity management. But your team still logs in twice — once for Keycloak, once for Nextcloud. That's one password too many, and one more place where credentials can leak. Connecting the two with OpenID Connect takes about 20 minutes.

Comparison

Supabase vs Appwrite vs PocketBase: Which Open-Source Backend for Your Next App?

Firebase changed its pricing again. You're not surprised — you've been here before. So you start looking at open-source backends you can actually own, and three names keep coming up: Supabase, Appwrite, and PocketBase. All three promise to replace Firebase. None of them do it the

CI/CD

How to Migrate from GitHub Actions to Gitea Actions

In December 2025, GitHub announced a $0.002-per-minute fee on self-hosted runners for private repositories. The backlash was immediate — hundreds of comments, cost calculations showing $3,500/month increases for mid-size teams, and a 24-hour reversal. GitHub "postponed" the change. Not canceled — postponed.

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 12, 2026. GTC Goes Open Source, $12.5M for FOSS Security, and Docker v29 Breaks Everything

Welcome back to the Self-Hosted Weekly. This week: NVIDIA went all-in on open-source AI at GTC, the Linux Foundation secured $12.5 million for FOSS security, a new secrets scanner was born, and Docker v29 is quietly breaking things. Let's get into it. 1. NVIDIA

Security

How to Replace LastPass with Vaultwarden

In December 2022, LastPass disclosed that attackers had stolen encrypted vault backups for roughly 30 million users. That was bad. What's worse — three years later, those stolen vaults are still being cracked. Over $438 million in cryptocurrency has been traced back to that single breach, with thefts still

CI/CD

How to Use Private Docker Registries with Elestio CI/CD

If you've been running CI/CD pipelines on Elestio with public images, life was already pretty smooth. But the moment you needed to pull from a private registry — your company's internal images, a gated container, anything behind authentication — you hit a wall. That wall is now

Comparison

Chatwoot vs Zulip vs Rocket.Chat: Which Self-Hosted Chat Platform for Your Team?

Here's the thing nobody tells you when you're searching for "self-hosted Slack alternative": Chatwoot, Zulip, and Rocket.Chat show up in every list, but they're not the same kind of tool. Picking the wrong one means rebuilding your communication stack six

Elestio

Elestio 2026: New Site, AI Agents, Clusters, and More

We just redesigned elest.io from the ground up, and honestly, a fresh coat of paint was long overdue. But this isn't just a cosmetic facelift. The new site reflects where Elestio is heading: AI-native infrastructure, high-availability clusters, and a much sharper focus on who we

Comparison

NocoDB vs Baserow: Which Open-Source Airtable Alternative Should You Pick?

Here's a sentence you've probably typed into Google: "open source Airtable alternative." And you probably landed on two names — NocoDB and Baserow. Both promise to free you from Airtable's per-seat pricing trap. Both let you self-host. But they solve the

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 11, 2026. Dify Raises $30M, Rust Is Stable in the Linux Kernel, and FOSS Gets an Endowment

Look, it's been one of those weeks where the open-source ecosystem flexed in every direction at once. Dify closed a $30M round. Rust in the Linux kernel isn't experimental anymore. And someone finally came up with a funding model for FOSS that doesn't

Valkey vs Redis vs KeyDB: Which In-Memory Store After the License Change?

Look, if you've been in the Redis ecosystem for any length of time, the last two years have felt like a soap opera. License changes, community forks, corporate drama — the whole deal. And now you're staring at three options that all look suspiciously similar: Valkey, Redis,

Qdrant vs Weaviate vs Milvus: Which Vector Database for Your RAG Pipeline?

If you are building anything with retrieval-augmented generation right now, you have probably hit the same fork in the road I did: which vector database do you actually run? Qdrant, Weaviate, and Milvus are the three open-source heavyweights, all self-hostable, all popular, and all happy to tell

meilisearch

Meilisearch vs Typesense vs Algolia: Which Search Engine Fits Your Stack?

You need search. Not "maybe eventually" search — real, typo-tolerant, sub-50ms, search-as-you-type search. The kind where your users start typing "runnng shoes" and instantly see running shoes. The question is: which engine do you pick? Meilisearch, Typesense, and Algolia are the three

Paperless-ngx

Paperless-ngx on Elestio: Automating Document Ingestion, OCR Processing, and Smart Tagging

Paperless-ngx can ingest your documents. You already knew that. But most people stop at "drop PDF in folder, let OCR do its thing" and never touch the automation engine sitting right underneath. That's a mistake. The workflow system, matching algorithms, and storage path templates can

open-webui

Open WebUI Just Gave Your AI a Real Computer

Most AI chat interfaces let you talk to a model. Open WebUI lets you hand it a terminal and say "figure it out." That's not hyperbole. With the Open Terminal feature, your LLM can install packages, run scripts in any language, manage files, and spin up

metabase

Your Team Doesn't Need Tableau: How Metabase Turns Any Database Into a Dashboard Anyone Can Use

Tableau charges $75 per user per month. Looker averages $150,000 per year. Power BI just raised its prices by 40%. Meanwhile, over 4,200 companies are running Metabase, an open-source analytics tool that does 80% of what those platforms do, and it costs nothing in license fees. If

mautic

Mautic on Elestio: Building Automated Email Campaigns, Lead Scoring, and Multi-Channel Workflows

HubSpot charges $890/month for their Professional tier with 10,000 contacts. Mautic gives you every feature, unlimited contacts, and full data ownership for the cost of a server. If you've been putting off self-hosting your marketing automation, this is the guide that gets you from zero

open-source

OpenClaw Explained: How the Fastest-Growing Open-Source Project Became a Self-Hosted AI Agent for Everyone

You've probably heard the name by now. OpenClaw went from zero to 250,000 GitHub stars in roughly 60 days, surpassing React as the most-starred software project on the platform. React took over a decade to get there. OpenClaw did it before most people figured out what