ShinyServer

Shiny Server: Free Open Source Alternative to Power BI & Tableau

Data visualization and interactive dashboards have become essential for modern analytics workflows. Tools such as Microsoft Power BI and Tableau are widely adopted due to their polished interfaces and powerful features. However, they often come with licensing costs, usage limits, or restrictions that may not suit individual developers, researchers, or

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

Inventree

InvenTree: Free Open Source Alternative to Fishbowl & Sortly

Inventory management software is expensive. Fishbowl starts around $329/month. Sortly's business plan runs $149/month. Most of these tools lock your data in their cloud, charge per user, and drip features behind paywalls you didn't ask for. InvenTree is different. It's a self-

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 softwares

Pangolin: Free Open Source Alternative to Cloudflare Tunnels

Cloudflare Tunnels do what they promise. One command, and your local service is accessible from anywhere without touching your router or opening ports. The catch is it's Cloudflare's infrastructure, Cloudflare's terms, and Cloudflare's call if your account gets suspended. Your tunnels go

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

Self-Hosted Weekly

Self-Hosted Weekly: Week 10, 2026. NGINX Ingress Is Gone, the Pentagon Goes Open Source, and AI Code Gets Banned Again

Welcome back to Self-Hosted Weekly, your Friday roundup of everything that matters in the open-source and self-hosting world. This week: a major Kubernetes retirement finally hits, the Pentagon goes open source, and the AI-generated code debate escalates again. 1. NGINX Ingress Is Officially Dead The March

Azure

Elestio Now Supports Custom Azure VNet and Subnet Selection

If you've ever deployed infrastructure on Azure and thought "I really wish I could keep everything inside my own network," you're not alone. One of the most requested features from our Azure users just landed: you can now select your own Resource Group, Virtual

SCALE 23x Takeaways: What North America's Biggest Open-Source Conference Tells Us About Self-Hosting in 2026

If you want to understand where self-hosting is headed, skip the analyst reports. Go to Pasadena. SCALE 23x, North America's largest community-run open-source conference, is happening right now (March 5-8, 2026) at the Pasadena Convention Center. Over 3,500 attendees, 120+ exhibitors, and 16

Gitea vs GitLab: Why Small Teams Are Choosing a 170MB Binary Over a 4GB Monolith

GitLab is a fantastic platform. It's also a 4GB monolith that wants 8-16GB of RAM just to sit there and wait for your five-person team to push code. For a lot of teams, that's like renting a stadium to play pickup basketball. Gitea is

ClickHouse vs TimescaleDB vs InfluxDB: Picking the Right Analytics Database for Your Self-Hosted Stack

Not all data moves the same way. Some arrives in steady streams from IoT sensors. Some lands in massive batches from event pipelines. Some sits quietly for months until someone needs a year-over-year comparison on a Tuesday afternoon. The database you pick for analytics determines how painful that