10 Apps Better When You Own the Server

Cloud services are convenient until they're not — price hikes, shutdowns, data breaches. These ten open-source apps do the same job, with your data staying exactly where you put it.

February 26, 2026

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Immich

Google Photos does everything right — except it owns your photos. Immich is the open-source version of that experience: mobile upload, face recognition, albums, sharing. Your library, your server.

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Paperless-ngx

Scan a document, forget about it, search for it three years later — and find it in seconds. Paperless-ngx runs OCR on everything you throw at it and turns your paper pile into a searchable archive.

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Vikunja

Todoist, Trello, and Asana all charge monthly. Vikunja gives you lists, kanban, Gantt, and table views — self-hosted, free forever, built in the EU. Even the mascot is a llama.

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Uptime Kuma

If you're running your own services, you need to know when they go down before your users do. Uptime Kuma monitors everything and pings you on Telegram, Slack, or email the moment something breaks.

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Blinko

A flash-note app with AI search built in — ask a question in plain language, it finds the note you wrote six months ago. Everything stays on your server. No subscription.

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IT-Tools

86+ developer utilities in one place — encode, decode, hash, format, convert, generate. Use the hosted version or drop it on your internal network. One tab that replaces twenty bookmarks.

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SimpleLogin

Every site you sign up for gets a different email alias. Spam? Delete that alias. Data breach? That alias was never linked to your real inbox. Owned by Proton, open source, self-hostable.

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Tandoor

A recipe manager that imports from thousands of sites, plans meals, generates shopping lists, and tracks nutrition. No ads, no paywalls, no data harvesting. Just your recipes.

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Super Productivity

Task manager, time tracker, and Pomodoro timer in one — syncs with GitHub, GitLab, and Jira issues. 100% offline, no account required. The kind of tool that doesn't disappear when you stop paying.

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The self-hosted glue between all your other apps. 400+ integrations, a visual workflow builder, running entirely on your server. Automate anything without your data flowing through someone else's cloud.

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