My favorite self hosted apps

This entry focuses on describing the services I use most frequently as part of my self-hosted infrastructure. This setup combines both personal and professional aspects of my digital life. Note that this list excludes Portainer, which I use primarily for container management.

Personal Services

Vikunja - Task and project management

I use Vikunja to keep track of various aspects at home, mostly related to improvements and maintenance projects. The organizational structure is intuitive and easy to follow, which certainly helps keep things organized. It's also very handy for collaboration when working on shared household projects.

Ghost - Blog platform

This blog is hosted on Ghost. I chose this platform because the free templates are polished and professional-looking, the performance is excellent, and it has built-in support for subscriptions and newsletters. The writing experience is clean and distraction-free, which aligns well with my preference for focused content creation.

Joplin - Note-taking and knowledge management

I migrated from Apple Notes to Joplin a while ago and haven't looked back. The ability to sync my notes across all devices is essential for my workflow. I can create different types of notes (text, markdown, with attachments), maintain a logical folder structure, and access everything offline when needed. This is one of the most stable applications in my entire setup, and the fact that I control my data gives me peace of mind.

Spliit - Expense sharing

This service is extremely handy for keeping track of shared expenses when traveling. Spliit is especially useful when people are actually interested in budgeting and fair cost distribution. It eliminates the awkwardness of money conversations and provides transparent expense tracking.

Synology Photos - Media management

This is an extremely capable application for hosting, sharing, and accessing photos. I automatically backup all my photos to my NAS through the mobile app, which means I don't rely on Google Drive or iCloud for this critical data. It's one of the best self-hosted services I can recommend for media management. The only downside is that it can be slow at times, but I suspect that's because I have accumulated way too many photos over the years.

Karakeep - Bookmark management

This is an excellent application for organizing and managing bookmarks. I highly recommend it if you have one of those brains that likes to save interesting content to revisit later. It helps me maintain a curated collection of resources...

Professional Services

Umami - Website analytics

This is a very handy application for tracking website usage and visitor analytics. I deploy it across my blog as well as personal and lab websites. It provides insights into how many people access the sites, which content is most popular, and general usage patterns. What I appreciate most is that it serves as a privacy-respecting alternative to more invasive analytics products and services.

Nextcloud + OnlyOffice - Collaboration platform

We use this combination intensively in the lab, and most, if not all, of our collaborative work is built around this setup. The integration between Nextcloud's file management and OnlyOffice's document editing capabilities creates a nice workflow for research collaboration. We actually wrote a paper documenting how we self-host and collaborate within the lab using this infrastructure.

AFFiNE - Conference notes

I use AFFiNE primarily for taking notes during conferences and academic meetings. It works exceptionally well in offline environments, which is crucial when conference WiFi is unreliable. I suspect this functionality could be easily replaced with Joplin, but I haven't fully explored Joplin's offline note-taking capabilities in conference settings yet.

Services I've Tried and Discontinued

Collabora - Office Suite Alternative

While functional, I found it not as intuitive or feature-rich as OnlyOffice. This might just be my personal preference. The document editing experience felt more cumbersome compared to the OnlyOffice integration we eventually adopted.

Monica - Personal CRM

This service required too many details and felt like micromanaging my personal relationships. While the concept is interesting, the overhead of maintaining detailed relationship information outweighed the benefits for my use case.

Mealie - Recipe Management

Although it looked fun and well-designed, it required too much detailed input and maintenance for my cooking habits. I prefer simpler solutions for meal planning and recipe storage that don't require extensive categorization and data entry.