Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Freeter

Dashy is a self-hosted personal dashboard for organizing links and services into a single, customizable home page. It supports dynamic widgets, health/status checks, and multiple layout modes for both homelab and everyday productivity use.

Key Features

• Multi-page dashboards with configurable sections, items, and layouts
• Real-time status indicators with optional polling, response time, and custom check URLs/headers
• 50+ bundled widgets for displaying dynamic data from API-enabled services
• Built-in theming, theme editor, and custom CSS support via CSS variables
• Flexible icon support (auto-fetched favicons, icon packs, emojis, local and remote images)
• Fast search with tags, keyboard shortcuts, and configurable launch behaviors
• Optional authentication with multi-user access controls and SSO support
• Alternate views including a minimal startpage view and a workspace view
• YAML configuration with an in-app UI editor plus validation and hints
• PWA support for responsive UI and basic offline access

Use Cases

• Homelab start page to quickly access and monitor self-hosted services
• Team or personal portal for bookmarks, tools, and status at a glance
• Wall display or kiosk-style dashboard showing key widgets and health checks

Dashy is a feature-rich option for anyone who wants a single place to launch apps, view live information via widgets, and keep an eye on service availability while maintaining a highly customizable look and layout.

Homer is a dead-simple static homepage dashboard designed to keep your self-hosted services and links in one place. It is configured using a single YAML file and served by any standard web server.

Key Features

• Fully static HTML/JS dashboard driven by a YAML configuration file
• Lightweight, fast UI with low ongoing maintenance
• Fuzzy search to quickly find services and links
• Multi-page layouts and item grouping for organizing large dashboards
• Theme customization and configurable appearance
• Smart cards for richer service tiles
• Keyboard shortcuts for fast navigation and search
• Installable as a Progressive Web App (PWA)

Use Cases

• Homelab start page to centralize links to self-hosted apps and infrastructure
• Simple internal tools launcher for small teams without a backend
• Lightweight dashboard for kiosks or shared admin screens

Limitations and Considerations

• Requires being served over HTTP(S); opening the file directly via file protocol will not work
• Dynamic features (users, permissions, server-side integrations) are out of scope by design

Homer is a strong fit when you want an attractive, minimal dashboard that is easy to deploy anywhere and maintain through a simple config file. Its static approach keeps complexity low while still providing useful navigation and organization features.

Flame is a self-hosted startpage for your server. It provides a customizable hub to organize and launch your applications and bookmarks through in-app editors, without editing configuration files.

Key Features

• Create, update, delete apps and bookmarks from a GUI editor
• Pin items to the homescreen for quick access
• Integrated search with multiple providers and the ability to add your own
• Authentication to protect settings, apps and bookmarks
• Extensive UI customization: custom CSS, 15 color themes, and a theme builder
• Weather widget showing current temperature and weather status
• Docker integration to auto-detect and add apps from container labels

Use Cases

• Set up a centralized startpage on a home server or Raspberry Pi to access your services
• Replace multiple dashboards with a single, customizable hub for bookmarks and apps
• Manage a personal DevOps cockpit for a small-scale home lab

CONCLUSION Flame offers a compact, self-hosted solution for organizing and launching server apps and bookmarks with a flexible UI and Docker integration.

Homarr is a modern, easy-to-use dashboard for organizing and managing self-hosted services from a single homepage. It provides a highly customizable layout, rich widgets, and integrations that can display status and data from the apps you already run.

Key Features

• Drag-and-drop grid layout for building dashboards without YAML/JSON configuration
• 30+ integrations to surface service status and data in widgets
• Built-in authentication and authorization with users, groups, and permissions
• SSO support via OpenID Connect and LDAP
• Real-time widget updates using WebSockets, with Redis-backed updates
• Fast built-in search across supported integrations and Homarr data
• Large built-in icon picker with 10K+ icons
• Multiple deployment options including Docker and Kubernetes (Helm)

Use Cases

• Create a homelab/startpage portal to launch and monitor all services in one place
• Provide a multi-user dashboard for families or teams with role-based access
• Centralize operational visibility (status, widgets, quick actions) for media and infrastructure stacks

Limitations and Considerations

• Many widgets depend on third-party integrations; feature depth varies by integration
• Full functionality may require additional services such as Redis for real-time updates

Homarr fits well for anyone who wants a clean, customizable home dashboard with integrated visibility and access controls. Its extensible integration approach makes it suitable for both small personal setups and larger multi-user environments.

Lab Dash is an open-source web UI that serves as a customizable, self-hosted homepage and dashboard for homelabs and server environments. It provides a tile/grid-based interface to organize shortcuts, monitor services, and surface system information from a single page.

Key Features

• Customizable grid layout with drag-and-drop reordering and resizable widgets
• Widget types for shortcuts, system information, service health checks, and custom widgets
• Local configuration storage with optional local encryption for sensitive data (AES-256-CBC)
• Admin-only editing controls and configuration backup/restore support
• PWA support for installation as an app on desktop and mobile devices
• Designed to run in Docker/Docker Compose; can access the Docker socket for service discovery and stats
• Customizable appearance: background image, custom search providers, and configurable titles/tabs

Use Cases

• Centralized homelab homepage to quickly launch and organize self-hosted services
• Lightweight service status dashboard for basic health checks and quick diagnostics
• PWA start page for households or small teams to provide a unified access point to tools and media

Limitations and Considerations

• Not a full-featured monitoring or alerting platform; health checks are basic and intended for quick status checks
• No bundled server-side database; configuration is file-based and depends on filesystem volumes for persistence
• Setup assumes Docker/Docker Compose familiarity and requires an encryption secret for protected fields

Lab Dash is focused on providing a simple, privacy-oriented start page and dashboard for home servers, prioritizing ease of customization, local data control, and quick access to services.