Best Self Hosted Alternatives to Smart Gardener

HortusFox is an open-source, self-hosted plant management and tracking system designed for collaborative use by households, friends or communities. It provides a web-based dashboard and mobile-friendly interface to add, catalogue and journal plants, photos and care activities. (hortusfox.com)

Key Features

• Plant management with attributes, photos, gallery and tags. (github.com)
• Custom locations and collaborative user management for shared workspaces. (github.com)
• Tasks, recurring reminders and calendar integration to track plant care. (github.com)
• Inventory system with export options and item tagging (PDF/JSON/CSV in recent releases). (github.com)
• Group chat and history/logs for collaborative notes and actions. (github.com)
• Weather forecast and plant identification integrations (OpenWeatherMap, Pl@ntNet) and GBIF for plant data. (github.com)
• REST API, theming, multi-language support, backups and an admin dashboard. (hortusfox.com)

Use Cases

• Home plant collections: catalog plants by room/location, track watering and maintenance. (hortusfox.com)
• Shared households or community spaces: collaborate on tasks, inventory and group chat for maintenance coordination. (github.com)
• Hobbyist record-keeping: photo galleries, logs, and plant identification tied to external biodiversity services. (github.com)

Limitations and Considerations

• Some features depend on external APIs: plant identification (Pl@ntNet), weather (OpenWeatherMap) and biodiversity lookups (GBIF); these require separate API keys and are opt-in. (github.com)
• System requirements include modern PHP and MariaDB versions and Docker support; plan for PHP 8.x and MariaDB 11+ in production. (github.com)

HortusFox is actively developed and distributed under an MIT license; releases and a public demo workspace are provided for evaluation. The project is community-discussed on selfhosted channels and documented in its repository and site. (hortusfox.com)