Best Self-hosted Media & Smart Home tools in 2026

Immich is an open-source platform for organizing, backing up, and streaming photos and videos with web and mobile clients, searchable metadata, face clustering, and S3-co...

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Google Photos+14

Open-source platform to control smart home devices, build automations and dashboards, with broad third-party integrations and local-first privacy.

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Google Home+15

Jellyfin is a free, self-hosted media server to organize, manage, and stream movies, TV, music, and photos to web, mobile, and TV clients.

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Plex+19

Self-hosted photo management app with automatic AI tagging, face recognition, maps, and powerful search to organize and find photos and videos in your library.

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Google Photos+13

Cobalt is a self-hostable web media downloader for saving publicly accessible videos and audio from supported social platforms via a simple paste-a-link interface and API...

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iTubeGo+4

Self-hosted NVR for IP cameras with real-time local AI object detection, recording, and low-latency live viewing, with MQTT and Home Assistant integration.

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Blue Iris+10

SRS (Simple Realtime Server) is a high-efficiency media server supporting RTMP, WebRTC, HLS, HTTP-FLV, SRT, MPEG-DASH, and GB28181 for real-time streaming.

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Wowza Streaming Cloud+8

Open-source, end-to-end encrypted platform for private photo backup, sharing, and authenticator (2FA) sync across devices, with optional self-hosting.

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Google Photos+14

Calibre is a cross-platform e-book manager to organize libraries, edit and convert formats, fetch metadata, and sync content to e-readers.

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Adobe Digital Editions+3

Alternative open source firmware for ESP8266/ESP32 IoT devices, providing local control via MQTT/HTTP/Web UI, OTA updates, and built-in automation rules and timers.

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SONOFF Cloud (eWeLink)+6

Open-source, browser-based low-code platform and Node.js runtime for wiring devices, APIs and services into event-driven flows for automation, IoT and integrations.

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IFTTT+13

Open-source IoT platform for device management, telemetry collection, rule-based processing, alarms, and real-time dashboards using standard IoT protocols.

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ThingsBoard Cloud+10

Kodi is an open source media center for organizing and playing local and networked video, music, and photos with a TV-friendly interface and add-on ecosystem.

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Microsoft Windows Media Player+7

Self-hosted music streaming server with a modern web UI, Subsonic-compatible API, multi-user support, and on-the-fly transcoding for large libraries.

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Plex+13

Open-source web music server that streams personal music collections via a modern web UI and Subsonic-compatible APIs; supports large libraries and on-the-fly transcoding...

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Plex+13

Invidious is a lightweight, privacy-focused alternative front-end for YouTube with subscriptions, playlists, and an API—without Google accounts, ads, or tracking.

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YouTube

Koel is a web-based personal music streaming server with a modern player UI, multi-user support, playlists, library management, and optional mobile apps.

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Plex+12

Self-hosted web app to browse, read, download, and manage eBooks from an existing Calibre library, with OPDS catalogs, user permissions, and device sync options.

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BookFusion+4

Self-hosted Zigbee-to-MQTT bridge that lets you control Zigbee devices without vendor gateways and integrate them with home automation platforms via MQTT.

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Tuya Zigbee Gateway+16

Beets is a command-line music library manager that catalogs collections and automatically fixes tags using MusicBrainz, with a powerful plugin ecosystem.

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MediaMonkey+4

PeerTube is a decentralized, ActivityPub-federated video hosting platform with live streaming, P2P WebRTC delivery, and customizable community-run instances.

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YouTube+8

Sonarr is a smart PVR for TV series that monitors RSS/indexers, grabs releases via Usenet or BitTorrent clients, and organizes your library with renaming and upgrades.

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Channels DVR+2

Self-hosted movie collection manager that monitors RSS, searches indexers, and automates downloading, importing, renaming, and quality upgrades via Usenet or torrents.

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SickChill+1

Self-hosted web app for organizing, tagging, and streaming a private adult video and image library with metadata scraping, galleries, and markers.

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Plex+11

Self-hosted audiobook and podcast server with multi-user playback sync, metadata management, downloads, and web/mobile clients.

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Audible+6

Owncast is a self-hosted live streaming server that supports RTMP ingest, HLS playback, and built-in web chat, with optional Fediverse (ActivityPub) integration.

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YouTube+12

Eclipse Mosquitto is a lightweight, open-source MQTT broker supporting MQTT 5.0 and 3.1.1, plus client libraries and CLI tools for pub/sub messaging.

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EMQX Cloud+11

ESPHome generates custom firmware for ESP32/ESP8266 and other boards from YAML, enabling local smart home devices with Home Assistant, API, and MQTT integration.

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Blynk+15

Self-hosted, multi-user ebook library with smart shelves, automatic metadata, OPDS, device sync (Kobo/KOReader), BookDrop imports, and an in-browser reader.

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BookFusion+10

Open-source self-hosted reading server providing EPUB/PDF/comics readers, OPDS feeds, rich metadata, user/role management, full-text search and a REST API.

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BookFusion+5