In 2025, the world of self-hosting with containers has expanded into a vast and exciting ecosystem. This guide provides a categorized list of some of the best containerized applications available, helping you build, manage, and enhance your home lab or production environment.
While many of the examples and community resources you’ll find are based on Docker, the applications themselves are platform-agnostic. You can run them on various container runtimes like Podman, LXC, or within orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. The core idea is the same: packaging applications and their dependencies into isolated, portable units.
Container Management and Maintenance#
To effectively manage and maintain your container environment, these tools are invaluable. They help with everything from providing a visual interface to automating updates.
- Portainer: Portainer is a lightweight and powerful management UI for Docker. It provides a simple and intuitive interface for managing your containers, images, volumes, and networks. While many experienced users prefer the command line, Portainer is an excellent tool for beginners and for those who want a quick visual overview of their system. Its features include application templates, container management, and a simple interface for managing user authentication.
- Dockge: A fancy, easy-to-use, and reactive self-hosted docker-compose.yaml stack-oriented manager. It’s a great alternative to Portainer for those who prefer managing their applications through compose files and want a modern, responsive UI.
- Watchtower: An essential tool for keeping your running containers up-to-date. Watchtower monitors your containers and automatically updates them to the latest image version, ensuring you have the latest features and security patches without manual intervention.
Personal Dashboard Containers#
A personal dashboard is a great way to organize and access all of your self-hosted services in one place. These dashboards provide a single, customizable interface with links to all of your applications, making it easy to find what you need.
- Homepage: Homepage is a modern, fully static, fast, secure, and highly customizable application dashboard. It offers more customization options than Heimdall, allowing you to add widgets for weather, system information, and more. It’s a great choice for users who want more control over the look and feel of their dashboard.
Media Management Containers#
For those looking to build a personal media server, these containers are indispensable.
Jellyfin: A fantastic free and open-source media system that puts you in complete control of your media. As a community-driven fork of Emby, it offers a rich feature set with no premium licenses or tracking.
*The arr Stack: A collection of tools for automating your media collection:
- Sonarr: TV series management.
- Radarr: Movie management.
- Lidarr: Music management.
- Jackett: A proxy server that translates queries from apps like Sonarr and Radarr into tracker-site-specific HTTP queries, giving you access to a huge number of indexers.
- Prowlarr: An indexer manager for the *arr stack that integrates seamlessly with Sonarr, Radarr, etc., to manage all your indexers from one place.
Download Clients: The workhorses that handle the actual downloading of content, often integrated with the *arr stack.
- Transmission: A fast, easy, and free BitTorrent client. It’s known for its simplicity and low resource usage, with a clean web interface for remote management.
Photography and Image Management Containers#
Organize, view, and share your photo and video collection.
PhotoPrism: A server-based application for browsing, organizing, and sharing your personal photo collection.
Immich: A self-hosted photo and video backup solution directly from your mobile phone.
E-book Management Containers#
Create your own private digital library.
- Calibre-web: A web app providing a clean interface for browsing, reading and downloading eBooks using an existing Calibre database.
File Sharing and Sync Containers#
Create your own private cloud for file storage, sharing, and synchronization.
Nextcloud: A suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. It’s a powerful alternative to Google Drive or Dropbox, with a rich ecosystem of apps for calendars, contacts, and collaboration.
Syncthing: A continuous, decentralized file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers in real time, safely protected from prying eyes, without needing a central server.
Filebrowser: A simple and elegant file managing interface within a web browser. It’s incredibly lightweight and perfect for quickly sharing files or managing a remote directory without the overhead of a full cloud suite.
Seafile: A high-performance, open-source file sync and share platform with a focus on reliability and performance. It offers features like file versioning and library encryption, making it a strong contender in the space.
ownCloud: The original open-source file sync and share platform that Nextcloud was forked from. It continues to be a robust and secure solution for data synchronization and sharing, particularly popular in enterprise environments.
SFTPGo: A fully featured and highly configurable SFTP server with optional FTP/S, and WebDAV support. It’s an excellent tool for providing secure and granular file transfer access to your server.
Document Management Containers#
Go paperless and manage your documents efficiently.
- Paperless-ngx: A document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive.
AI Applications Containers#
Bring the power of Artificial Intelligence into your own lab.
Ollama & Open WebUI: A powerful combination for local AI. Ollama runs large language models (like Llama 3, Mistral, etc.) locally, while Open WebUI provides a feature-rich, user-friendly web interface to interact with them, similar to ChatGPT.
Flowise: A low-code UI for building customized LLM-based applications. It provides a drag-and-drop interface to visually construct and orchestrate complex AI workflows.
Stable Diffusion WebUI: A browser interface for Stable Diffusion, allowing you to generate images from text prompts.
Langflow: An alternative UI for LangChain, offering a graph-based interface to prototype and experiment with LLM chains and agents.
Langfuse: An open-source observability and analytics platform for LLM applications. It helps you trace, debug, and evaluate your LLM-powered features.
LiteLLM: A brilliant tool that provides a unified API interface for over 100 LLM providers (including OpenAI, Azure, Cohere, and local models via Ollama). It simplifies switching between models and managing API keys.
Home Automation Containers#
Automate your home and connect your devices with these powerful platforms.
- Home Assistant: An open-source home automation platform that puts local control and privacy first. With a massive community and thousands of integrations, it can act as the central brain for your smart home.
- Node-RED: A powerful flow-based programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs, and online services. It’s often used alongside Home Assistant to create complex automations and logic flows with a visual editor.
- Mosquitto MQTT Broker: An open-source message broker that implements the MQTT protocol. It’s a lightweight and essential component for many IoT and home automation setups, allowing smart devices to communicate with each other reliably.
- openHAB: A mature and highly flexible open-source home automation platform. It’s known for its pluggable architecture and strong support for a vast number of devices and technologies, making it a great alternative to Home Assistant.
Game Server Containers#
Host and manage your own game servers.
Pterodactyl: A free, open-source game server management panel.
SteamCMD: A command-line version of the Steam client, which can be used to install and update dedicated servers for many games.
Communication Containers#
Stay connected with your own private communication platform.
- Ntfy: A simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop from any script or application.
- Mailrise: An SMTP-to-Apprise gateway that lets you receive email notifications and forward them to a wide array of notification services. It’s perfect for integrating legacy systems that only support email alerts into modern notification platforms.
- Mattermost: A self-hosted alternative to Slack.
Web Hosting Containers#
Host your own websites and blogs.
- WordPress: The most popular content management system in the world.
- Ghost: A modern, professional publishing platform.
Network Management Containers#
Manage your network traffic, enhance security, and improve performance.
- Nginx Proxy Manager: An easy-to-use, graphical interface for managing Nginx proxy hosts. It’s a great alternative to Traefik with a much gentler learning curve.
- Traefik: A modern reverse proxy and load balancer. While it has a steeper learning curve, its powerful features and dynamic configuration capabilities make it a popular choice for complex setups.
- Pi-hole: A classic and widely-used network-wide ad blocker. It acts as a DNS sinkhole, protecting your devices from unwanted content without installing any client-side software. It remains a popular and robust choice for many home lab enthusiasts.
- AdGuard Home: A powerful network-wide ad and tracker blocking DNS server. Often seen as a modern alternative to Pi-hole, it offers a rich feature set and a sleek user interface.
- Unbound: A validating, recursive, and caching DNS resolver, which can be used in conjunction with AdGuard Home for enhanced privacy and security.
Monitoring and Analytics Containers#
Keep an eye on your services and infrastructure to ensure everything is running smoothly.
- Uptime Kuma: A fancy self-hosted monitoring tool. It’s a great simple alternative to the more complex Prometheus and Grafana stack.
- Prometheus & Grafana: A powerful monitoring and alerting toolkit. Prometheus scrapes metrics from your services, and Grafana allows you to visualize them in beautiful dashboards.
Security and Privacy Containers#
Protect your data and your privacy with these essential security tools.
- WireGuard: A fast, modern, and secure VPN tunnel.
Password Management Containers#
Take control of your passwords with a self-hosted password manager.
- Vaultwarden: A lightweight, unofficial Bitwarden server implementation written in Rust. It provides a self-hosted password manager that is both powerful and resource-friendly.
Productivity Containers#
Boost your productivity with these self-hosted applications.
- Stirling PDF: A powerful, self-hosted web-based PDF manipulation tool.
- Joplin Server: A self-hosted server for the Joplin note-taking and to-do application.
RSS Feed Containers#
Stay up-to-date with your favorite websites and blogs.
- FreshRSS: A free, self-hostable aggregator for RSS feeds.
Weather Monitoring Containers#
Get your own local weather forecast.
- Meteo-Swiss-API: There are several community-built containers that can pull data from various weather APIs.
Time Tracking Containers#
Track your time and improve your productivity.
- Traggo: A simple, self-hosted time tracking tool.
Development Containers#
Tools to help you with your software development workflow.
- GitLab: A complete DevOps platform, delivered as a single application. GitLab provides Git repository management, CI/CD pipelines, and more.
- Gitea: A lightweight and easy-to-install self-hosted Git service.
Database Containers#
Manage your data with these popular database solutions.
- PostgreSQL: A powerful, open-source object-relational database system.
- Redis: An in-memory data structure store, used as a database, cache, and message broker.
Backup and Recovery Containers#
Ensure your data is safe with these backup and recovery tools.
- Duplicati: A free, open-source, backup client that securely stores encrypted, incremental, compressed backups on cloud storage services and remote file servers.
Personal Finance Containers#
Manage your personal finances with these self-hosted applications.
- Firefly III: A free and open-source personal finance manager.
Conclusion#
The container ecosystem in 2025 is more vibrant than ever. This guide provides a starting point for exploring the vast world of self-hosted containers. Whether you are a developer, a DevOps engineer, or a home server enthusiast, there is a wide range of tools available to meet your needs.