The 25 best self-hosted apps in 2026 (ranked by GitHub activity)

The best self-hosted apps in 2026, judged by real GitHub data, are Ollama, Dify, Langflow, Open WebUI and Immich at the top, followed by Stirling-PDF, Uptime Kuma, RAGFlow, Home Assistant and OpenHands. We built this ranking from the appsgit catalog of 1,222 self-hostable projects using two signals you can check yourself: how many people starred the repository, and whether the code is still moving. Every app below had at least 500 commits in the past 12 months, so nothing here is abandonware.

How we ranked them

Popularity lists go stale fast because stars accumulate forever, even on projects nobody maintains. So we used activity as a gate and stars as the order:

1. Actively developed: at least 500 commits to the default branch in the last 12 months. 492 apps in the catalog pass this bar.
2. Easy to self-host: an official Docker image, and not archived.
3. Open source: an OSI-style licence as reported by GitHub. That excludes fair-code and source-available projects such as n8n and NocoDB.
4. An app, not a building block: we left out databases, search engines and backend frameworks (Supabase, PocketBase, Appwrite) that you build on rather than use.

Then we sorted the shortlist by stars. The figures are a snapshot taken on October 6, 2026; every app page on appsgit shows the live numbers.

The ranking

#	App	Category	Stars	Commits (12 mo)	Licence
1	Ollama	AI & LLM Tools	182,289	1,083	MIT
2	Dify	Low-code & Backend	157,921	6,112	Apache-2.0 (modified)
3	Langflow	AI & LLM Tools	155,530	2,486	MIT
4	Open WebUI	AI & LLM Tools	154,037	4,746	BSD-3 + branding clause
5	Immich	Photo Galleries	115,648	2,638	AGPL-3.0
6	Stirling-PDF	Document Management	93,634	1,925	Apache-2.0
7	Uptime Kuma	Monitoring	92,149	1,359	MIT
8	RAGFlow	AI & LLM Tools	91,708	5,821	Apache-2.0
9	Home Assistant	Home Automation	91,266	17,497	Apache-2.0
10	OpenHands	AI & LLM Tools	90,074	3,155	MIT
11	Netdata	Monitoring	80,804	2,609	GPL-3.0 (agent)
12	Grafana	Monitoring	77,096	11,362	AGPL-3.0
13	AnythingLLM	AI & LLM Tools	66,738	887	MIT
14	Prometheus	Monitoring	66,381	2,592	Apache-2.0
15	Traefik	Reverse Proxies	65,081	846	MIT
16	Memos	Note-taking	63,545	928	MIT
17	Coolify	Self-hosting Platforms	62,628	4,939	Apache-2.0
18	Penpot	Utilities	60,729	4,842	MPL-2.0
19	Plane	Project Management	60,414	678	AGPL-3.0
20	Gitea	Project Management	58,319	1,696	MIT
21	Twenty	CRM	57,949	7,656	AGPL-3.0
22	Jellyfin	Media Servers	57,817	2,025	GPL-2.0
23	Odoo	ERP & Inventory	54,848	10,679	LGPL-3.0
24	Mastodon	Social & Forums	50,353	2,689	AGPL-3.0
25	Metabase	Analytics	49,547	6,378	AGPL-3.0

Together these 25 projects landed more than 107,000 commits in a year. The busiest by far is Home Assistant with 17,497, followed by Grafana and Odoo, each above 10,000.

What the data says about self-hosting in 2026

AI is the new home-lab default. Seven of the top 13 are AI tools. Ollama runs open-weight models locally, Open WebUI gives them a ChatGPT-style interface, and Dify, Langflow, RAGFlow and AnythingLLM turn them into agents and document chat. If you want a private replacement for paid chat assistants, see our ChatGPT alternatives.

The classics are still growing. Immich is the most-starred non-AI app on the list and the clearest example of a self-hosted project beating a big-tech product on features. Jellyfin, Home Assistant and Uptime Kuma remain the first apps most people install.

Licences deserve a second look. "Open source" on a GitHub badge is not always the full story. Dify's licence is Apache 2.0 with extra conditions that forbid running it as a multi-tenant service and removing its logo. Open WebUI added a branding clause to its BSD-3 licence in 2025. Netdata's agent is GPL-3.0, but its dashboard UI ships under a separate non-open licence. None of that matters for a personal server, but it matters if you plan to resell hosting.

The best pick in each category

If you only want one app per need, these are the ones we would install first:

• Photos: Immich. Automatic phone backup, face recognition and a polished mobile app. Our Immich deploy guide gets it running in about 15 minutes.
• Media: Jellyfin. Free hardware transcoding and no account required. Read Jellyfin vs Plex if you are deciding.
• Monitoring: Uptime Kuma for simple up/down checks and status pages, Grafana plus Prometheus when you need metrics.
• Smart home: Home Assistant, the most actively developed project in the whole catalog.
• Deploying everything else: Coolify gives you a Heroku-style dashboard on your own VPS, and Traefik routes traffic with automatic HTTPS.
• Work tools: Plane for issues and roadmaps, Twenty as a CRM, Gitea for Git hosting and Penpot for design.

Honourable mentions

A few hugely popular projects missed the cut on our rules, not on quality:

• n8n has more stars than any app in the table, but its Sustainable Use License is fair-code rather than OSI open source. It is still free to self-host for internal use; see n8n vs Zapier vs Activepieces.
• Vaultwarden is the password server most self-hosters run, but it is a small, stable codebase with 181 commits in the past year. Low churn is a feature for security software. Our Vaultwarden vs Bitwarden comparison explains the trade-offs.
• Syncthing and Caddy fall under the activity gate for the same reason: mature, focused tools that do not need thousands of commits a year.

How to use this list

Pick one app that solves a real problem for you, deploy it with Docker Compose, put it behind a reverse proxy and set up backups before you add a second. If you are starting from zero, our beginner's self-hosting roadmap covers hardware, Docker, HTTPS and backups in order. When you are ready for more, browse all apps sorted by stars or by recent activity.