A list of Cloudron-like services/ competitors

[marcusquinn]

@jagan Looks interesting, but can't see a way to deploy to your own VPS. Interesting for testing FOSS apps, but doesn’t seem very open as a Delaware LLC, and can’t see how you’d control your data on your own VPS, so I wouldn’t recommend for anything you care too much about.

[necrevistonnezr]

Cosmos, already in the list, recently had an interesting milestone:
link: https://github.com/azukaar/Cosmos-Server/

All in one secure Reverse-proxy, container manager with app store, integrated VPN, authentication provider, and Monitoring, now with Multilingual support, completely reworked VPN, mDNS, and many improvements

Wow, what a trip! 6 months ago I started working on this update, and boy, was that an adventure! The main culprit: Constellation (The VPN)! I always envisioned Constellation to be this one solution to all networking issues when selfhosting (Tunneling/VPN allowing you to use your server in any circumstances without even opening any port). And while there are some technologies that exist that gives you the networking part like Tailscale, no solution come close to the level of end-to-end support Constellation provides, as it integrates directly into the reverse-proxy and other features such as the user managements for a complete seamless experience. That level of novelty, is what made Constellation this hard to design and implement. After all this work thought, while it is nowhere near perfect (yet ;p) it is in a place where it can work and cater for many of the uses cases, and much easier to use than it has ever been.

Aside from this, Cosmos 0.16 has a lot of exciting improvements, such as Multi-language, mDNS support, which gives you automatic *local domains out of the box! As well as great improvement to compose import. But I will expand on those individually.

[jrl-abstract27]

Hi Guys,

@jdaviescoates, there is something called dokploy that is similar to coolify.

Dokploy - An open-source & self-hostable Heroku / Netlify alternative.
https://dokploy.com/
https://docs.dokploy.com/en/docs/core/get-started/introduction
https://github.com/dokploy/dokploy

But hey, Cloudron is the best

[ntnsndr]

A friend just told me about Start9, which makes both hardware and an OS for self-hosting:

https://start9.com/
https://github.com/Start9Labs/start-os

[LoudLemur]

@ntnsndr said in A list of Cloudron-like services/ competitors:

A friend just told me about Start9, which makes both hardware and an OS for self-hosting:

https://start9.com/
https://github.com/Start9Labs/start-os
Nice!

[seeker]

I was curious if people have any additional thoughts or experiences with these platforms. I tell everyone they should use cloudron and I am very much a devotee. But I am curious about other services.

When voting for apps to be added on cloudron I often feel at a loss because I have not tested the app so it is about imagining it utility based on videos etc elsewhere. So a platform where I could test might be nice. Additionally an platform where people could get their feet wet.

Backups are important and cloudron does more on that front than others based on when I searched many years ago. Not perfect but it used to be better than the alternatives.

I stumbled upon this article which got me thinking about the state of alternatives. https://www.xda-developers.com/runtipi-raspberry-pi-guide/

If I had more money I would just loan out rasberrypi(s) with something set up so people can experiment.

[jdaviescoates]

@seeker said:

So a platform where I could test might be nice. Additionally an platform where people could get their feet wet.

Yeah, I think lots of people here use other platforms just to test out/ use apps that aren't on Cloudron yet.

@seeker said:

Backups are important and cloudron does more on that front than others based on when I searched many years ago. Not perfect but it used to be better than the alternatives.

Yeah, I've not looked at it in much depth, but I think that's still the case. The way Cloudron works makes backups, restores, updates, and migrations mostly Just Work.

Additionally, afaik none of the other offerings have a full email server (that apps are pre configured to use) either. Whereas not only does Cloudron have Haraka built-in, but I tihnk @girish is one of the top contributors too.

[robi]

If the app is LAMP compatible, pointing claude code or opencode with aidevops would install it for you.

[scooke]

@seeker I think there are firmly held opinions about this, but hosting at home is more properly called homelabbing, or, running a homelab. I think there is a big enough difference in what you need to keep in mind between running a server (whatever shape or form) at home vs running apps and services on a VPS or bare metal server, not the least of which is going to be network access and security.

That article does make a nice point distinguishing "self-host" OSes from dashboard/docker management systems.

I think voting for apps is based more on the fact that enough people have been paying for a commercial version of an app and know about and want to move to an open source alternative. I don't think anyone here is voting for apps they have no familiarity with. That said, seeing what gets suggested has sometimes led me to see which other platforms might already have it (I'm using affine on my runtipi VPS, for example) and I see what the fuss is about there. My curiosity has led me to install runtipi on my Dedirock VPS where I have affine, Obsidian LiveSync, GrampsWeb, FlightLog, and Write-freely. I'd switch them all to Cloudron if these were available here. I've tried almost all the alternatives, and I've stuck with runtipi the longest (despite the stupid name). The rest just always, and I mean ALWAYS, crap out eventually and either the forums or help have been very very weak, or actually non-existent (no one knows what went wrong and how to fix it). Forget them!

[jdaviescoates]

@scooke said:

the forums or help have been very very weak, or actually non-existent (no one knows what went wrong and how to fix it).

This is a very good and important point. Aside from mostly Just Working (and apps that are maintained and updated promptly), one of the best things about Cloudron is how amazingly good the support is, both from staff and from the rest of the users here on the forum.