Cloudron vs Homelabos
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Thanks. I don't mind paying 15$/month or even working on porting open-source webapps to these solutions, but open-source just feels better because the benefits of my contribution will be more widely shared.
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@nilesh yeah Cloudron is well worth paying for as it enables the developers @girish and @nebulon to keep all the 80+ apps up to date, to provide amazing support and to keep developing the platform in response to user needs (and to fix bugs or contribute upstream too)
If you want to give it a spin for a month for free here's my referral link which should give you $30 credit to try it out:
https://cloudron.io/?refcode=5adcafc820c53c3d
Enjoy!
Also, having had a very quick look at HomeLabOS it seems to be aimed a on premises. Cloudron is primarily installed on a VPS, although some people do install it at home/ on premises too.
Also, it looks to me like apps and services on HomeLabOS aren't as integrated as they are Cloudron.
HomeLabOS offer Mail server and LDAP apps as options, but in Cloudron those things (and LOTS more goodness) are already pre-baked into the platform and all the apps in the app store are pre-configured to work with them. So everything Just Works out of the box. It's amazing!
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I've tried out HomelabOS and agree with @jdaviescoates assessment. Installation of apps on Cloudron is smoother, especially considering some features such as email and user/group management are ready for use. Installing apps, setting scheduled backups and mounting volumes from the UI is also a nice touch. For HomelabOS, I believe the installation of apps and other HomelabOS-specific functions are done through the command line, which may not appeal to everyone.
However, HomeLabOS has its advantages in the sense that there are some apps on HomeLabOS which are not available on Cloudron (e.g. Miniflux), so it also depends on your requirements - does HomelabOS or Cloudron have the app you want?.
Both are very active projects and have made lots of improvements over the past few months, and I made the decision to go with Cloudron.
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Yeah. Another option is using something like Rancher to manage a kubernetes cluster but again the same level of ease of use and integration just isn't there without significate up-front time investment.
And yeah I honestly prefer Cloudron on prem. Most VPS services have costs for storage and dedicated CPU that dont seem worth it to me when I can spend 800 bucks on a server and make that money back in a short amount of time.
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@atrilahiji I guess it depends on how good your on premises connection is and how many off premises users you have
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@jdaviescoates Yeah true. I suppose if its being used for a business it might be worth using a VPS for reliability. I'm thinking for more of a homelab perspective I guess.
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@jdaviescoates said in Cloudron vs Homelabos:
When was this implemented? I've been asking for this for years!?
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@robi https://forum.cloudron.io/topic/2823/referral-program/ . I think those days you were active on the chat and probably missed the forum announcements
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Points taken for Cloudron being better. But that's precisely why it feels bad not to back a truly open-source project which needs all our help we can give, as opposed to yet another closed-source project that encourages vendor lock-in.
FWIW, HomeLabOS uses Docker and Traefik so the approach is very simple and it supports about 50 apps in all. The main developer is quite responsive and they have a good community going at their Zulip chat group.
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@nilesh I have advised homelab as an open source alt but as much as I admire homelabos its only on 0.7 & its lead developer does have a fulltime role as CTO @ https://grownetics.co/ (they do have amazing tech btw
both homelab & grownetics!!) where as cloudron does have 2 fulltime devs and is on 6.x
(Have been a cloudron user for many moons so please excuse my bias)
In terms of supporting open source - might as well donate directly to the downstream projects if you want the most impact -
I would rather pitch something like Yunohost as a truly open-source alternative. That being said, I still prefer how Cloudron is set up and I don't mind the cost at the moment. It if becomes prohibitive I might consider something else, but I'm good rn.
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@atrilahiji As I said, it's not about the cost. I too am happy to pay the cost. But given two alternatives, I want to support a FOSS project with my money, rather than yet another closed-source one. Supporting a closed-source project starves the FOSS alternative for users/mindshare/resources etc.
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@girish Have you considered releasing Cloudron code under an open-source license with, say, a 6 months delay behind the latest one? So, my money at least eventually improves the open-source version? A license like that would seal the deal for me in a heartbeat.
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@nilesh said in Cloudron vs Homelabos:
open-source license with, say, a 6 months delay behind the latest one
That is an excellent idea that I personally had not considered. I do not know of any open-source project which has this model. Do you ?
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@mehdi MariaDB follows this as per Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_models_for_open-source_software#Delayed_open-sourcing
It's even okay if the delayed open-source release is restricted to individuals and not corporates - to protect the revenue stream. But we must find a way to direct our resources towards improving public and community goods.
