Best Self-Hosted Apps in 2026: 8 Picks You Can Deploy in One Click

In this video, I'm going to walk you through 8 apps that can replace commercial services that you probably use. Things like photos, offices, file managers, video streaming, all that stuff. And there are a couple of reasons you might want to do this. One is financial. If you can run your own on your own server, it's probably going to be cheaper in the end. But the other is owning your own content. As a proud owner of a tinfoil hat, I like having my own stuff on my own server, not connected to a big commercial entity. And this allows you to do that. Now, these apps are available on GitHub. They're all open source. You can download them, set up Docker, set up SSL, all that stuff. That's a pain. You don't want to do that. I don't want to do that. So I'm going to show you how to use xCloud to set them all up with one-click install. You just click the install button and the app gets installed. You usually have to do a little setup of the app afterwards, like logging in, things like that. But just turning it on is super, super simple. I do want to point out that while xCloud does a lot of the heavy lifting here, Uh, they do backups, they do the install, they set up SSL, all that stuff. In the end, this is your server and it's on you to set things up. For example, one of the apps we're going to install is Vaultwarden, and by default, anyone can create an account on there. I'm going to show you how to turn that off, but you're going to want to take care of that kind of thing on your own and go through the apps, go through the settings, and get things squared away. So So let's get started. The first app that we're going to look at is called Image, and this would be a replacement for Google Images or Apple iCloud Photos or something like that. Uh, these are actually my photos, and you can see you can do things like, uh, get map coordinates out of the EXIF data, uh, albums, favorites, all that. You can click the view large, get a little screen show, Et cetera. Image is great. I really like it. One possible issue is that if you have many, many photos, you might need some extra drive space. But that's just the nature of the beast. You're going to have a lot of media. You're going to need a lot of drive space. You're going to want good backups, regular backups. These are your photos. You don't want them to just disappear. This is the heaviest app that we're going to talk about. Uh, it needs 4 gigs of RAM just for this. Also, there's a, um, also there's an app that runs that scans your images looking for things like faces. And so you can search by a person's face. That's pretty heavy. Uh, it runs on the CPU by default, so it's going to run hot. Um, all that said, it's amazing. Uh, I love it. I have— I'm using 12 gig of 93 available. These images right here are not 12 gig. So a lot of the, a lot of the 12 is the app itself. So if this is right for you, then by all means go for it because it's great. I really like it. The next thing we're going to look at is Jellyfin. Let me show you this here. Go to just click new site on my dashboard and I'm going to search for Jellyfin. And there it is. You click that, answer just a couple questions, and it installs it. Piece of cake. I already have it installed. It's right here. Now Jellyfin is— the service it would replace would be like Netflix or Prime Video or any, any streaming server. I did not upload a video or movies into mine because I don't have super fast internet. But, uh, I use Plex also, so this would be a replacement for Plex. And I put a lot of my music in there, and so I put some music on this. Uh, it's by Dan Gilmore, who's a friend of mine, and it's playing the music. You can click there and see all the songs, and there are apps for it. You can get a Roku app for it, probably Google TV, etc., and watch your movies there. So something to import— something important to remember is that Jellyfin does not provide movies or music. It doesn't provide anything like that. It provides you a platform to stream your own movies. So if you have your own movies, you can put them on this server and watch them on your TV or your phone or your tablet or whatever. 4K transcoding does need a pretty, pretty beefy CPU. That's just something to keep in mind. If you don't need that, then there you go. It also requires 2 gigs of RAM for direct play. Play and transcoding scalings with streams. So just give your, give your server the appropriate resources and it'll be totally fine. Again, Jellyfin is really great. I like it a lot. I've been a Plex user for a long time and I'm hearing a lot of people say Jellyfin is better, so I might be switching. Next, we're going to look at Paperless NGX. So it took me a bit to figure out, to wrap my head around what this does. It's a, it's a document management thing, but it's more about managing the content inside. So I'm going to give you a quick example. I'm going to switch to the dashboard here, upload a PDF. This is a resume from somebody. It says it's uploading, complete, waiting, it's processing. And there we are. It's uploaded. So I'm going to click on this PDF and I can view it here. And I can go into this data view and I can see the contents of this PDF in text. Now, some PDFs are fine that way. You can just highlight the text and copy it yourself like this one. Often the text in a PDF is an image and you can't copy and paste it. This will scan that text out and make it available to you. Uh, you can get the metadata, you can make notes about it. There's a history of this. Document. You can set permissions, so you can upload a whole library of stuff in here and then be able to search across it and find text in PDFs, etc. So Paperless NGX is really good. This is sort of a replacement for Dropbox because you can upload your docs there, but it also has that scanning component, which is really, really great. I like it a lot. A note that is important is that when I uploaded it, it took a few minutes to process it. This is only a 1-page PDF. If you upload a 100 or 1,000-page PDF, a book, an ebook, it can take a while. Just keep that in mind. But I mean, that's again the nature of the beast. That's a lot of data. It takes time. Next, we're gonna look at Vault Warden. And that's the one I'm going to install with you. So let's click here. There's Vaultwarden. So Vaultwarden is a Bitwarden-compatible password manager, and the compatibility is important because you can use the Bitwarden mobile app to connect to your personal Vaultwarden setup. So the Vaultwarden people did not need to make a mobile app. It just works. The browser plugins all work with Vaultwarden. The browser plugins for Bitwarden work with Vaultwarden. So if you don't want to trust your passwords to Bitwarden, set it up yourself right here. So I'm going to click Vaultwarden and it is getting started. Here are the servers I have that it could run on. Or I could do a new one. I'm going to put it on Basic Apps 2 and then hit Continue. And I'm going to call this one Vault Warden. I'm not going to use a live domain name. And you know, if this is for your personal use, you don't ever have to use a live domain name. You could leave it on a domain name like this. So let's click Next and we're off to the races. So, all right, there we are. That setup took maybe 3 minutes. So now I'm going to click visit site. And there's something important I want to show you right here. I can create an account for Bitwarden or Vaultwarden, but let's go to Jellyfin. On all of these apps, you're going to want to go to access data and credentials. Now Jellyfin, the only thing it has here is the URL to go to, but many of the apps create a default user on install, and you don't know what that is. It's just, it's just made up by the installer. If you come to Access Data Credentials, it will tell you. Some of them have more information, some have less. Jellyfin doesn't have a lot, but coming to Credentials is a place you want to come to find out how to log into your new site. So I'm going to create an account right here. And just like Bitwarden, I'm going to set up some password stuff and you can tell it to check for known data breaches of this password. And my account has been created. So I'm going to get the extension. All right. Then open it. Let's do that again. Now that I've updated those permissions, I need to log in. And right here, I'm going to choose self-hosted. And I'm going to put in the server URL. Ha! I need to bring that back. Oh, looks like I need the full URL. There we go. Now I'm going to log into it. There we go. Now obviously this is brand new. I don't have any passwords, but I am now connected. My Brave browser is connected to my own Vaultwarden thing. So I'm going to skip to the web app and This probably looks very familiar to you if you're familiar with password managers at all. I'm not going to show you how to set up the mobile app because it's exactly the same. But that's all it was. I mean, you saw the configuration I did for Vaultwarden. It was almost nothing. I just hit one click, created an account, connected my browser, and ready to go. Our next app is going to be Nextcloud, which is right here. Now, I haven't used it a whole lot yet, so it's— this is the UI I'm getting. But the magic is here. You can go to files. You know, I should clarify, Nextcloud is— wow, it's so big. It's hard to clarify what it is. All the tools you would need or want for an office, I guess you would say. It has something to replace Google Drive, Dropbox. It does email. It does. Well, here I'll show you. So here's like a file manager. So like Dropbox. But then we go to photos and it has something a little bit like image, but it's rolled into everything else in here. Activity. So you can see who's doing what, where, when, who uploads what, all that stuff. Uh, here's the office thing, so you can create documents in here. But then we go to more apps, and this is the gold, let me tell you. So here are the categories of apps. So there's file management stuff, there are games, integrations into other things. Here, let me click, um, all of these things. Monitoring, so watching what's going on inside your Nextcloud. Uh, multimedia. So there's an HEIC HEIF image converter. Um, there's an image integration right there. Maps, memories, music, all that stuff. We go to Office and Text. It can integrate with all of these things. Organization, Message Vault, money stuff, money management, notes, OpenID. Nextcloud can do an amazing amount of things. A friend of mine is a minister and their whole church administrative stuff runs all on Nextcloud. They do their email in there. They do all their docs, notes, all that stuff. Nextcloud is really amazing. It needs about 2 gigs of RAM just to run. So keep that in mind when you're setting up your server. And if you use it as a file manager, you going to want to watch your disk space. Again, it's the nature of the beast. You upload a lot of data, you're going to need a lot of drive space. It's the way it goes. Um, next I'm going to look at LinkWarden. Um, I used an app in the 2000s that let me have my bookmarks on the web instead of in my browser, because then they were accessible everywhere. LinkWarden is kind of like that. Um, I've just done the setup here. You I could create new link and categorize it. It's really just a link manager, but way more powerful than what's in your browser. And you can— it's gone. There was a thing to click right here. Where did it go? Okay. Yep. There it is. I got it. You can install a browser add-on to integrate with it. So I clicked on it right here in my URL bar, and I'm going to click install. Install there. Now Link Warden is operating as an app in a browser environment, so you can manage all your links here. Link Warden is really cool because, like, I loved having my links on the web. It was really, really useful. You can publish them, you can make a Linktree, all that kind of stuff. I would call this an uncovered gem. Uh, there are other things that do this, but this is really slick. It's open source, it's lightweight, so it runs nicely on an xCloud server. So I recommend it. Next, we're going to look at Ghost. Uh, Ghost would replace Substack or Medium or Mailchimp. Um, this is what the front end of the, of the site looks like that I created with Ghost. I didn't create— the installer made this. Uh, this is, this is what it came up with. Um, so we're on the analytics page right now. Uh, there's a network page. You can view the site within your admin panel here. Uh, there's posts, pages, tags, site members, et cetera. I'm going to click post and create one. Let's add a featured image. Yeah, we'll do this one. I took that picture this morning. There we go. And publish. There we go. So now there's the coming soon one, and then there's Topher's first post. So let's go back to the page, reload, and there it is. Now, uh, one of the reasons Ghost is great over something like WordPress is that it's a static file site, so you're not running a big database. Pages are going to load super duper fast. Uh, it's, it's really slick. So if you're looking for something lightweight, something not WordPress, then Ghost might be a great option for you. It does need 1 gig of RAM because it does a lot of work every time it rebuilds a site. And if you end up with a very large site, it does more work each time. So just keep that in mind. Next, we're going to look at Plausible Analytics. Now, this would replace Google Analytics. I'll give you one guess on when I installed it. Right there. So I installed Plausible in xCloud. Then I went to my WordPress site and installed the WordPress plugin for Plausible, and I was able to relatively easily connect them. It just needs an API key. Let's go here. So I'm going to click— nope, that's not what I wanted. Oh, but you can see that it does all this. Similar kinds of things to, uh, Google Analytics. Here we go. Site settings. That's what I was after. So in Plausible, I set up the domain that I want on the other end. Then I got a key. I went to WordPress, put the key in, and they connected just fine. Piece of cake. Um, Plausible is really cool because it doesn't use cookies, or it, it can not use cookies if you wish. Which gets around a lot of like GDPR rules, things like that. It's not as in-depth as Google Analytics. If you want that and open source, then you're looking at something like Matomo. But Plausible is super lightweight, super fast, can run without cookies, absolutely free, and keeps all of your data inside your own little bubble so you're not giving it all to Google and stuff like that. So there we are. That's 8 apps. We did Image for images, Jellyfin for replacing something like Netflix, Paperless NGX, which allows you to, uh, upload and archive digital files and scan them to get text out. Uh, you know, something I didn't mention is that you can just take a picture of a sheet of paper with writing on it And upload that from your phone in here and it will scan it for you. So it's, it's like having a scanner. We looked at Nextcloud for doing everything. It's really, really powerful. We looked at Ghost for setting up a website. It could be a blog. It could be a regular website, not a blog. You have a lot of options here. And Plausible for analytics so that you're not giving away all that data. And you're keeping it private, and it's more efficient. It's a lot faster. And lastly, we looked at Vaultwarden for managing your own passwords. I want to reiterate something that I said at the beginning: Xcloud gives you a good baseline for security. They set up SSL, all that kind of stuff. But in the end, you're responsible for it. So think about good passwords. Think about not leaving things open. Stuff like that. xCloud gives you a lot of power, and as Spider-Man taught us, with great power comes great responsibility. So take care of your shop. All of these things were installed using the one-click app installer, and they were all easy. That— it was, it was nothing to just set them up. So if you're interested in any of these apps, give them a shot. They're on xCloud. If you have questions, you can either put them in the comments of this video or you can hit up xCloud support. They're happy to answer any questions. So give this a shot and I'm excited to hear what, what you install. Please put that in the comments. I want to know what apps you choose to install. I'll see you next time.