Self-hosting: guides & tutorials

Both Authentik and Keycloak provide enterprise-grade single sign-on, OIDC, SAML, and MFA for self-hosted application stacks. Both are serious identity providers — not lightweight utilities. The difference is philosophy: Authentik is built for modern DevOps teams who want something that works out of the box; Keycloak is the battle-tested choice for enterprise environments that need maximum protocol coverage and production history going back a decade.

Billionmail and Listmonk are both self-hosted, open-source email tools. But comparing them head-to-head misses the point: they solve different problems, and the most effective self-hosted email stack often uses both together.

Chatwoot and FreeScout are both self-hosted customer support platforms with open-source roots. But they are not interchangeable — Chatwoot is a full omnichannel support suite, while FreeScout is a lean shared inbox focused on email. Picking the wrong one means either over-engineering a simple email workflow or under-building when live chat is a requirement.

Coolify and Dokploy both turn a VPS into a Heroku-style platform: push code, get a URL, forget about Nginx configs and SSL certificates. Both are Apache-2.0 licensed, both install with a single command, and both support Docker Compose deployments, Let's Encrypt TLS, Git webhooks, and database provisioning. The difference is scale, maturity, and complexity tolerance.

Dify and Flowise both let you build LLM-powered applications through a visual interface without writing a full backend. But they are aimed at different maturity stages: Flowise for rapid experimentation, Dify for production-grade deployments where teams need RAG knowledge bases, API publishing, and multi-user workspaces.

Mautic and Listmonk are the two most common self-hosted answers to Mailchimp and HubSpot email — but they solve different problems. Listmonk is a high-performance newsletter sender. Mautic is a full marketing automation platform with drip campaigns, lead scoring, landing pages, and CRM-lite features. Picking the wrong one means either paying for complexity you don't need or hitting a ceiling on automation you can't reach.

Ollama and vLLM both let you run open-weight LLMs on your own hardware without sending prompts to OpenAI or Anthropic. But they are built for different points on the scale curve — Ollama for developers and small teams, vLLM for production multi-user inference workloads where throughput matters.

Both Plausible and Umami replace Google Analytics with cookie-free, privacy-first tracking that you can self-host on your own VPS. Both are actively maintained, both run on Docker Compose, and both score well for GDPR compliance. The difference is operational: they diverge significantly in RAM footprint, database requirements, feature depth, and license terms.

Both Twenty CRM and EspoCRM are genuinely open-source, genuinely self-hostable, and genuinely capable of replacing a commercial CRM for small-to-mid-size teams. But they occupy different points on the maturity-versus-modernity spectrum — and picking the wrong one means a painful migration later.

Auth0 Essentials starts at $23/month for up to 1,000 monthly active users. Beyond that, the pricing scales by MAU in a way that surprises teams that grow: 10,000 MAUs cost roughly $240/month, and adding enterprise features (SAML, custom domains, MFA) pushes you to higher tiers. A self-hosted identity provider on a Liquid Web 4–8 GB Managed VPS eliminates per-MAU pricing entirely.