First-hand · hands-on · honest

We deploy self-hosted tools and tell you what actually broke.

Every article is one tool we ran for real in a sandbox — the working docker-compose.yml, the errors we hit, the fixes, and whether it's worth your time. No aggregation, no “#1 best” lists.

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Categories

Web & product analytics Privacy-first, self-hosted analytics we deployed and ran ourselves. 0 tested Monitoring & uptime Metrics, dashboards, status pages and alerting — tested end-to-end. 0 tested Git & dev platforms Self-hosted forges and code-review tools, spun up in a sandbox. 0 tested Automation & workflows Low-code, iPaaS and job runners — deployed and put through their paces. 0 tested Data & BI Dashboards, SQL explorers and viz tools, tested against real data. 0 tested Content & CMS Headless CMS, docs, wikis and blogs — installed and reviewed first-hand. 0 tested Auth & identity SSO, identity providers and access proxies, deployed and probed. 0 tested Files & storage Sync, photos, documents and object storage, run in a real container. 0 tested

How we ran it

Want an ephemeral env from any compose?

We tested this tool in a Buddy sandbox — spin up any docker-compose the same way, or automate the deploy with a pipeline.

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