11 Underrated Self-Hosted Apps You Can Run on a Raspberry Pi

I have been running several self-hosted applications on my Raspberry Pi for some time now. From my experience, it’s one of the best ways to take back control of your data while ditching costly cloud subscriptions. In this article, I will share the best self-hosted apps you can run on a Raspberry Pi, based on my hands-on experience with each.

The Raspberry Pi supports a wide range of self-hosted applications, spanning photo and video management, audio and podcast servers, file management, productivity tools, note-taking, and system monitoring. All these are deployable via Docker with minimal hardware resources.

Below is a list of self-hosted apps that I have compiled from my experience using them over the years.

If you’re looking for inspiration for your next Raspberry Pi project, I’ve put together a list of 75+ ideas with full descriptions, difficulty ratings, and links to tutorials. Whether you’re a beginner or more advanced, there’s something here for you. Grab the list for free here!

Immich

Self-hosted photo and video management with local AI.

Immich is a popular, self-hosted alternative to Google Photos and iCloud. You can use this app to back up photos and videos on your mobile phone to Immich on the Raspberry Pi. Think of it as how Google Photos and iCloud Photos work.

Interestingly, Immich has unique features not available in Google Photos or iCloud. It can process uploaded images using facial recognition, geolocation, and more.

Immich is also a strong alternative to another popular self-hosted photo app called PhotoPrism. I have tried PhotoPrism, and in my experience, PhotoPrism is best for archiving and organizing massive, existing photo collections using an advanced metadata and search system.

Choose Immich if you want a seamless, modern Google Photos replacement with excellent mobile auto-upload apps.

Related: 10 Ways to De-Google Your Life with a Raspberry Pi

Immich is a resource-hungry application, so I recommend running it on a Raspberry Pi 4 or Raspberry Pi 5. You can easily deploy it using Docker, and if you need a step-by-step walkthrough, this guide on setting up Immich on the Raspberry Pi covers the full process.

Homepage Dashboard

Highly customizable and modern web dashboard.

Homepage is a modern, open-source application dashboard that gives you a single, centralized view of all your self-hosted services. It is a highly customizable dashboard that you can easily configure using YAML files.

Homepage integrates with more than 100 self-hosted applications and Docker containers. You can use these integrations to add widgets and shortcuts that display useful information directly on your dashboard. It also includes built-in support for multiple languages, making it easy to customize the interface for your preferred language.

Even though Homepage is a great dashboard, I will be honest about one thing, though. The setup process is tricky. Everything is text-based. It means you need to write all your configurations in a YAML file.

You might find that a little hectic, especially if you have used other dashboards like Heimdall or Homarr, which support web-based settings and tweaks. But don’t let this bother you. Once you learn to write your first YAML file, everything else will flow smoothly.

The easiest way to install it on the Raspberry Pi is using Docker, and if you need a full walkthrough, this guide on setting up the Homepage Dashboard on a Raspberry Pi covers everything you need to get started.

Zerobyte

Automated and encrypted homelab backups.

Zerobyte is an open-source, self-hosted backup automation tool built on top of Restic. If you haven’t heard of Restic, it’s an open-source backup program that runs on the command line.

So, instead of struggling with commands to perform backups with Restic, Zerobyte gives you a modern web interface to schedule, manage, and monitor encrypted backups.

It can be deployed on a Raspberry Pi using Docker and Docker Compose, making it an excellent lightweight homelab backup server. You can follow the official installation guide to get it up and running on your Raspberry Pi.

Beszel

Lightweight server monitoring hub.

Beszel is a lightweight, open-source server monitoring tool that lets you keep an eye on your Raspberry Pi and other servers in your homelab from a single dashboard. You can use it to track CPU usage, memory, disk space, network activity, and even your Docker container stats in real time.

I am pretty sure you have come across similar tools, such as the popular Grafana and Prometheus. They are powerful tools that offer the same functionality as Beszel but have one major downside: they are heavy and complex to configure compared to Beszel.

Take Prometheus as an example. It can use up to 300MB of RAM. That is not much on a high-end PC, but on the Raspberry Pi, that is a lot of RAM.

Beszel takes a completely different approach. It uses a hub-and-agent model, where the hub is your dashboard, and the agents run on the systems you want to monitor, collecting and sending metrics back to the hub. The result is an incredibly lean setup.

You can deploy Beszel on a Raspberry Pi using Docker Compose. Follow this official installation guide to set up Beszel on your Raspberry Pi.

Audiobookshelf

Personal server for audiobooks and podcasts.

Audiobookshelf is a specialized media server for storing all your audiobooks and podcasts. It is free, open-source, and works similarly to the Plex media server.

The main difference is that, with Plex, you can also watch Movies and TV shows, but Audiobookshelf is designed specifically for audiobooks and podcasts.

I have tried storing podcasts with both, and I will always recommend Audiobookshelf first. Plex is not really good for podcasts as it treats them as music files. That results in clunky organization and lost progress.

You can easily download podcasts through the Audiobookshelf interface, and on top of that, you can also use it to automatically download newly released podcasts. To do that, you will need to provide the necessary RSS feeds, and it will download the newest ones for you immediately.

In addition to audiobooks, this app has amazing features for your eBooks. For example, it features a built-in e-reader that automatically tracks your reading progress and pairs text files directly with their audio versions.

Talking of eBooks, why don’t you check out our Master Raspberry Pi in 30 days eBook? It is a compressed guide that will take you from beginner to expert in Raspberry Pi. You will learn useful Linux skills and practice multiple projects with step-by-step guides.

Audiobookshelf natively supports ARM devices. That means you can install and use the app comfortably on your Raspberry Pi. Follow this guide and learn how to install Audiobookshelf on the Raspberry Pi to host your audiobook and podcast library.

BentoPDF

Local and secure web-based PDF editor.

BentoPDF is a privacy-focused, browser-based PDF toolkit that lets you edit, merge, split, and process PDF files entirely on your device. Since everything runs in your browser and nothing leaves it, your files are completely private and secure.

I have been using BentoPDF for a while now, and I actually love it. I am actually using it to do a lot of PDF stuff that I used to do on the iLovePDF website. You know that popular website that everybody uses to merge and manipulate PDF files.

Some of the popular services that I get from BentoDF include:

• Merge PDFs: I have used this feature mostly when creating a CV. You have separate PDF files, and you need to merge them into one.
• Split PDFs: You use this feature to do the opposite of merging. You can extract specific pages or divide a document into smaller files.
• Organize Pages: You can use BentoPDF to delete, re-order, or duplicate PDF pages using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
• Extract Pages: If you have a long PDF, you can use BentoPDF to extract a specific range of pages as a new PDF.

These are just a few features I have listed. You can view more features on the official BentoPDF website. Just scroll down to the “popular tools” section, and you will be surprised by how much you can do with this app.

It is quite easy to install BentoPDF on your Raspberry Pi. You have two options. You can install it using NPM as any regular NodeJS website, or you can install it using Docker. You can view the full installation guidelines on the official BentoPDF GitHub page.

Changedetection.io

Automated website change monitoring and alerts.

We have an article on this website on how to monitor website downtime. You can use it to check whether your site is online and if it is displaying the right content. Now imagine you had a tool dedicated to this task with advanced features.

ChangeDetection.io is a free, open-source web application that monitors websites for changes and sends you alerts. There are many channels you can use to send these alerts, whether it’s Discord, email, Slack, Telegram, Webhook, etc.

There are a few features I really love about this tool, especially the included support for AI features. For instance, Changedetection.io is an ideal tool for monitoring price changes, stock updates, or content edits, and much more.

For example, you can specify a rule using plain English. “Notify me when the price for Stock X drops below $50.” Or if you are dealing with an e-commerce site, you can say, “Notify me when product X is back in stock.”

And another interesting bit is that once it has generated a report of any detected changes, it gives you a well-summarized notification. For example, you can get a heading like “Price for Product X dropped from $8 to $5.”

The easiest way to successfully install and run ChangeDetection.io on your Raspberry Pi is by using Docker. You can follow the installation instructions provided on their official GitHub page.

Linkwarden

Collaborative and privacy-focused bookmark manager.

Of all the applications on this list, Linkwarden is the one I use the most.

My work spans technical writing, IoT projects, software development, cybersecurity, and a few other areas, so I’m constantly researching new topics. Along the way, I come across articles, tutorials, and resources worth keeping for later.

After trying several alternatives over the years, Linkwarden has become my preferred bookmark manager thanks to its simplicity and reliability.

Linkwarden is an open-source bookmark manager that you can host locally and use to collect, organize, and archive web pages. I know you might have used other popular bookmark managers, but trust me, you will find Linkwarden pretty interesting.

Now, instead of bookmarking a webpage by just saving the URL, Linkwarden takes screenshots of the webpage and generates a PDF of it automatically. This approach is especially useful for research, as you’ll still be able to access the resource even if the website changes, removes the page, or disappears entirely.

Another interesting feature I found with Linkwarden is collaboration support. You can create a shared collection and invite other users to contribute links. Each user can also maintain their own private collections alongside any public ones.

You can easily get Linkwarden up and running on your Raspberry Pi using Docker. But one thing you need to know is that you will need to use a 64-bit operating system. It doesn’t include support for 32-Bit systems.

Use this official installation guide to get Linkwarden running on your Raspberry Pi.

File Browser

Lightweight visual file manager for local storage.

If you have ever wanted to access and manage files on your Raspberry Pi from another device without setting up something complex like an FTP server or a full NAS, File Browser is the answer.

File Browser is a lightweight, open-source, web-based file manager that runs on your Raspberry Pi and lets you view, upload, download, delete, and organize files directly from any web browser. Think of it as your own private Google Drive, but running entirely on your Pi with no cloud involved.

What I find most useful about it is how simple it keeps everything. You open a browser, navigate to your Pi’s IP address and port, and you get a clean file manager interface. No extra software needed on the device you are accessing it from.

Some of the things you can do with File Browser include:

• Upload and Download Files: You can drag and drop files from your computer directly into the File Browser and download them just as easily.
• Create and Edit Files: The File Browser includes a basic text editor so you can create or edit files directly in the browser without SSH.
• User Management: You can create multiple user accounts and control which folders each user can access. That makes it a decent option if you want to share specific files with other people on your network.
• Share Files via Links: You can generate shareable links for specific files, similar to how you would share a file on Google Drive.

You can get File Browser running on your Raspberry Pi using Docker. This guide on setting up File Browser on the Raspberry Pi walks you through the full process.

IT-Tools

All-in-one web utility toolkit for developers and power users.

If you’re a developer, you probably visit certain websites regularly for quick tasks, like generating a UUID, encoding a string to Base64, formatting a JSON file, or generating a QR code. The problem is that these are all scattered across different sites, most of which are cluttered with ads.

IT-Tools solves exactly that. It‘s an open-source collection of over 80 handy web utilities built specifically for developers and IT professionals, all bundled into one clean interface. Once you have it running on your Raspberry Pi, you have a Swiss Army knife sitting on the local network that you can access from any browser.

Some of the tools you get include:

• Cryptography and Security: Token generators, hash text, UUID generators, text encryption and decryption, and RSA key pair generators.
• Converters: JSON to YAML, YAML to TOML, and other format conversions without worrying about indentation errors creeping in.
• Developer Utilities: Crontab generator, Chmod calculator, Docker run to Docker Compose converter, and a QR code generator.

One thing I also find really useful is the favorites feature. You can click the heart icon on any tool to add it to your favorites, and those will always appear at the top of the main page. That saves a lot of scrolling once you know which tools you reach for most often.

Everything runs client-side, meaning there is no backend, no database, and no data sent anywhere. That makes it a great option for working with sensitive values like tokens or private keys without worrying about where that data ends up.

You can get IT-Tools running on your Raspberry Pi with a single Docker command, and it will be up in minutes. This guide on setting up IT-Tools on the Raspberry Pi walks you through the full process.

Trilium Notes

Hierarchical note-taking knowledge base.

If you take a lot of notes and are tired of paying for tools like Notion or Evernote, Trilium Notes is worth looking at.

Trilium Notes is a powerful, open-source, hierarchical note-taking and knowledge base application that you can self-host on your Raspberry Pi. You might have heard it referred to as TriliumNext.

That is because the original developer set the project into maintenance mode, meaning it would only receive bug fixes going forward. The community then picked it up and continued active development under the name TriliumNext. The good news is that it’s still fully compatible with existing Trilium databases.

What makes Trilium stand out from similar apps is how it organizes notes. Instead of flat folders, everything lives in a tree-based hierarchy. A single note can exist in multiple places in your structure through cloning, without duplicating content or using extra storage. That is a genuinely useful feature when you are building a knowledge base with overlapping topics.

Some other features worth knowing about include:

• Relation Maps: You can visually map out how your notes connect to each other, which is great for research or project planning.
• Note Versioning: Trilium keeps track of changes to your notes, allowing you to revert to previous versions whenever you need to.
• Built-in Scripting: You can write scripts to automate tasks and create advanced workflows directly inside the app.
• Sync Across Devices: TriliumNext includes syncing and database backup scheduling features that save your data automatically.

You can deploy Trilium Notes on your Raspberry Pi using Docker, which is by far the quickest way to get it up and running

In this article, I have listed 11 self-hosted apps you can install and run on a Raspberry Pi. Most of them are lightweight enough that you can run several at the same time without affecting performance. Until next time, happy self-hosting.

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