Keycloak

Selfhosting is where you're hosting your own websites, apps, software, tools, and much more on your own server instead of having to rely on 3rd-party cloud providers such as Hetzner. Taking this approach to hosting gives you more control over your data and how your server or servers are managed. When you are running multiple things on one or two servers, within your home, it's called a "Homelab" and you're "Homelabbing" at that point. Running your own server and homelab within your home is great for privacy-conscious individuals such as myself, tech enthusiasts, small businesses, and those seeking more control of their digital life. The following lists provided here are applications and software I've gotten comfortable with and enjoyed using over the past 3 and a half years since I started homelabbing, it's based on my experience and what fits my criteria. Some well known softwares won't be listed here, as my experience may of not been at best with them. My criteria is that software is built in the open, respects user privacy and security, should not require a license to operate, and don't contain profanity and other minor things. I'm also willing to test new software to selfhost, feel free to comment or message me to try out other alternatives. There are other places to check out as well for those interesting selfhosting, such as Awesome Selfhosted, selfh.st, and other places you can find on the internet. https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-foss/awesome-sysadmin https://github.com/veggiemonk/awesome-docker If you ever need help with selfhosting, you can check out the following communities: Homelab Community on Fluxer, I personally run /r/selfhosted (Reddit) /c/selfhosted (Lemmy / Fediverse) There's also a wiki you can look into as well. If you believe an alternative software should be added to this list, please contact me or direct message via my AlternativeTo account. I'm also available on Signal. This lists gets updated every month at least, check back regularly.

This list is an update to the list I created seven years ago https://alternativeto.net/lists/8010/back-end-web-development/ which focused on the server-side aspect of web applications. The web and development has changed a lot since then and rather than re-write history, decided to create a new list based on current patters and shifts in enterprise environments. These details are based on both what I've seen in the professional world as well as for hobbyists and web development enthusiasts who run their own projects. The general pattern for back-end development will cover three main points for each function: Self Hosted Option Third-Party Service Option AWS Option I also cover any GUI interfaces available for folks who don't want to interact with these services using a terminal. In addition to consulting the documentation for each of the tools below, I'd like to shout out the following projects which also played a big part in informing the overall structure of this list: Jeff Delaney's 100 Second Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@Fireship Kamran Ahmed's Roadmaps: https://roadmap.sh Stack Overflow's Developer Survey: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/ The beginning of this list will cover some common languages used to build server-based APIs for web applications, including Python, Javascript, C#, and Go. Honorable mentions, some of which were from my original list, include the following: Rails with Ruby: one of the best developer experiences but counterbalanced by terrible performance from a speed and efficiency perspective. This framework is still really popular in India. Spring Boot with Java: A very common enterprise-based application framework and particularly popular in China. But it requires Java, which I wouldn't wish on anyone. Laravel with PHP: PHP gets a lot of hate, but I used it back 20 years ago and am still fond if it. PHP is generally useful for Wordpress-based sites too. Has performance issues though since it is an interpreted language. Phoenix with Elixir: Also a great developer experience and is very popular on the Stack Overflow survey. Only reason I can't recommend is because you will be learning Elixir just to use Phoenix because it isn't a language really used for anything else mainstream. Note that I don't plan on covering anything AI related for the development process. Of Generative AI, wickedest of technological inventions, I shall neither speak nor give direction.

Toolkit for my daily job