Privacy & Security Tools.
Zero-Knowledge Audited.

The boring, sensible choice. Bitwarden has been through independent third-party audits, the encryption model is well understood, and the browser extensions actually work. Cloud hosting is cheap and the self-hosted route is officially supported, not an afterthought. The client UI is functional rather than pretty, but everything you need is there.

The pragmatic way to self-host Bitwarden. All official Bitwarden clients work against it, so you get the polished apps without running the heavier official server. Memory footprint is a few hundred megabytes instead of a few gigabytes. Caveat: it's a community project, not an official Bitwarden release, so you're trusting the maintainers' compatibility work.

The piece that makes self-hosting feel professional. Configure Authelia once and every app behind your reverse proxy gets a login page, session management, and optional 2FA. The configuration is YAML-heavy and takes a weekend to get right. Once it's running, it's invisible until you need it, which is the point.

Your notes are just Markdown files in a folder. That's the whole pitch, and it's why Obsidian has stayed popular. The plugin community is enormous and the graph view is genuinely useful once your vault grows. The core app is closed-source and sync costs money, but the files themselves are portable forever.

Sync files directly between two computers without a cloud middleman. Once two devices are paired, they transfer directly and changes propagate in near-real-time. The web UI is a bit ugly but functional. Encryption is end-to-end and there's no account anywhere. Great for keeping a laptop and desktop in sync without Dropbox.

Sits between Obsidian and Standard Notes in philosophy — Markdown files, but with built-in sync. You choose where your data syncs: Dropbox, Nextcloud, S3, or Joplin's own service. Mobile apps are mature. The interface is a bit dated compared to newer tools, but it works reliably.

Logseq is what Roam Research should have been. Everything is a bullet point, everything can link to everything, and daily notes are the primary interface. Files are plain Markdown on your disk. The outliner model either clicks immediately or never does — try it for a week before deciding.

Mattermost's pitch is enterprise-grade Slack replacement without the SaaS. The compliance features are real — message retention policies, eDiscovery, audit logs. Setup is more involved than Rocket.Chat but the result is more stable for larger teams. The open-source version is generous, but some enterprise features require a paid license.

Like Plausible but with a slightly different design philosophy — simpler, more minimal, easier to read at a glance. Self-hosting is a single Node process with a Postgres database. You get the numbers that matter (visits, referrers, top pages) without the complexity of full web analytics.

You query SearXNG, SearXNG queries Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others on your behalf, and combines the results. No tracking, no profiling, no IP logged by the underlying search engines. The instant answers are hit or miss compared to Google, but for actual web search it works fine.

Keycloak is what enterprises use when they need real identity management. More capable than Authelia but correspondingly more complex — the admin UI is dense and the concepts take time to learn. For a homelab it's usually overkill. For anything with multiple user types and permissions, it's the right tool.

Does one thing well: tells you which pages people visit, where they came from, and what device they used. No cookies, no cross-site tracking, no consent banner needed in most jurisdictions. The tradeoff is you give up the deep user-journey analytics Google Analytics provides — if you need funnels, look elsewhere.

Element is the reference Matrix client and the most polished way to use the protocol. You can sign up on the public matrix.org server or host your own Synapse instance. Encryption is on by default and the bridging ecosystem to Slack, Discord, and IRC is genuinely useful. The mobile app has had performance issues in the past, though it's improved a lot recently.

Everything is encrypted in your browser before it hits the server. The server never sees plaintext, so it can't be compelled to hand over your data — because it doesn't have it. Collaboration works well once you're in. Missing some conveniences of Google Docs, but the privacy model is the point.

Standard Notes positions itself as the note app that will still open your files in 30 years. The base editor stores plain text with encrypted metadata, and you can extend it with editors for Markdown, code, and rich text. Less polished than Obsidian, more durable. The free tier is genuinely usable.