Choosing between services

The blueprint ships several services for some problems. Where that happens it is because they suit different situations, not because one is a spare.

This page covers the cases where a choice exists. Services that solve a problem nobody else here solves are in the overview.

Files and sync

	Nextcloud	Seafile	Seafile Pro
Beyond file sync	calendar, contacts, apps	none	none
Shape	five containers	multi-container	multi-container
Sync over large trees	slower	its design goal	its design goal
Full-text search, antivirus	via apps	no	yes
Licence	AGPL-3.0	AGPL-3.0	commercial
Company	Nextcloud GmbH, Germany	Seafile Ltd, China	Seafile Ltd, China

Nextcloud if you want one system for files, calendars and contacts, and accept a heavier stack for it. It is the only one here that replaces several services at once. Guide →

Seafile if sync performance over large directory trees is the deciding factor. It does file sync and does not try to be a suite.

Seafile Pro adds full-text search and antivirus scanning under a commercial licence. Guide →

The company behind Seafile is Chinese and behind Nextcloud is German. Whether that matters depends on what you store and who might ask about it — see data sovereignty.

Paperless-ngx sits next to these rather than against them: it takes scanned paper, runs OCR, and gives back a searchable archive. Pair it with either.

Document editing in the browser

All three plug into Nextcloud or Seafile as a shared backend.

Collabora is the light one — around 1 GB idle, LibreOffice underneath. Take it when the host is small.

Euro-Office is an EU-governed fork of OnlyOffice, maintained by a group that includes Nextcloud, IONOS, XWiki and Proton. Same editor, different governance. Take it when the supplier’s jurisdiction is part of the decision.

OnlyOffice stays closest to Microsoft formats. Take it when documents move back and forth with people using Word and Excel. Guide →

Dashboards

Four, and what separates them is how you configure them.

Dashy — one YAML file, and the interface rebuilds when it changes. The simplest to keep in version control.

Heimdall — a launcher first. Quick to set up, with optional per-service status widgets. Take it when you want links on a page and not a control panel.

Homarr — configured in the browser and built around integrations. It shows live state from media servers, download clients and reverse proxies rather than only linking to them.

Homepage — also file-based YAML, but split by concern: services, bookmarks, widgets and settings each in their own file. More structure for a larger setup.

Photo libraries

Five, separated by what they are for.

Immich is the phone-backup one. Mobile apps upload automatically, with machine-learning search and face recognition.

LibrePhotos covers face and object recognition and location data, closest to PhotoPrism in scope.

Lychee presents rather than manages: fast browsing, clean galleries, little machinery.

PhotoPrism manages an existing library — TensorFlow classification, face recognition, and strong handling of large collections already on disk.

Photoview is built around RAW files and EXIF. Take it if you shoot RAW and want the folder structure to stay the organising principle.

Publishing

BookStack for a wiki. Shelves, books, chapters and pages, and no attempt to be a CMS.

Ghost for a publication — newsletters and paid memberships are built in.

WordPress for a site that will need plugins and themes, and where other people will edit it.

Appointments

Cal.diy is the community edition of Cal.com. It is the newer of the two and asks more of the host.

Easy!Appointments has run since 2013 on PHP and MySQL, and installs without a build step.

E-signature

Documenso and OpenSign both replace DocuSign for self-hosted signing. Documenso is US-registered with development largely from Hamburg; OpenSign is registered in India. Neither has a guide here yet.

Uptime monitoring

Gatus is configured in YAML and nothing else, which is what you want when the monitoring configuration belongs in the same repository as everything else.

Uptime Kuma is configured in its interface. Rich probe types, SQLite behind it, quick to get running.

Project management

OpenProject is the full platform — Gantt, work packages, time tracking, wikis. The Community Edition has no OIDC or SSO.

Vikunja is task management: kanban, lists, Gantt and table views, closer to Trello than to a planning suite.

Where to go next

• Data sovereignty — licence, jurisdiction, and what each service sends outward
• Applications — the services that have a full guide
• The repository lists every service it ships, each with its own README

What this page is

Editorial comparison, as of 31 July 2026. The distinctions come from configuring and running these stacks in this repository, not from a benchmark and not from external citation — how sources are chosen and checked sets the standard the security pages meet, and a comparison of this kind does not meet it.

Feature sets, licences and resource appetite all move. Where a difference would change your decision, confirm it against the project itself rather than against this page.