What people actually run on a home server

A server sitting in a cupboard does nothing on its own. This is what people put on it, what each one saves them paying for, and whether the project is still being worked on.

Popularity here is the project's GitHub star count, which is a rough measure of how many developers have bookmarked it, not of how many people run it. It is the best public number available and it is honest about what it is. The figure that matters more is the last release date: a project that has not shipped in a year is one you would think twice about trusting with your photographs.

All figures read from the GitHub API on 21 September 2026 The most recently updated project on this list is Paperless-ngx, which shipped v3.2.1 on 20 Sept 2026.

How to read this

Almost everything here is free and open source, which is the point: the reason to run your own server is to stop renting the same service every month. A licence of AGPL-3.0 or GPL-3.0 means the code must stay open even if someone builds a business on it, which is a reasonable thing to want from software holding your family's photographs. MIT and Apache-2.0 are more permissive and equally safe to run.

"No release" does not mean abandoned. Some projects ship continuously from their main branch and never tag a version, which is a legitimate choice but does make it harder to tell what you are running and harder to write down what changed. That is a real cost on a machine you rely on.

What to put on first

If you are starting out, the usual first three are an ad blocker for the whole house, somewhere to keep your photographs, and something to watch your films. They are useful on day one, none of them needs much hardware, and each one replaces something you are probably paying for. Everything else can wait until you know you will keep the machine running.