My Privacy-First Self Hosted App Stack 2026

My Privacy-First App Stack

The self-hosted apps I am using to protect my privacy and offer some digital sovereignty from the enshitified platforms.

  • XCP-ng: A high-performance, enterprise-grade virtualization platform based on Xen. It provides a turnkey open-source solution to host and manage all your virtual machines.
  • Proxmox VE: A complete open-source platform for enterprise virtualization that tightly integrates KVM hypervisor and LXC containers, giving you a powerful web interface to manage your lab.
  • FreshRSS: A self-hostable RSS feed aggregator that allows you to keep up with news and blogs without being tracked by centralized platforms or algorithms.
  • SearXNG: A privacy-respecting metasearch engine that aggregates results from various search services while stripping out all tracking data and cookies.
  • OpenWebUI + Ollama: A pairing that allows you to run powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) entirely locally on your own hardware for private AI assistance.
  • Home Assistant: An open-source home automation platform that prioritizes local control, ensuring your smart home data never leaves your network.
  • Immich: A high-performance photo (and video) backup & management solution that features local AI-powered facial recognition and organization.
  • Kasm Workspaces: A container streaming platform that provides “disposable” browser and desktop sessions to keep your primary OS isolated from web tracking.
  • IT-Tools: A comprehensive collection of handy online tools for developers (like formatters and decoders) that you can run locally to protect sensitive code or data.
  • UniFi Protect: A professional-grade camera security system that records locally, has no subscription, and can use but does not require the cloud to use.
  • NetBird: A zero-trust overlay network built on WireGuard that allows you to securely connect your devices without opening any firewall ports.
  • Syncthing: A continuous file synchronization program that syncs files between devices in real time using peer-to-peer encryption.
  • Joplin: An open-source note-taking and to-do application that supports end-to-end encryption and syncs via your own self-hosted storage.
  • RustDesk: A full-featured remote desktop application designed for self-hosting. It allows you to maintain full control of your data and remote connections without relying on third-party relay servers.

Looks like the original IT-Tools is kinda abandoned by the developer.

There seems to be an actively mantained fork in sharevb/it-tools with the running tools in sharevb-it-tools.verce.app and the docker images in github.com/sharevb/it-tools/pkgs/container/it-tools

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Thanks! I will check that out.

Some good tools there, need to investigate. I’d recommend Sterling PDF https://www.stirling.com/, very handy when manipulating PDF files.