Heimdall

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 737 words

Heimdall is the dashboard for people who refuse to write YAML, and Homepage is the one for people who enjoy it. Everything about Heimdall follows from that split: you add apps by clicking, the tiles show live counts from a few dozen services with an API key and nothing else, and the whole thing has looked and behaved the same since 2017. On a 256 MB budget with 10 minutes of setup you get a start page your family will use. Whether to pick it over the newer dashboards is the question the middle of this guide answers.

Setup is 1 container and no config file

services:
  heimdall:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/heimdall:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:80"
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/London
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
    restart: unless-stopped

Open it, click Add, pick from the list of pre-drawn icons or upload one, paste the URL. That is the whole workflow. The SQLite database and uploaded icons sit in config/; back that up and you have everything. There is no configuration file to learn, which is precisely why this is the dashboard I hand to relatives.

Enhanced tiles are the feature, and the list is short

Two tile kinds. Foundation tiles are icon plus link. Enhanced tiles poll a service and show a number: Pi-hole (queries blocked today), Sonarr and Radarr (queue and wanted counts), Proxmox, Nextcloud, Portainer, Jellyfin and a few dozen more, each needing the service URL and an API key typed into the tile's form. The enhanced list is nowhere near Homepage's widget catalogue and it grows slowly, because Heimdall's development pace is the polite phrase for a release or two a year. If the service you want live data from is not in the list, you get an icon and a link, and no way to add a widget yourself short of a pull request in PHP.

Search, tags and users

The search bar at the top can query Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing or a custom URL, and it filters your own tiles as you type, which is what makes a 40-tile page usable. Tags are Heimdall's folder concept: create a tag, assign apps to it, and the tag becomes a tile that opens a sub-page, so Media, Admin and Kids can each be a page. Multi-user exists with an optional PIN per user and per-user tile sets, though the design is single-user first and the user picker is more of a profile switch than authentication. If the dashboard is reachable beyond your LAN, put real auth in front of it with a forward-auth proxy rather than relying on the PIN.

Against Homepage, Homarr and Dashy

If you want both no-YAML and lots of widgets, Homarr is the modern answer and the reason Heimdall's share has been shrinking. If you want a flat list of links and nothing else, Flame is even smaller. The full field is in the dashboards category.

Why it is still worth picking in 2026

Three reasons. It is finished: a project that changes little also breaks little, and a dashboard is the last thing you want to debug on a Sunday. It has the fastest onboarding of any of them, under 10 minutes from docker compose up to a usable page. And it looks fine: a background image, coloured tiles, a search bar. For a household start page, "fine and never changes" beats "powerful and needs a YAML edit every time someone adds a service".

What I'd do

Family start page, or the first dashboard on a new server: Heimdall, one container, tags for Media and Admin, Pi-hole and Sonarr as enhanced tiles, done in 10 minutes. Homelab with 30 services and a wish for live stats everywhere: skip it and go straight to Homepage if you like text files, or Homarr if you do not. Do not migrate away from Heimdall for its own sake; migrate the day you want a widget it cannot draw.