Organizr

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 826 words

The reason to run Organizr in 2026 is not the tabbed portal on the tin. It is that Organizr can act as the login gate for everything behind your reverse proxy, with per-user group levels, and do it on a 256 MB PHP container. The reason not to run it is the same iframe design that makes the portal work: any service that sends X-Frame-Options: DENY or a strict Content-Security-Policy shows a blank tab, and more of them do every year.

Every tab is an iframe, and that decides who this is for

Organizr loads each service inside a frame within its own page. That gives you one browser tab with Sonarr, Radarr, Plex and Grafana as sub-tabs, one URL to remember, and one place to log in. It also means Organizr is fighting the browser. Frame-blocking headers have to be stripped at the proxy, cookies scoped to a subdomain sometimes fail inside the frame, and mobile layouts of embedded apps are hit and miss. The *arr apps behave well, Portainer and Home Assistant need proxy tweaks, and anything behind its own OAuth flow tends to fail outright.

If what you want is a page of pretty links with service status, you do not want frames at all. Homepage and Homarr are the current defaults in the dashboards category, and Heimdall, the tool Organizr is most often compared with, is a plain launcher that never had the iframe problem because it never tried to embed anything.

The auth_request feature is the part worth keeping

Organizr exposes an endpoint your reverse proxy can call before letting a request through. In nginx that is one auth_request line per protected location pointing at Organizr's /api/v2/auth with a group level, so /sonarr/ is available to users of level 1 and above, /portainer/ only to admins, and unauthenticated visitors get bounced to the Organizr login. Users are created in Organizr's own database, or pulled in from Plex, Emby, Jellyfin or LDAP, and 2FA is built in.

That is a real feature for a household or a friends-and-family media server: you hand out one login, you decide who sees what, and the apps themselves stay unauthenticated on the internal network. It is less capable than Authelia or Authentik, which do proper forward auth with OIDC, but it is also about a tenth of the setup and the media-server crowd it was built for rarely needs OIDC.

Install is a single container

The maintained image is organizr/organizr; the older LinuxServer image is retired, so do not copy a 2019 compose file.

services:
  organizr:
    image: organizr/organizr
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - TZ=Europe/London
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
    ports:
      - "9983:80"
    restart: unless-stopped

First launch runs a setup wizard: pick SQLite (fine for any home install), create the admin account, and set a hash key it uses for cookies. Then add tabs, each with a URL, an icon, a minimum group level and a choice between "iframe" and "open in new window." The second option is the escape hatch for every service that refuses to frame, and honestly, once half your tabs are new-window links you have rebuilt Heimdall with extra steps.

Health pings and the rest of the feature list

Organizr pings each tab's URL and shows a red or green dot, which covers basic "is it up" without a separate monitor. There are homepage widgets for Plex recently added, Sonarr and Radarr calendars, download client speeds and Tautulli stats, all of which assume the same media-stack audience. Themes are plentiful, but the catalogue's note that the UI feels dated is fair: it is a 2017 design with PHP rendering and a lot of jQuery, and it looks it next to Homepage.

The project is mature and stable rather than active. Releases are infrequent, the Discord is where support happens, and the feature set has not moved much in years. For a tool whose job is to sit in front of other tools that is not a bad thing, but it does mean the iframe problem is not going to be engineered away.

What I'd do

If you run a Plex or Jellyfin household with the *arr apps and want one login for the family, run Organizr, use its auth_request gate on nginx or SWAG, set Plex-account login, and accept that a few tabs will be new-window links. Back up the config volume and forget about it. If you are a single admin who wants a landing page, or you run apps that fight framing, skip it: Homepage for the dashboard, and Authelia in front of the proxy when you actually need authentication. Do not adopt Organizr for the auth feature alone on a stack that has no media apps; the widgets, user import and tab logic all assume you do.