Developer Tools & Git

Host your own code and pipelines with self-hosted alternatives to GitHub, GitLab, and hosted CI.

226 self-hosted apps · 220 comparisons

All developer tools & git apps

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 447 words

Half of the best "self-hosted" developer tools are not hosted at all. lazygit (81,637 stars), lazydocker, and dive are single Go binaries you run in a terminal; there is no container, no port, no backup plan. This category is a grab bag of 227 tools, so the useful move is not ranking them against each other but sorting them into three piles: binaries you install, services you deploy, and platforms you commit to. If you came here looking for a GitHub replacement, that lives in git hosting; this category is everything around the forge.

How to choose from a grab bag

Ask three questions of any tool here. Does it need a server at all? lazygit works against any Git remote and takes 30 seconds to install; deploying it is not a concept. Is it for you or your team? Solo, the web-based tools are often overkill; with a team, features like Hoppscotch's shared workspaces are the entire point of self-hosting instead of using the public cloud version. And what state does it hold? Strapi and NocoDB sit on databases that need backups and survive upgrades with varying grace (Strapi's major-version upgrades are a known chore), while a whiteboard export is a file you can afford to lose.

Where to start

Excalidraw is the easiest win in the whole category: 130,520 stars, one container, 256 MB, and a hand-drawn whiteboard your whole team will actually use. Just know that real-time collaboration needs a companion server and nothing persists by default, so export anything you love. Hoppscotch replaces Postman for REST, GraphQL, and WebSocket testing; the app is light but the self-hosted edition is a multi-container stack, so treat it as a real deployment, not an afternoon toy. And lazygit, plus its sibling lazydocker, are the binaries I would put on every dev machine regardless of what else you host: staging hunks and interactive rebase go from ritual to reflex.

The trap: hosting things that did not need hosting

The category's quiet failure mode is running a container, a reverse proxy entry, and a backup job for something a static site or a local binary does better. Excalidraw without collaboration is fine as a bookmark to the public instance; json-server is a dev dependency, not a service. Host the things with team state. Install the rest.

Default for a first-timer: install lazygit today, then make Excalidraw your first real deployment. One changes your daily workflow immediately, the other teaches you Docker, reverse proxying, and the value of self-hosting with almost nothing at stake.

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