Home labs are perfect when you need an experimentation hub to deploy, test, and tinker with self-hosted services. While Jellyfin/Plex/Emby, Pi-hole, Wireguard, pfSense/OPNsense, and Vaultwarden/Bitwarden are often considered the quintessential apps for any home server, you’ll find a myriad of useful services once you dive into the self-hosted rabbit hole. So, here are five amazing applications you can try running on your home lab.

5 Pinry

With a shout-out to Hoarder

From DIY enthusiasts in need of new project blueprints to cooking lovers on the lookout for tasty recipes, setting up a Pinterest board lets you organize your ideas in an easy-to-digest pictorial format. Pinry is exactly that – except it’s a self-hosted app that doesn’t show targeted ads or keeps tabs on your browsing history.

As such, Pinry serves as the perfect alternative to Pinterest when you need more privacy for your image, video, and web page boards. Hoarder is another option worth mentioning, as it lets you harness the power of Chat-GPT (and even locally hosted AI) to automatically tag all the pins in your collection.

4 n8n

Automate your apps and software platforms

Home Assistant is the perfect tool for automating your smart home space, but there are several other fields where you can use automation to make your life a lot easier. n8n is one such tool that lets you create trigger-action sets for your workflow.

It’s compatible with a slew of apps, including Discord, Slack, Google Drive, Notion, and Airtable, and you can even set conditional statements for cross-app communication and automation.

3 SearXNG

Your private (meta)search engine

Besides removing the tracking hijinks of typical search engines, hosting a metasearch engine on your home lab can provide a richer set of search results. This makes SearXNG perfect for anyone looking for a privacy-laden alternative to Google and other conventional search engines.

Since it’s available as a Docker container, it’s fairly easy to get SearXNG up and running on your home server.

2 FreshRSS

Perfect for avid blog readers

RSS feeds are a neat way to stay up to date on your blogs and podcasts. But if you’re not fond of relying on third-party services to aggregate your RSS feeds, you might want to check out FreshRSS.

On its own, FreshRSS is a fairly capable tool for those who rely on the RSS and Atom protocols for content. But its utility goes up a notch when you use it in tandem with certain extensions. The best part? Since it’s a self-hosted solution, you won’t have to worry about some corporation pulling the plug on the service (I’m looking at you, Google Reader).

1 IOPaint

Photoshop isn't the only software with solid AI tools

Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that Photoshop is an amazing image-editing tool. Heck, it’s one of the very few examples where, rather than serving as a marketing gimmick, the inclusion of AI is helpful to users. But if you want a self-hosted alternative to Photoshop that can leverage locally hosted AI models to complement your image editing workflow, IOPaint is worth checking out.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it can replace Photoshop's generative fill facility, IOPaint is pretty good at erasing background objects, adding text, and modifying image subjects, and it can even handle face corrections with the help of extra plugins. The only caveats are that you’ll need a beefy graphics card for the best performance, and undergo the painful procedure of setting up GPU passthrough if you’re using a virtualization platform like Proxmox or XCP-ng for your home lab.

There’s a lot more where that came from

Apart from the apps I’ve mentioned so far, there are tons of other self-hosted apps you can run on your home lab. RomM is an amazing app for organizing (and even running) your ROM collection. Habitica is another useful tool that tracks all your goals and productivity tasks using an RPG-esque interface.

WeTTY is another worthwhile mention, as it emulates a terminal interface inside the browser of your choice. And this article wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t spread the good word about Trilium Notes’ solid personal knowledge management provisions.