By offering a neat interface to help you access your self-hosted apps, services, and platforms, dashboards are perfect for bringing order to chaotic home lab setups. But with a myriad of dashboard tools floating around, you might have a hard time choosing the ideal utility for your home server.

As someone who has plowed through several of these apps, Homepage is easily my favorite of the bunch, and here are four reasons why I almost always recommend it to seasoned home labbers.

4 Tons of info and service widgets

For popular as well as obscure services

While you could access your self-hosted services without widgets, they’re really useful when you want to glance at the essential properties of your favorite apps. Whether it’s checking the query count on your Pi-hole server or showing off the number of shows and movies in your media server, widgets are worth configuring for your Homepage dashboard.

Once you start getting into the nitty-gritty of containerized projects, you can even add the service and information widgets of the services you use as part of the container stack. Better yet, Homepage has an enormous list of widgets, ranging from popular tools to the more obscure utilities like Tube Archivist and Spoolman.

3 Fairly lightweight

It’s quite fast even on low-end systems

The best aspect of a home lab is that you can get it up and running on practically any hardware, especially if you’re planning to deploy more containers than virtual machines. But if you’re on a weak system, you’ll want to minimize resource utilization as much as possible.

Despite letting you create some of the coolest dashboard UIs out there, Homepage barely consumes any resources. It also supports x86 and ARM64 processors, making it a solid option for Raspberry Pi-powered workstations.

2 Solid built-in monitoring provisions

To track the essential metrics of your apps

When you’re hosting an armada of services, you’d want to watch over their uptime, resource consumption, and other statistics. Although I recommend running a dedicated uptime tracking server, you can keep an eye on the ping and availability of your dashboard apps by adding the sitemonitor keyword inside the Homepage configuration file.

For the CPU, memory, and network metrics, you can define resource widgets in your config.yml file. If you belong to the Docker faction, you can simply use the showresources keyword for your containerized services.

1 Highly customizable

Provided you’re willing to edit YAML files

Homepage has the most flexible UI in the dashboard landscape – to the point where you can customize every aspect of its interface. With a few lines of YAML code, you can transform its minimalist UI into an aesthetically pleasing dashboard housing all your containers, servers, and bookmarks.

Then you’ve got the custom themes, layouts, and grouping options to better organize your collection of services. Factor in the service, information, and resource widgets, and you’ve got an all-in-one dashboard companion.

Still, Homepage has its flaws

Although I’ve migrated entirely to Homepage, it’s far from the most accessible dashboard manager. Unlike Heimdall and Homarr, Homepage has a steep learning curve due to its reliance on YAML configuration files, and you’d have to spend a while tinkering with different keywords, parameters, and layouts to create your ideal dashboard.