Self-Hosting: Still Worth It?

Umbrel: From the kiddie pool to the deep end in record time

I wanted to like Umbrel more than I did, I think. Visually, it looks sharp, and it feels like it’s going to be a really painless experience to get going. But the problem is, if you know too much about how self-hosting works before you jump into this, you start asking too many questions.

Among them: Why can’t I change the Docker Compose files without the app resetting that file every time there’s a new version? (What’s the point of even having Docker Compose if you’re just going to delete my tweaks?) Why is it so hard to give this thing https support? And why do you have to set up your own version of the platform’s app store to add your own apps?

That made Umbrel a bewildering experience for me. It’s designed for people who want different things from self-hosting than I do—like bitcoin lockers and Tor connections. It’s a weird dichotomy that speaks to the pages of confused comments I saw in help forums.

Umbrel’s interface starts shallow, but hides a deep learning curve. Its advanced settings page had just a handful of options, not letting you change common defaults but instead pushing you to the terminal for literally everything. As a result, I found myself increasingly frustrated with this otherwise polished tool.

My tests:

» Set up the tool to support Tailscale: Easy enough to get going (the tool’s in the app store), but it’s unfortunately held back by Umbrel’s tendency to emphasize local access. The result is that you can install it, but with a lot of digging to figure out how to turn on https for the server. As I learned from looking at forums, many folks have been down this exact road before me, and some had given up. (For those who are lost: Use tailscale serve on every port you want to access remotely, adding https access as needed.) Grade: B-

» Install an app from the platform’s app store: I chose Solidtime, a time-tracking tool that I’ve been leaning into lately. While a slick app, it does an unwittingly excellent job of highlighting the folly of Umbrel’s security approach. Essentially, the local domain is hard-coded into the environment variables used by Docker Compose, and because Solidtime is a Laravel app, you can’t easily change anything. (You have to go into the terminal to update variables, for example.) I ended up breaking the app because I changed my email address in the app, which caused Solidtime to freak out. Solidtime sends a verification email to confirm the change. However, I didn’t have an email set up—and there was no easy way to do so in the interface—so I was unable to log back in. Adding Tailscale to the mix only worsened the problem. If you’re going to offer it in your app store, make it easier to tweak under the hood. Grade: D

» Install an app using Docker Compose: On the plus side, Umbrel does offer a route forward for this in the form of tools like Portainer and Dockge. These tools allow you to install and manage your own Docker containers relatively easily, even solving for the environment variable issues that I ran into with Solidtime. I installed Listmonk, an email tool I’ve been using, and in a matter of like five minutes, I had a working server, and a Tailscale command later, it had https. Problem is, this container is not visible to Umbrel, meaning you have to dig into a separate app to find it, sort of defeating the purpose of the clean interface. Overall though, this worked OK. Grade: B+

» Install a local LLM tool: I was ready to try AI on this, raring to go, but … installing OpenHands somehow broke Umbrel’s networking entirely. After 45 minutes of troubleshooting, landing repeatedly on unanswered support threads, I don’t have the energy to figure out why it broke. Honestly, I think I’ve made my point. Grade: F

When it comes to self-hosting, simple is a trap. You want knobs and standard approaches that match what everyone else is doing. You don’t want to have to painstakingly rebuild your electrical system while the power is still on. Because if something breaks, your house goes up in flames. Umbrel, unfortunately, showed why knobs matter.

Unraid: A hosting tool with knobs

I’ll be honest: Unraid is built for much more complex setups than a mini PC with a single drive. It encourages the use of drive formatting techniques like XFS and ZFS. And it doesn’t offer a friendly front page—though, if you want one of those, you can use a dashboard tool like Homarr or Glance.

But here’s the thing: Unlike Umbrel, it speaks roughly the same language as everything else. (Unraid’s been around for decades; it helped to define that language.) In other words, you are working with the tool, not against it. That leads to fewer fires thanks to robust documentation and a strong community.

The rub is that Unraid is not open-source, but its business model is still weekend-warrior friendly. You just need a $49 one-time license to keep your site going (with tiers that go up as you scale). That paid license comes with support that is likely to come in handy as you break things. Here’s how it went for me:

» Set up the tool to support Tailscale: Unraid has a deep integration with Tailscale that makes it a great choice if you want as much flexibility as possible. There’s a learning curve—it is admittedly confusing sometimes to determine whether a particular container should have Tailscale off or on—but it’s made up for by the fact that Unraid can manage the tool with scripts. I created a cron tool to turn off ports if the server went offline and vice versa. Grade: B+

» Install an app from the platform’s app store: I gave BentoPDF, a tool for manipulating everyone’s favorite file format, a spin. It is admittedly not a complex tool (I usually host it on my laptop), but it shows just how easy it is to get something like this set up. While I ran into some initial issues with Tailscale, they were easy to fix. Grade: A

» Install an app using Docker Compose: So, Unraid doesn’t natively support Docker Compose, favoring actual containers instead. But it is more than capable of doing so using a plugin for the task. Case in point: My issues with Solidtime on Umbrel did not follow me to Unraid. I ran into some permissions issues with the folders I needed, and the .env format was a bit prescriptive (Solidtime wanted laravel.env, but I was limited to just .env), but I got it working—and in a much more stable setup than with Umbrel. It was work, but work that made you feel like you were learning something. Big difference. Grade: A-

» Install a local LLM tool: For this one, I went with Open WebUI, which is one of the most popular tools of its kind, and downloaded Deepseek-R1 via an Ollama package. This is the part where more performant hardware matters. You’re not winning any land-speed records with this GPU, but Ollama can allocate roughly half the memory on this device (24GB) to the GPU, more than enough to run the 8 billon parameter DeepSeek models. My M1 with 16GB of RAM choked on this model, but this ran it fine once I added the right GPU variables. Grade: B

Overall, if you’re willing to pay—and more importantly, learn—Unraid is an excellent experience. And while it may not be built for a mini PC like this, it more than does the job.

Plus, if you want to, say, run a Linux install in a VM, it does the job pretty well. Proxmox, a similar tool that focuses more on VMs, is also good—but Unraid has a little more flexibility in the container direction. With Umbrel, you felt the limitations of the software right away. With Unraid, there’s still headroom.

HomeDock OS: The desktop apps are interesting, but …

Honestly, if it was just me, I would probably stop at Unraid and just move on with my Tailscale-simplified life. But this test needed more than just two entrants. So I dropped in another SSD and decided to install an app-based self-hosting tool that can be used on any distro.

That led me to HomeDock OS … which wasn’t the most fun choice for my particular setup.

The long and short of it is that the tool was not built to work with Tailscale. I could work around it (unlike Umbrel, HomeDock’s simply a Linux app), but it was a bit of a nightmare figuring that part out. I thought it was my distro. No, it was really some SSL drama that I eventually figured out with some purpose-built scripting.

It’s too bad, because HomeDock OS is a fascinating project—effectively an OS-like self-hosting experience, complete with windows, in your own browser. Unfortunately, I found myself having to navigate with SSL jank over and over. But unlike Umbrel, it was at least in the wheelhouse of what other tools do.

Eventually I figured it out, and found some interesting design decisions. I just wish it didn’t take me that long to get there.

Anyway, my tests:

» Set up the tool to support Tailscale: HomeDock OS doesn’t take any steps to support Tailscale out of the box, which is fine if it can play nice with it—or, honestly, give me an https connection at all. And whew, that’s where it struggled. I was never able to get their suggested homedock.local default URL to work, so Tailscale became my best option. I will note that it also supports Wireguard, but that felt like a pretty significant reset as I dug in, so Tailscale it was. (The strategy: install Tailscale’s cert, set the default url to your Tailscale URL, and enable ports as needed.) Grade: D

» Install an app from the platform’s app store: The novelty of being able to install desktop apps in a self-hosting tool was pretty good, I must admit. (Unraid also had these, but HomeDock puts them front and center of a fairly small app store.) I can see the case for loading up Krita from inside a browser, especially if, say, you’re on a work machine; I’m less convinced about the value of a nested Chromium. But word of warning that you might run into problems with Selkies, the remote desktop it relies on. (Because of how my keyboard was set up, I couldn’t bold or italicize anything.) Promising, but needs more work. (A point in its favor: Setting up Syncthing, which isn’t a desktop app, was painless.) Grade: B-

» Install an app using Docker Compose: The format on this is a little weird—you’re essentially importing Docker scripts into its proprietary format, which isn’t really that proprietary, really. Hey, still better than what Umbrel was doing. Honestly, I’d recommend using the supplied Portainer rather than building your own app store. You don’t get the nice icons, but you’ll actually get your container working in short order. That was how I got Penpot working in a matter of minutes. Grade: B-

» Install a local LLM tool: Given how popular LLM stuff is with self-hosting these days, I admit to being slightly surprised that AI stuff wasn’t all over HomeDock. It had some apps, though, such as Perplexica, an open-source take on Perplexity that was recently renamed Vane. I didn’t get amazing results using Deepseek (the Wikipedia page on “Why did the chicken cross the road?” was more informative than its answer), but if you want this in your arsenal, it works. (One knock against it: The tool is not packaged with Ollama, requiring a knotty separate download which adds complexity. Save yourself some grief: Just set up Ollama on Portainer.) Grade: B-

This one was a bit of a journey, and there are some quirks and weaknesses. I might have skipped the interstitial page when loading an app, and some of Portainer’s functionality should be HomeDock itself. But if you can look past those, HomeDock OS has plenty of potential.

Would I use this over Unraid? No. But given the newness of the tool, less than a year old, it’s worth keeping an eye on.