Updated August 2026
    Contested · 44/100

    Open Source Personal Dashboards: 18 Projects Compared

    Every open-source personal dashboards project we track, scored on maintenance, momentum and licence — so you can tell the live competitors from the abandoned repositories.

    TL;DR • open source personal dashboards • as of August 2026

    Personal Dashboards has 18 open-source implementations in this dataset, of which 10 show real momentum and 1 are dormant or abandoned. The leader is Glance with 36k stars against a category median of 3.6k — roughly 10x the typical project. Saturation score 44/100: Contested. Several maintained alternatives exist, but no one owns the category.

    18
    Implementations
    10
    Real momentum
    1
    Dormant or dead
    56%
    Maintained rate

    Should you build a personal dashboards product?

    Contested · 44/100
    18 implementations · leader 10x the median

    Winnable, but differentiation is not optional. Pick one underserved segment and be visibly better for it rather than competing feature-for-feature with a free tool.

    The practical test in this category: Glance is the reference implementation at 36k stars, and 10 of 18 projects are still shipping. A buyer evaluating you will find at least one maintained free option, so your pricing and positioning have to answer "why not self-host Glance?" in the first minute.

    The projects that actually compete

    All 18 open-source personal dashboards projects

    Dashy

    Personal Dashboards

    26k

    Feature-rich homepage for your homelab, with easy YAML configuration.

    Actively maintained
    Real momentum
    MIT

    Homer

    Personal Dashboards

    12k

    Dead simple static homepage to expose your server services, with an easy yaml configuration and connectivity check.

    Actively maintained
    Real momentum
    Apache-2.0

    Your Spotify

    Personal Dashboards

    4.5k

    Allows you to record your Spotify listening activity and have statistics about them served through a Web application.

    Actively maintained
    Real momentum
    MIT

    LinkStack

    Personal Dashboards

    3.7k

    Link all your social media platforms easily accessible on one page, customizable through an intuitive, easy to use user/admin interface (alternative to Linktree and Manylink).

    Actively maintained
    Real momentum
    AGPL-3.0

    Mafl

    Personal Dashboards

    752

    Minimalistic flexible homepage.

    Slowing down
    MIT

    Starbase 80

    Personal Dashboards

    555

    A simple homepage with an iPad-style application grid, for mobile and desktop. One JSON configuration file.

    Actively maintained
    Real momentum
    MIT

    Homepage by tomershvueli

    Personal Dashboards

    321

    Simple, standalone, self-hosted PHP page that is your window to your server and the web.

    Abandoned
    MIT

    portkey

    Personal Dashboards

    168

    Simple web portal that serves as a startup page, displaying a compilation of links and URLs, while also allowing the addition of custom pages, all managed through a single configuration file.

    Actively maintained
    AGPL-3.0

    Nimbus

    Personal Dashboards

    124

    Modern drag-and-drop homelab dashboard with visual editor and simple configuration.

    Actively maintained
    AGPL-3.0

    Hubleys

    Personal Dashboards

    120

    Personal dashboards to organize links for multiple users via a central yaml config.

    Actively maintained
    MIT

    gobookmarks

    Personal Dashboards

    17

    Landing page to display bookmarks stored in GitHub, GitLab or local Git.

    Actively maintained
    AGPL-3.0

    How to compete when a free version already exists

    Why 'someone already built it' is the wrong conclusion

    Existence is not competition. A project competes with you only if it is maintained, findable, deployable by your buyer and licensed for their use. Most projects fail at least one of those tests. Run all four before you shelve an idea — or before you assume you have a clear run.

    • Maintained: commits in the last twelve months and a recent release.
    • Findable: your buyer can discover it without knowing the project name.
    • Deployable: the buyer's team can actually run it without a platform engineer.
    • Licensed: the licence permits the use your buyer needs.

    How stars mislead founders

    Stars are a lifetime counter with no decay, so a project abandoned in 2022 still looks like a leader in 2026. In this dataset 149 projects are dormant, abandoned or archived, and several of them sit in the top decile by stars. Sort by momentum and commit activity instead — popularity tells you the project was once interesting, maintenance tells you whether it will still be there when your customer needs a bug fixed.

    The self-hosting cost buyers forget to count

    When a prospect says 'we could just self-host the free one', they are usually comparing your price against zero. The real comparison is your price against hosting, upgrades, backups, security patching, integration work and the engineer hours behind all of it. Quantifying that number is the single most effective response to a free-alternative objection — and it is more persuasive coming with a spreadsheet than with a feature list.

    • Infrastructure: compute, storage, backups, monitoring.
    • Upgrades: breaking releases, migration work, dependency drift.
    • Security: patching, access control, audit trails, compliance evidence.
    • Opportunity cost: engineer time not spent on your buyer's actual product.

    Licences decide business models

    Founders treat licensing as a legal footnote and then discover it dictates strategy. Permissive licences allow closed commercial forks, which is why so many managed services exist around MIT and Apache projects — and also why your differentiation cannot be the code itself. Copyleft licences, especially AGPL, remove the closed-wrapper option entirely, which reduces competition but restricts you too. Source-available licences exist precisely to stop the wrapper business.

    Open source competition: common questions

    How do I know if my startup idea already exists as open source?

    Search this database by category and by the commercial product you would replace. It covers 1665 projects across 130 categories, each mapped to the paid tool it substitutes. If your category shows a "Crowded" verdict, a maintained free version almost certainly exists and your positioning has to account for it.

    Does an open-source alternative mean I should not build my product?

    No. It means free is your price anchor. Plenty of large companies were built next to a good open-source project — the ones that failed were the ones selling the same job at a price the free tool made indefensible. Find the part of the job the project deliberately does not do, and sell that.

    What does the saturation score mean?

    Each category gets a 0–100 score built from three inputs: how many implementations exist, what share of them are still actively maintained, and how far ahead the leading project is compared with the category median. 62+ is Crowded, 38–61 Contested, under 38 Open. 11 categories are Crowded and 88 are Open.

    How is 'real momentum' calculated?

    A project has momentum when it committed code in most of the last twelve months, shipped a release recently and is not archived. 736 of 1665 projects qualify. This is the single most useful filter here — it strips out the popular-but-dead repositories that make a category look more competitive than it is.

    Can I use an open-source project commercially?

    It depends entirely on the licence. MIT, Apache and BSD let you build and sell closed products on top. GPL and AGPL require derivative work to stay open, and AGPL extends that to network use, which blocks most SaaS wrappers. BSL, SSPL and Commons Clause are source-available, not open source, and usually restrict competing commercial use outright.

    Validate before you build in a contested category

    IdeaProof scores your idea against real competitors, market size and 1,000+ documented startup failures in about two minutes.

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