Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

Alien is an open-source platform written in Rust that enables software developers to deploy their applications directly into customers' own cloud environments while maintaining full remote management and support. It… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

1. 1
   Scoutflo Deploy▲501

   Automate self-hosting of commercial open source products

   2023 · its alternatives →

2. 2
   Use Ansible to Run a “friends and Family” OpenVPN Server on Digital Ocean▲206

   Make a self hosted OpenVPN server in 15 minutes. Contribute to robbintt/popup-openvpn development by creating an account on GitHub.

   2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

3. 3
   Maritime▲98

   Hi HN, my name is Maria, and I’m a co-founder of Maritime. We started Maritime at MIT to build infrastructure for companies that need to run thousands of isolated AI agents for their customers. Imagine you set up an agent like OpenClaw, or a personal assistant agent with a custom framework, and want to give a separate version of it to every customer/friend. Each customer needs their own agent running in an isolated microVM, with persistent state, secrets, triggers, and sleep/wake behavior. Building such scalable and secure infra will take you months and will cost hundreds of…

   Mar 2026 · maritime.sh · its alternatives →

4. 4AS
   A searchable list of self-hosted software with screenshots▲656

   2019 · selfhostedsource.tech · its alternatives →

5. 5
   HomelabOS – Ansible scripts to deploy self hosted cloud services▲235

   Your very own offline-first privacy-centric open-source data-center! https://homelabos.com/

   2018 · gitlab.com · its alternatives →

6. 6AS
   arkOS - Securely self-hosting your data▲156

   2013 · ark-os.org · its alternatives →

7. 7
   Ambient, a multiplayer game engine and platform using WASM/WebGPU/Rust▲90

   Earlier this year, we released our open-source game engine [0] built with Rust, WebAssembly, and WebGPU. Today, we’re happy to announce the Ambient platform, which brings web deployment, server hosting, and more to the runtime. With Ambient, you can make a game, deploy it to the browser in one command, share your URL and instantly play with others, no downloads or installs needed. Our WASM use is innovative; it is being used as both a sandboxed runtime for user code, and as a way to run the entire Ambient runtime in the browser. This, paired with our ECS data model, enables a highly modular…

   2023 · ambient.run · its alternatives →

8. 8
   Eve – Managed OpenClaw for work▲72

   Eve is an AI agent harness that runs in an isolated Linux sandbox (2 vCPUs, 4GB RAM, 10GB disk) with a real filesystem, headless Chromium, code execution, and connectors to 1000+ services. You give it a task and it works in the background until it's done. I built this because I wanted OpenClaw without the self-hosting, pointed at actual day-to-day work. I’m thinking less personal assistant and more helpful colleague. Here’s a short demo video: https://www.loom.com/share/00d11bdbe804478e8817710f5f53ac61 The main interface is a web app where you can watch work happen in…

   Apr 2026 · eve.new · its alternatives →

9. 9
   zero▲94

   One command to deploy Docker containers to your own server

   Apr 2026 · shipzero.sh · its alternatives →

10. 10
    OpenBerth▲84

    Deploy AI-generated apps to your own server with one command. Open source, sandboxed, automatic HTTPS. Built for non-engineers.

    Apr 2026 · openberth.io · its alternatives →

11. 11
    I built a service to help companies reduce AWS spend by 50%▲123

    Hey HN: Kaveh here, the founder of https://www.usage.ai/ We help companies drive down AWS EC2 spend. Why? Because the way it's done now is a pain. DevOps and Software Engineers end up spending time managing costs rather than focusing on business problems. Previous to founding Usage, I worked on high-performance computing research at JP Morgan Chase and as a software engineer at a number of smaller startups. Here's how it works: We are typically brought in by a DevOps manager to cut AWS EC2 costs. The app is entirely self-service and the savings are generated automatically,…

    2022 · usage.ai · its alternatives →

12. 12
    Rust Based Desktop Client for Self Hostable Personal Cloud over S3▲13

    Personal Cloud Storage and File Management Solution with Privacy and Security - doshareme/desktop

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

13. 13
    VPNHome – 1-click, self-hosted OpenVPN deployment and management app▲85

    1-click, self-hosted deployment of OpenVPN with DNS ad blocking sinkhole - ezaquarii/vpn-at-home

    2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

14. 14IB
    I built indiehost to automate self-hosting on a VPS with Coolify▲11

    Recently moved all of my apps to a $4/mo VPS using Coolify Saved tons of $$, and can self-host my Ghost/Wordpress/Postgres instances etc. Built a tool to help others do the same

    2024 · indiehost.io · its alternatives →

15. 15
    I wrote a book about self-hosting for a small group of friends/family▲30

    If you're not yet self-hosting or looking to adjust your self-hosting setup, you might find it useful. Edit: The ebook is available now for purchase/download. Earlier beta was mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40269993

    2024 · selfhostbook.com · its alternatives →

16. 16
    mist.io - Cloud management in your pocket▲56

    A secure cloud management platform for automation, orchestration, cost and usage monitoring of public and private clouds, hypervisors and container hosts. Provides multi-cloud RBAC. Enables self service provisioning. Cost analytics and cloud spending optimization

    2013 · mist.io · its alternatives →

17. 17
    Pi-hosts – Give the Pi coding agent access to your servers▲23

    I built that initially for an AI chat bot that allows teams to perform DevOps tasks straight out of Slack/Teams (with proper permission control, obviously). Useful to let developers perform mundane tasks, or help coordinate incident response. I ended up using it myself on my own machine to manage Hetzner and AWS boxes. I thought that may be useful to others. The default policy should be good enough, but if you don't like living dangerously, you can set it to `paranoid`. Install: `pi install npm:pi-hosts` GitHub: https://github.com/hunvreus/pi-hosts

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

18. 18
    Open Computer Usefree▲9

    Hi everyone, I'm Vasek (https://x.com/mlejva), the CEO of the company behind this - https://e2b.dev. The company is called E2B. We're an open-source (https://github.com/e2b-dev) devtool that makes it easy to run untrusted AI-generated code in our secure sandboxes. You can think of us as coding runtime for LLMs. You can self host us on GCP (https://github.com/e2b-dev/infra/blob/main/self-host.md) and we're working on AWS, then Azure, and any Linux machine. This repo is one of our open-source projects that we're…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

19. 19EA
    Empire – A Self-Hosted PaaS Built on Docker and Amazon ECS▲36

    2015 · medium.com · its alternatives →

20. 20
    Cosmos▲13

    Most Easy and Secure Home Server: VPN, Apps & Much More

    2023 · cosmos-cloud.io · its alternatives →

21. 21
    Nucleus – A security-hardened, Nix-native container runtime▲40

    Hi HN, I've been building Nucleus, a lightweight Linux container runtime focused on two workloads: ephemeral AI-agent sandboxes and declarative NixOS services. It's a single Rust binary, no daemon. It is not a Docker replacement and not a strict subset of Docker either. I dropped the entire image-and-distribution half (no Dockerfile, no layers, no registry, no pull/push, no persistent storage layer) in exchange for going deeper on isolation and reproducibility. The rootfs is either a directory copied into tmpfs (agent mode) or a Nix-built closure mounted read-only (production mode). If…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

22. 22DT
    Disco – The self-hosting platform I wish existed years ago▲12

    Hey HN, for the past 1.5 years my cofounder Antoine and I have been building Disco, an Open Source deployment platform that lets you host multiple web apps on a single server: https://disco.cloud/ After getting tired of high per-project pricing on platforms like Heroku and Render, and frustrated with Kubernetes' complexity, we created a platform with all the polish and convenience of commercial solutions, but as an Open Source project you can run anywhere. Disco gives you a streamlined experience (ie a clean CLI and web UI) with the freedom and economics of self-hosting. Key…

    2025 · its alternatives →

23. 23TD
    ThreeFold – Decentralized Cloud Infrastructure▲37

    We built it from the ground up, minimal Linux based operating system (written in go and rust), messaging system written in rust and infrastructure as code support (terraform and pulumi) There is even a dashboard, and a playground UI to manage it (that you can even run yourself) . Beautifully decentralized, you have full control of everything, you can deploy on your own servers if the cost of the cloud is too much. You can even run the whole system yourself if you want to. Here is a link to documentation https://manual.grid.tf/ Also, we are honored if it piqued your interest,…

    2023 · threefold.io · its alternatives →

24. 24
    We built a managed Kubernetes provider at half the cost of AWS▲25

    Since there’s a few discussions recently on $4 VPSes we thought you might be interested in Symbiosis, a cheaper and simpler managed k8s provider. Supported features include external LBs, encrypted+replicated storage and autoscaler. Infrastructure can be managed with UI, CLI, Terraform or Pulumi. Control planes are free of charge and a 1vCPU/2GB node goes for $6 per month. We’re live in Germany right now and we’re expanding into US during 2023. Feel free to try it out and leave a comment.

    2023 · symbiosis.host · its alternatives →

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →