Awesome Dashboards

Topic

Open source dashboards

Open source dashboards publish their own source code, and most are free to run yourself. Free and open source are not quite the same thing, though: some open source projects also sell a paid, hosted version alongside the code anyone can download.

This is the largest single group on this list, spanning homelab launchers like Dashy, Homepage and Homarr, monitoring tools like Beszel, and business intelligence software like Apache Superset. What they share is the code being open, not the audience or the job the dashboard does.

Choosing among them starts with what you actually want the dashboard to do. A homelab launcher and a BI tool solve different problems, and only after that does license or hosting model matter. A permissive license lets you fork and modify freely. A copyleft or open core license, common on the BI side, keeps the self-hosted core free while charging for a hosted or enterprise tier, so visible code does not always mean every feature ships for free.

Running one yourself trades someone else's uptime and updates for full control over your own data. That control carries a real cost: your own server, your own backups, and your own time when something breaks. A hosted, closed source alternative charges for exactly the maintenance you would otherwise be doing.

7 entries

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On the list

  3. Dashy

    Self-hosted app launcher with live status checks, dozens of widgets, and a YAML config.

    Type
    Self-hosted
    Price
    Free and open source
    Code
    Open source, MIT
    Runs on
    Docker, Raspberry Pi, Linux, macOS and more

    Checked

    Read the write-up dashy.to

  7. MyKK

    Single HTML file start page with drag-drop widgets, offline storage and optional cloud sync.

    Type
    Self-hosted
    Price
    Free plan, paid upgrades
    Code
    Open source, MIT
    Runs on
    Web, Chrome, Edge, Safari

    Checked

    Read the write-up mykk.us

Questions people ask

Can I create my own dashboard for free using open source software?

Yes, running an open source dashboard yourself is free of license cost. It is not free of effort: you still need a server or container to run it on, and you are responsible for backups and updates that a hosted product would otherwise handle.

What is the best free dashboard software?

There is no single best pick. It depends on the job: a homelab launcher, a monitoring tool and a business intelligence platform are open source in the same sense but solve different problems, so the right one is whichever matches what you are actually trying to display.