Self-hosted dashboards compared: launchers, monitors, and metrics pages

"Self-hosted dashboard" means three different things, and most disappointment with these tools comes from installing one category when you wanted another. Before comparing names, sort by job:

1. Launchers — a start page for your homelab. Tiles linking to your services, maybe with up/down indicators.
2. Monitors — is it up, how fast, what broke. Uptime checks, alerting, status pages.
3. Metrics pages — the state of your projects: stars, deploys, revenue, traffic, on one page you can share.

The launchers

Homer is the minimal option — a static page from one YAML file. Homepage is the same idea with service integrations that pull live info onto the tiles. Dashy adds status checks, themes, and a UI editor. Homarr is the drag-and-drop one, popular for media-server stacks. Glance bends the category toward a personal feed reader — RSS, weather, markets — in a single binary.

If your goal is "one tab that opens everything on my server", pick from this list and you're done. They're all good; the differences are config style and taste.

The monitors

Uptime Kuma owns this category for self-hosters: uptime checks, notifications, and public status pages with minimal setup. Beszel covers the server-resource side. Beyond that you're in Grafana/Prometheus territory — real observability, priced in setup time.

The metrics pages

The third category answers a different question: not "where are my services" but "how are my projects doing?" — GitHub activity, CI status, uptime, analytics, revenue, pulled from their sources onto one page. This is what infrapage is: 30+ widget types across 15+ integrations (GitHub, Polar, Stripe, Umami, Google Search Console, Sentry, Linear, Vercel, Discord, and more), self-hosted as a single binary or Docker Compose stack, AGPL-3.0, free.

It also composes with the other categories rather than replacing them: infrapage has widgets that read from Uptime Kuma and Beszel, so your homelab monitoring can feed the project page.

Two things the launchers can't do, because they're built for a private tab, not an audience: per-widget visibility (each widget is public or private, and sensitive numbers can show as growth-only), and publishing — a claimed page is a shareable URL, and every public widget doubles as a live README badge or social share card. What a page like that should contain is its own topic — here's what belongs on an infrastructure dashboard.

Picking

• "One tab for my homelab" → Homepage or Homarr; Homer if you want minimal.
• "Tell me when things break" → Uptime Kuma, plus Beszel for host metrics.
• "Show me (and others) how my projects are doing" → infrapage. Self-host it free, or use the hosted version — a public page is a one-time €29 claim, no subscription.
• Deep debugging and alerting rules → that's Grafana's job; a dashboard should link to it, not replace it.

Honest caveat: if you want a service launcher, infrapage is the wrong pick — it doesn't do app tiles, and the launchers above do it better. The categories exist for a reason; the trick is just knowing which one you're shopping in.