A Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB) has the RAM for 192 of the 194 apps we measured

copySelfHost Atlas (2026). A Raspberry Pi 5 (8 GB) has the RAM for 192 of the 194 apps we measured. https://selfhostatlas.com/blog/raspberry-pi-5-self-hosted-apps-ram. Data: doi:10.5281/zenodo.22983606

A Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM has a usable app budget of 6,041 MB by our rule, and 192 of the 194 apps we measured idle below that figure. The two that do not are Sentry and PostHog. This is a RAM count only, and every idle figure behind it was measured on x86, not on a Pi.

#The budget

Our hardware pages size memory like this: take the board's RAM, divide by 1.25 for headroom, and subtract 512 MB for the operating system. Build your stack uses the same two constants (25% headroom, 512 MB for the OS), run the other way to size a VPS plan from documented minimums.

For 8 GB that is 8,192 ÷ 1.25 − 512 = 6,041 MB.

An app "fits" when its measured idle RAM is at or below that budget on its own. Each hardware page runs the same per-app check, but over all 256 apps and using the project's documented minimum where we have no idle figure, so a page's count and the table below can differ. Here it is restricted to the 194 measured apps.

#What fits

Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB)189 appsRaspberry Pi 5 (8 GB)192 appsIntel N100 (16 GB)192 appsAMD Ryzen (32 GB)194 apps

• Moving from the Pi 4 to the Pi 5 adds three apps: Graylog (2,998 MB), Zulip (3,259 MB) and Huly (3,699 MB).
• Two apps need more than the N100's budget as well: Sentry (13,284 MB) and PostHog (16,824 MB). Only the 32 GB class fits them.

#How many at once

The count above is one app at a time. Stacking is a different question. Adding up the idle figures of the lightest apps first, 93 of them fit inside the Pi 5's 6,041 MB (5,913 MB in total). On a Pi 4 it is 68 apps in 2,739 MB.

Treat that as an arithmetic ceiling, not a plan. It adds idle figures and nothing else, so it ignores load, and it assumes a stack made only of the very lightest apps. The median app idled at 174.5 MB, and 6,041 ÷ 174.5 is about 34 median-sized apps.

#What this does not say

• Every figure was measured on x86. The idle RAM comes from our install-verification runs on GCP servers running Ubuntu, most of them an e2-standard-2 (188 of the 194), the rest on larger machines. We have not run these apps on a Pi, and we have not verified that each one ships an arm64 image. An app that has no arm64 build does not run on a Pi at any amount of RAM; check the project's image tags first.
• Idle is not load. The figures are a short snapshot of an app that is installed and not being used.
• RAM is one of several limits. The Pi 5 has four cores, and its storage is a microSD slot unless you add NVMe hardware. Raspberry Pi's own cooling and power recommendations are on the hardware page.
• The budget is our rule, not a vendor figure. A different headroom or OS base moves every count above.

#About the numbers

The idle figures are from our install-verification dataset (export of 2026-10-16, 256 apps, 194 with a measured idle RAM), published under CC BY 4.0 with the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22983606. The budget rule is the one our hardware pages use.