Firefly III vs Ghostfolio

Firefly III and Ghostfolio both sit in the personal-finance corner of a self-hosted stack, and both are AGPL-3.0, but they answer different questions. Firefly III asks where did my money go? — it is a double-entry ledger for your bank accounts, spending, budgets and subscriptions. Ghostfolio asks how are my investments doing? — it tracks stocks, ETFs and cryptocurrencies across brokers and reports performance and allocation. Neither one does the other's job, so the honest answer is often not "which one" but "one, the other, or both".

Bookkeeping vs. portfolio tracking

Firefly III is built on double-entry bookkeeping: every withdrawal, deposit and transfer moves money between accounts, and on top of that ledger it layers budgets, categories, recurring transactions, rules, piggy banks for savings goals, income and expense reports, multi-currency support and a REST API. It is the tool for knowing exactly what you spent, on what, and whether you stayed inside a budget.

Ghostfolio calls itself "open source wealth management software" for people "trading stocks, ETFs or cryptocurrencies on multiple platforms" and "pursuing a buy & hold strategy". You record activities — buys, sells, dividends, fees, interest, liabilities — and Ghostfolio prices your holdings from market data and shows portfolio performance over periods from today to all-time, allocations, benchmarks, a FIRE calculator and a static analysis that flags potential risks in your portfolio. It does not do budgets.

Firefly III's own documentation draws the same line. Its "what it's not" page says plainly: "you won't be able to manage your stocks or portfolio with Firefly III", and suggests a separate portfolio tool — noting that your Firefly net worth would then exclude the portfolio, unless you keep an asset account and record profits and losses as transactions. Ghostfolio is exactly that kind of separate tool.

The stack you have to run

Both are three-container Docker Compose deployments, but the pieces differ.

Firefly III is a PHP / Laravel app. Upstream's compose file runs the app, a MariaDB database and a small cron container — and the cron matters, because recurring transactions, auto-budgets and exchange rates only work when it runs. You generate a 32-character APP_KEY and pick a database password before the first start. Bank and CSV import is a separate official Data Importer container, so a fully featured install is four services.

Ghostfolio is a TypeScript app — a NestJS backend and an Angular front end — on PostgreSQL, with Redis as a cache. Its official compose file starts the app, PostgreSQL and a password-protected Redis. You clone the repository, copy .env.example to .env, set two passwords and two random strings, and start it; the app listens on port 3333, and the first account you create becomes the admin. On upgrade the container applies database migrations itself during startup. Official images cover amd64, 32-bit ARM and arm64.

For sizing, our catalog lists Firefly III at 512 MB and Ghostfolio at 1 GB; both are our estimates, since neither project publishes a RAM figure. We rate Firefly III 3 / 5 on difficulty and Ghostfolio 2 / 5 — Ghostfolio has fewer moving parts to get right, but neither is hard.

Privacy and outside services

Firefly III "will never contact external servers until you explicitly tell it to" — a ledger of your own transactions does not need to.

Ghostfolio cannot work that way, because valuing a portfolio needs market prices. Its self-hosting FAQ lists Yahoo, CoinGecko and manual data as officially supported sources, so a self-hosted instance fetches quotes from those providers. For assets no provider covers, you can create a custom asset with the manual source, optionally with a scraper configuration to fetch its price from a website. Two more upstream notes worth knowing: you are responsible for gathering historical exchange rates (a one-time job in the admin panel), and there is no app-store mobile app for self-hosters — you add the web app to your home screen instead.

What self-hosted Ghostfolio includes

Ghostfolio is also sold as a hosted service, Ghostfolio Premium, and its pricing page is clear about the split. The free, self-hosted Open Source plan includes unlimited transactions and accounts, portfolio performance, summary, allocations, performance benchmarks, the FIRE calculator and data import and export, with community support. In the hosted cloud, summary, allocations, benchmarks and the FIRE calculator are Premium features; for a self-hoster they are already in the box.

The one thing self-hosting does not include is Ghostfolio's own professional data provider. Upstream lists it as "available with Ghostfolio Premium", and a Premium subscription grants API access to it for a self-hosted instance. Without it, you rely on Yahoo, CoinGecko and manual data.

Which should you self-host?

Pick Firefly III if…

• You want to know where your money goes: every account, every transaction, budgets, subscriptions and rules that categorize spending for you.
• You want double-entry bookkeeping with reports and a REST API.
• You want an app that stays offline unless you tell it otherwise.

Pick Ghostfolio if…

• Your question is how your investments are performing, across several brokers or exchanges, with allocation and benchmark views.
• You are a buy-and-hold investor who would rather not maintain a portfolio spreadsheet.
• You accept that the server fetches market data from Yahoo or CoinGecko.

Run both if…

• You want a budget and a portfolio view. This is the arrangement Firefly III's own documentation points toward: Firefly for the ledger, a dedicated tool for the portfolio. Keep the brokerage accounts out of Firefly — or track them there as a single asset account — and let Ghostfolio handle holdings and returns.

If what you really want is a friendlier envelope budget than Firefly III, that is a different comparison: see Actual Budget vs Firefly III, and every budgeting option on the YNAB alternatives page.

Running them on a VPS

Neither is demanding, and running both on one small server is reasonable — they are separate compose projects with their own databases, so you back up each one on its own. For Firefly III, back up the database and upload volumes plus your launch variables, especially APP_KEY. For Ghostfolio, upstream's advice is regular full database dumps. Put either behind a reverse proxy with HTTPS before you expose it; Ghostfolio documents ROOT_URL and TRUST_PROXY for that, and Firefly III's FAQ points to TRUSTED_PROXIES. The setups are on the Firefly III and Ghostfolio pages, and any VPS below has room for both, plus the rest of your self-hosted stack.