Self-Hosted Apps Built with C++

6 self-hostable apps built with C++ you can run on your own server — compared on specs, deployment difficulty, and the SaaS each one replaces.

Office suite

Collabora Online

A LibreOffice-based online office suite for editing text documents, spreadsheets and presentations in the browser with real-time collaboration. It runs as an editing server behind a file platform such as Nextcloud, ownCloud or Seafile rather than as a standalone app.

C++JavaScript

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Home automation

ESPHome

A system to control ESP32, ESP8266, BK72xx, RP2040 and similar microcontrollers from simple configuration files and manage them from home-automation systems such as Home Assistant, a project of the Open Home Foundation. The Docker image runs the ESPHome dashboard (Device Builder), the web UI for managing device configurations.

PythonC++

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Vector database

Milvus

A vector database built for similarity search over embeddings at scale: collections with multiple index types, scalar filtering, hybrid dense-plus-sparse search, partitions and role-based access, served over gRPC and a REST API with SDKs for Python, Go, Java and Node.js. Apache-2.0 licensed, written in Go and C++; in standalone mode it runs as one Milvus container that depends on etcd for metadata and MinIO (or S3) for the vectors themselves, with the message queue embedded.

GoC++etcdMinIO

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AI Chat Interfaces

Ollama

Lightweight local model runner and OpenAI-compatible API server for downloading and serving open LLMs on your own hardware, with optional NVIDIA/AMD GPU acceleration — CPU-only also works for smaller models.

GoC++

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Office suite

ONLYOFFICE Docs

An online document editor for text documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDFs with real-time co-editing, using the Office Open XML formats (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX) natively. It has no file manager of its own and is used through an integration such as Nextcloud, Seafile or ownCloud.

JavaScriptC++

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Search engine

Typesense

A C++ search engine, billed upstream as an open-source Algolia alternative: typo-tolerant instant search, facets, geo search, vector and hybrid search with built-in embedding models, and scoped API keys for multi-tenancy. GPL-3.0, one binary, with Raft clustering for high availability in the open-source build. The whole search index is held in RAM.

C++

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