Self Hosted Alternatives to Google (Full List)

The practical self hosted alternatives to Google are Nextcloud for Drive and Docs, Immich for Photos, SearXNG for Search, Vaultwarden for saved passwords, Jitsi Meet for Meet, and a mail stack such as Mailcow or Stalwart for Gmail. All of them are free and open source, and one ordinary computer can run the lot for a household. The catch is that the computer becomes your responsibility.

This page is the service-by-service map: what replaces what, how hard each swap really is, and which Google products still have no honest self-hosted equal. If you want a staged plan instead of a catalogue, read de-Google your life, step by step. We run most of the software below on our own hardware, so the warnings come from operating it rather than from a feature chart.

What self-hosting actually replaces

Two different moves get called the same thing. Going from Gmail to Proton Mail changes which company holds your data. Self-hosting removes the company: the software runs on hardware you own, and the files sit on a disk you can pick up. No terms of service change under you, no account is closed by an automated system, nothing is scanned to build a profile.

What you take on in exchange is the job Google was doing quietly in the background. Uptime is yours. Backups are yours. Security updates are yours. When photo sync stops at eleven at night, the on-call engineer is you, in your kitchen, with the family waiting.

It is not all-or-nothing. Mixed setups are sensible: self-host files, photos and passwords, and pay a small provider for mail. Every service you move is a real reduction in how much of your life sits inside one advertising company. For the idea behind it rather than the tool list, see what data sovereignty means.

The service-by-service map

Here is the whole page in short. Effort assumes you are comfortable copying a Docker Compose file and editing a domain name in it. If not, add an evening of learning to each row.

Nothing in that table is a startup with a runway to burn. These are long-lived open source projects with active maintainers.

What you run all of it on

The hardware bar is lower than people expect. A used small-form-factor office desktop with an SSD and 16GB of RAM runs every service above for a family. An old laptop works too, with a battery backup built in. A Raspberry Pi 5 handles the lighter services, though Nextcloud with online documents and Immich thumbnailing will feel slow on one.

The base is boring on purpose: Debian or Ubuntu, Docker with Compose files, and a reverse proxy that handles HTTPS certificates. Caddy does that in about three lines per service. If you would rather open no ports at all, put everything behind Tailscale or plain WireGuard and reach it from your phone over the tunnel. If assembling that yourself sounds like too much, YunoHost, CasaOS and Umbrel install and manage these apps for you.

Backups are the part people skip and later regret. Two copies in the same house is not a plan. restic or Borg to an external disk, plus an encrypted copy to cheap offsite storage, is enough. Restore one file from the offsite copy before you delete anything from Google. An untested backup is a rumour.

Drive, Docs and Photos

Nextcloud is the closest thing to a drop-in Workspace replacement: files with sharing links, calendar, contacts, notes and tasks, plus phone apps that back up your camera roll. Add Collabora Online or OnlyOffice and you get collaborative documents and spreadsheets in the browser, opening the .docx and .xlsx files you already have. Be honest about hardware, though. Nextcloud on an underpowered box feels sluggish, and that is the most common reason people give up on it.

If you only want files on every device, Seafile syncs faster and is lighter, and Syncthing skips the server idea entirely by copying folders directly between machines. Syncthing has no web interface and no sharing links, which for some people is the point.

Immich is the Photos replacement and it is genuinely good: a scrolling timeline, face grouping, map view, multi-user libraries, and background upload from the phone. It moves fast, and some releases need a migration step, so pin a version and read the release notes instead of blindly pulling latest.

For the pile of scanned bills that ended up in Drive, Paperless-ngx does OCR and full-text search.

Search: the one you cannot really self-host

SearXNG is excellent and takes ten minutes to stand up, but it is a metasearch front end, not a search engine. It queries Google, Bing, Brave and others on your behalf, strips the tracking, merges the results and shows them with no ads and no profile. Whoogle does a narrower version for Google results specifically.

Your searches stop being tied to your identity, which is a real win, but the index still belongs to the companies you were trying to leave. If Google blocks the query, you get nothing. Independent engines such as Mojeek and Marginalia do crawl the web themselves, but you cannot host those either.

A private instance for one household usually behaves. Busy public instances get rate-limited and start throwing captcha errors, which is why people who care run their own. Building an actual index at home is not realistic: YaCy is a real peer-to-peer crawler and it works, but result quality is far below what you are used to.

Mail, calendar and contacts

Calendar and contacts are the easy half. Radicale and Baikal are small CalDAV and CardDAV servers that run on almost anything, or use the Nextcloud apps you already have. iOS syncs both natively; on Android, DAVx5 wires them into the built-in apps. This layer is close to maintenance-free.

Email is the hard half. Mailcow, Mailu, Stalwart and docker-mailserver all install cleanly and give you IMAP, webmail and spam filtering. Receiving mail is straightforward. Sending mail so it lands in inboxes rather than spam folders is the fight.

You need SPF, DKIM and DMARC set correctly, matching forward and reverse DNS, and an IP address with no history. Home broadband addresses are blocked outright by most large providers, so you need a VPS with a clean IP. Even then, one provider deciding you look suspicious can quietly break your mail.

The answer most experienced self-hosters land on: run your own server if you want to learn how mail works, but relay outbound messages through a paid SMTP service. Losing a job offer to a spam folder is an expensive way to prove a point.

Maps, video and the honest gaps

Maps mostly work. OpenStreetMap data with Organic Maps or OsmAnd gives offline navigation with no account and no location history, and in most cities the map itself is as good as Google's. What you lose is live traffic, transit times, and business listings with hours and reviews. You can host map tiles with OpenMapTiles and routing with OSRM, but that only matters if you are building on top of maps.

Video is the real gap. Invidious and Piped are proxy front ends that let you watch YouTube without ads, tracking or an account, and they are worth running. They also break whenever YouTube changes something, sometimes for days. PeerTube is a proper federated video platform you can host, but it does not contain the videos you actually want to watch. There is no self-hosted YouTube.

The odds and ends are simpler than expected. Jitsi Meet replaces Meet and is pleasant for small calls, though ten people on video needs real CPU and upload bandwidth. Umami or Plausible replace Google Analytics with no cookie banner. LimeSurvey covers surveys, and for anything where the result truly matters, such as a co-op board election, Folkmoot is verifiable voting software you can run yourself.

What self-hosting is bad at

Availability is the first honest limit. Google's uptime is better than your house. Power cuts, a router reboot, an ISP outage or a failed drive all become your problem, and they tend to happen while you are away. A UPS and a spare disk cover most of it.

The support burden is the part people underestimate. When your own photo server is down you are not a user filing a ticket, you are the helpdesk for everyone in the house. If a partner cannot reach the family photos because you were mid-upgrade, that is a relationship cost, not a technical one. Upgrade on a weekday morning.

Collaboration outside the household is clunkier: sharing a document means sending a link to a domain nobody recognises, and some mail filters distrust exactly that.

And it is not free. Hardware, electricity, a domain and a few hours a month add up to more than a cheap subscription in pure cash terms. If your only goal is to stop being advertised at, a paid privacy-respecting provider gets most of the benefit for almost none of the work. Self-hosting earns its keep when the data has to stay local, when you want to understand the machinery, or when the service must keep running whether or not the internet does.

Where to start without burning out

Pick one service, run it for a month, then add another. The usual first choice is Vaultwarden or Immich: both are small, both solve a problem you feel daily, and neither breaks anything else if you turn it off.

Keep the Google account alive while you migrate. Export with Google Takeout, import, use the self-hosted copy as your primary for several weeks, and verify a restore from backup before deleting anything upstream. Deleting the original the same weekend you set up the replacement is how people lose photos.

For a running order with realistic timings, the sibling guide to de-Googling your life step by step lays out the stages. If you want services that keep working when the internet does not, self-hosted software pairs naturally with local networking: see how mesh networks work, and the off-grid LoRa hardware from Blackout Labs. The rest of our plain-language guides are in the learn section.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best self hosted alternative to Google Drive?

Nextcloud, for most people. It handles files, sharing links, calendar, contacts and notes, has solid mobile apps, and adds collaborative documents when you attach Collabora Online or OnlyOffice. Seafile is faster and lighter if you only want file sync, and Syncthing copies folders directly between your devices with no server at all.

Can I self host a search engine to replace Google?

You can self-host SearXNG, but it is a metasearch front end rather than an index. It queries Google, Bing and others for you, removes the tracking, and shows merged results with no ads or profiling. Building a real index at home is not practical. YaCy is a genuine peer-to-peer crawler, but result quality is far below what you expect.

Do I need a real server to self host Google alternatives?

No. A used small-form-factor office desktop with an SSD and 16GB of RAM runs everything a household needs, and an old laptop works too with the bonus of a built-in battery. A Raspberry Pi 5 handles lighter services well, though Nextcloud with online documents and Immich thumbnailing will feel slow on one.

Is self hosting email actually worth it?

Usually not as your only mailbox. Mailcow, Mailu and Stalwart install cleanly, but deliverability is the hard part: you need SPF, DKIM, DMARC, matching reverse DNS and a clean IP, since home broadband addresses are blocked outright. Many experienced self-hosters run their own server and relay outbound mail through a paid SMTP service.

How much does it cost to self host alternatives to Google?

Expect a one-off cost for a used mini PC and a drive, plus a domain name each year and a few dollars a month of electricity and offsite backup storage. The larger cost is your time: a few hours to set up and a few hours a month for updates, backups and the occasional thing that breaks.

Is self hosted software really more private than Google?

For anything stored on your own machine, yes, because the data never leaves hardware you control and nothing scans it to build an ad profile. The exception is services that still reach outward. A self-hosted search front end still sends queries to Google's index, and self-hosted mail still hands messages to whoever your recipient uses.