Heimdall vs Homer vs Dashy — Best Open Source Personal Dashboard Compared

Your homelab grows fast. One month it’s a Jellyfin server; the next you’re running Nextcloud, a password manager, a monitoring stack and half a dozen other services. Before you know it your bookmark bar is a wall of tabs and you’re typing IP addresses from memory. A personal dashboard fixes that: one clean startpage that puts every service a click away. The three most popular open-source options are Heimdall, Homer and Dashy — all free, all self-hostable, all with huge communities. But they take very different approaches.

Heimdall — The Elegant App Launcher

Heimdall comes from the linuxserver.io team, whose Docker images already power a big slice of the self-hosting world. Of the three it is the easiest to pick up, because you configure it through a web interface rather than editing files.

Type the name of a service and Heimdall fills in the icon, background colour and, for “enhanced apps”, live data pulled from that service’s API — unread mail counts, upcoming calendar events, that sort of thing. It also includes built-in search across your installed apps, tile grouping and tags, and a genuinely attractive default look that gets people using it.

• Setup — official linuxserver.io Docker image, or manual install behind any web server.
• Configuration — entirely in the browser; no YAML hand-editing.
• Icons — built-in app library with foundation and enhanced apps, plus custom icons.
• Extras — app search, tags, tile groups, API-powered enhanced apps.
• Licence — MIT, actively maintained (v2.8.3, Sept 2026).

Homer — The Dead-Simple Static Homepage

Homer is the minimalist’s choice: a static HTML/JS page that reads a single YAML file. There’s no database, no backend and almost nothing to maintain — just drop the release zip behind any web server or run the small b4bz/homer Docker image.

You define groups of services in assets/config.yml, and Homer renders them as cards with optional health checks — little status dots that ping your services and show whether each one is up. It has fuzzy search built in, keyboard shortcuts (/ to search, Enter to open, Alt+Enter for a new tab), multi-page support, themes in a few YAML lines, and it is installable as a PWA, so it behaves like a native app on your phone.

• Setup — download the release zip or run the Docker image; done.
• Configuration — one YAML file; no UI.
• Icons — auto-fetched favicons, or custom URLs.
• Extras — smart cards with service health checks, PWA install, fuzzy search, keyboard shortcuts.
• Licence — Apache-2.0, very active (v26.08.3, Aug 2026).

Dashy — The Power User’s Dashboard

Dashy is the feature-rich heavyweight — 26,000+ GitHub stars, over 20 million Docker pulls and a feature list that runs for pages. If Heimdall is the showroom and Homer is the notepad, Dashy is the command centre.

It bundles 50+ widgets (weather, clocks, uptime monitors, system stats, notes), per-app status indicators with response times, a UI config editor that writes YAML back to disk as you click, dozens of themes plus a colour-palette editor, custom CSS, icon packs including Font Awesome and Material Design Icons, simple built-in authentication or Keycloak/SSO, a workspace view that launches several apps side by side, and an optional end-to-end-encrypted cloud backup. Its minimal view also makes a great fast-loading browser startpage.

• Setup — a one-line Docker command, then point it at your config:

  docker run -p 8080:80 lissy93/dashy

• Configuration — YAML file and/or a drag-and-drop UI editor.
• Icons — auto-fetch from favicons, Font Awesome, Material Design Icons, emoji or images.
• Extras — 50+ widgets, status monitoring, theming, auth/SSO, workspace and minimal views, cloud backup.
• Licence — MIT, very active (v4.7.0, Sept 2026).

Side-by-Side

• Licence — all three are open source: Heimdall MIT, Homer Apache-2.0, Dashy MIT.
• Ease of setup — Heimdall configures itself in the browser; Homer needs one YAML edit; Dashy accepts either YAML or its UI editor.
• Customisation depth — Dashy wins outright; Homer and Heimdall are deliberately simpler.
• Status checks — Homer and Dashy natively; Heimdall via enhanced apps.
• Docker integration — all three ship maintained images; Homer and Dashy also offer health-check integrations with containerised services.
• Mobile experience — all are responsive; Homer is PWA-installable and Dashy’s minimal view shines on phones.
• Performance — Homer is the lightest (pure static files); Heimdall and Dashy run small backends.

Which Should You Choose?

Choose Heimdall if you want something that looks great out of the box with minimal effort — especially if you already live in the linuxserver.io ecosystem.

Choose Homer if you want the lightest, most maintenance-free option — a static page you can forget about until you add a new service.

Choose Dashy if you are a power user who wants widgets, health monitoring, theming and integrations without limits — and you don’t mind a little more configuration complexity.

There’s no wrong answer — all three are excellent, and switching later is easy since it all boils down to config files. Browse the Personal Dashboards category in our directory for more options such as Homarr and Homepage, or explore the full collection of free and open source tools. Know a great dashboard we’re missing? Submit it here.