Arcane
An open-source, self-hosted web dashboard for managing Docker containers, images, volumes, and compose stacks — a modern alternative to Portainer.
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Description
If you run a handful of apps on a home server or a small team's server using Docker, you've probably typed the same `docker ps`, `docker logs`, and `docker compose up` commands more times than you'd like. Arcane replaces that terminal routine with a clean web page: click to start or stop a container, watch its logs live, see how much CPU and memory it's eating, and deploy a whole docker-compose stack without SSH-ing in at all.
Arcane is fully open source and self-hosted — you run it as its own container, point it at your Docker socket (local or remote), and it gives you a dashboard for containers, images, volumes, and networks with real-time resource monitoring. It supports GitOps-style stack deployment, meaning you can define compose stacks in a Git repo and have Arcane pull and apply them, which fits homelab and small-team workflows that already version their infrastructure. Being free and unlicensed-cost software, the only investment is the server it runs on.
💬 Our review
The short version: Arcane is a free, self-hosted Docker dashboard worth trying if Portainer's interface has ever felt dated or bloated to you — it does the same core job with a lighter, more modern UI.
Portainer is still the incumbent here, with a much larger install base, a paid Business Edition, RBAC, and multi-cluster/Kubernetes support that Arcane doesn't attempt to match. Dockge, another lightweight open-source competitor, focuses specifically on docker-compose stack management with a simpler scope than Arcane's fuller container/image/volume/network dashboard. Yacht is a third option in the same space but has seen less active development recently. Because Arcane, Dockge, and Portainer CE are all free and self-hosted, the real cost of any of them is your own server resources and the time to set one up — there's no subscription to weigh. For a homelab or small technical team, Arcane is a reasonable pick if you want something newer than Portainer without giving up container-level visibility; if you need enterprise RBAC or Kubernetes management, Portainer Business remains the more mature choice. <!-- ai-generated -->
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Open source, self-hosted, aucun coût de licence (coût serveur uniquement)
Pros
Interface moderne et légère
Déploiement de stacks en GitOps
Monitoring temps réel
100% gratuit et open source
Cons
Pas de management Kubernetes
Communauté plus petite que Portainer
Pas d'hébergement managé