HomeioPortainer is a strong container console, built for more than one host and more than one person. On a single home server most of that goes unused, while the jobs that do come up, such as disks, backups, Samba and remote access, are outside its scope. Homeio covers those, and it runs happily next to Portainer if you want both.
| Need | In Homeio |
|---|---|
| Install an app | Pick it from the store, adjust ports, volumes and environment in the form, install. Or paste a compose file or a docker run command. Portainer: App Templates, or write the stack yourself. |
| Read why a container died | Live logs with level badges, keyword filter and download, readable even when the app colours its output. Portainer: logs, plus an interactive console inside the container. |
| Clean up images and volumes | Not yet. Planned as an image manager. Portainer does this well. |
| Several hosts or users | One server, one account. Portainer: environments via agents, and RBAC in Business Edition. |
| Files and storage | File manager with editor and previews, Samba shares, SMB mounts, USB drives, and partitioning and formatting in Settings. Outside Portainer's scope. |
| Backups of the whole server | Database, /DATA and compose stacks in one archive, weekly, restored from the UI. Kept on the same disk, so copy it elsewhere. Portainer backs up its own configuration, not your data. |
| Recurring jobs | A cron scheduler for app restarts, image pulls, backups and scripts, without editing the host crontab. |
| Reach it from outside | Tailscale for the dashboard, Cloudflare Tunnel for individual apps, both configured in Settings. |
For one home server, often yes. Portainer is a container management console: environments, stacks, images, networks, volumes, access control. Homeio is a server manager: it installs and runs Compose apps, and it also handles the files, disks, backups, scheduled jobs and remote access around them. If you use Portainer mainly to install and restart a handful of apps, Homeio covers that and the rest of the box.
Quite a lot, for container work. It manages several hosts, Swarm, Kubernetes and Podman; it opens an interactive console inside a container; it lets you inspect and prune images, networks and volumes; it deploys stacks from a Git repository; and its Business Edition has role-based access. Homeio does none of that today. An image manager is on Homeio's roadmap.
Yes, and some people should. Homeio lists every container on the host, including the ones Portainer deployed, with live stats; it shows them read-only and leaves them alone. Use Homeio for the apps, files and the host, and keep Portainer for container-level inspection.
It has App Templates, a list of predefined containers and stacks you can deploy and extend with your own template URL. Homeio's store is closer to a home-server catalog: the CasaOS app store by default, with icons, descriptions, per-app settings and update checks, and you can add more sources.
The host. A file manager with a Monaco editor, Samba shares, USB drives, a disk and partition manager, Wi-Fi settings, a cron scheduler, weekly backups of the database, /DATA and your stacks, two-factor login, and Tailscale and Cloudflare Tunnel in Settings.
Yes. Logs stream live with level badges, a keyword filter and a download button; since 1.9.2 ANSI colour codes are stripped, so coloured output is readable and warnings are labelled as warnings. Stats cover CPU, memory, disk and network for the host and each container.
A restricted one. It runs allowlisted commands such as docker, df, ls and ping, one at a time, with a 12-second timeout and no pipes. Useful for docker ps or docker logs --tail; not a replacement for SSH or for Portainer's container console.
Yes, it is open source under the AGPL-3.0, and everything on this page is in the one edition there is. Portainer Community Edition is free and open source too; Business Edition is paid, with a free tier for a small number of nodes.
curl -fsSL https://get.homeio.app | sudo bash on Debian, Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi OS (UI on port 80), or docker compose up -d from a clone of the repository (UI on 12026). Neither touches the containers Portainer manages.
The demo needs no install. On a spare machine or a VM, the Docker install takes a few minutes and listens on port 12026, so it does not fight your current setup for port 80.