selfh.st’s 2026 survey puts numbers on the Portainer exodus: 66% to 33% in a year
selfh.st’s annual survey, published November 12, 2026 from 6,221 responses (+52%), shows Portainer falling from 66% to 33% share among container-management tool users, overtaken by the Dockhand, Komodo, and Arcane wave, while 60% of respondents already use AI. If your homelab runs on Portainer CE, this shift is about you.
November 12, 2026. Ethan Sholly publishes the results of the selfh.st annual survey, the reference point for the English-speaking self-hosting world. 6,221 completed responses, up 52% from 2025. Why it matters: the numbers confirm what the community has suspected for months — Portainer is collapsing, AI is settling in, and almost nothing else is moving.
A 6,221-response snapshot
The survey ran on Formbricks, an open-source survey tool — self-hosted by the publisher, true to the spirit of the place. Two methodological firsts this year: a full section on AI use, and a question on Linux distributions, one of the most requested additions in past years. The questionnaire was announced in October and covered in our analysis of its opening.
The sample size makes this the most reliable picture we currently have of what self-hosters actually deploy. The first takeaway is a single number: 84% of respondents happily self-host sensitive data, and 66% deploy a NAS. Self-hosting is no longer a sandbox.
Portainer collapses: 66% to 33%
The most striking result concerns container management. Among respondents who use a dedicated tool, Portainer falls from 66% to 33% share in a year. That is not erosion; it is a fracture. Meanwhile the new generation explodes: Dockhand (991 responses, absent from the 2025 ranking), Komodo (491, up from 308), and Arcane (477, up from 28) take the ground, while Dockge holds steady (434).
The causality is clear, and we documented it in September: Portainer announced the end of its Community Edition, frozen on the 2.x branch with no further features, in favor of a Kubernetes-centered 3.0 and a free tier capped at three nodes. November’s survey is the quantified confirmation that the community did not wait: it left.
The message is bigger than one product. Container management, long dominated by a single heavyweight, is fragmenting into lightweight panels — Dockhand, Komodo, Arcane, Dockge — each with its own philosophy. The substrate, though, remains Docker: 5,454 responses, far ahead of LXC (1,863) and Podman (790). Kubernetes involves only 148 respondents — a useful reminder that the average homelab does not orchestrate.
The core that barely moves
Behind the churn of interfaces, the heart of the ecosystem is remarkably stable. Debian (2,954) and Ubuntu (2,584) dominate distributions, well ahead of Arch (606), Fedora (568), and Alpine (455). In media, Jellyfin (3,966) keeps its crown, far ahead of Navidrome, Plex, and Audiobookshelf. In authentication, authentik (1,093) stays on top, but Pocket ID (851, up from 310 last year) is surging — a sign that lightness pays.
Another signal of maturity: Forgejo (1,686) overtakes Gitea (1,057) as the self-hosted Git platform, after a year of explosive growth driven by distrust of Gitea’s commercial footprint. Again, the community votes with its containers.
Data stores tell the same story: 82% of respondents run a separate containerized database per application rather than one shared instance. It is the kind of unglamorous discipline that matters far more for long-term upgradeability than which panel you pick — and it suggests the community has internalized the lesson that shared databases are how small homelabs turn into big headaches.
The favorite-software ranking confirms the hierarchy: Jellyfin (765), Home Assistant (707), and Immich (679) hold the podium, ahead of Vaultwarden (205). Plex and the *arr apps lose share — consistent with the rise of Jellyfin and Audiobookshelf.
A homelab that looks more like production
The maturity shows in hardware and usage too. The spectrum runs from consumer hardware (3,841) to low-powered devices (3,059), through cloud VPS (2,207) and server clusters (736) — a minority that has crossed into dedicated infrastructure. The typical profile is still a discreet box or a repurposed machine, but a meaningful fringe now rents its compute in the cloud.
The network side confirms it: 62% run their own firewall, 86% use a custom domain for their services, and the reverse proxy (4,087) has become the standard front door for remote access. The 2026 homelab looks less and less like a hobby and more and more like a small production environment — with the expectations that implies.
That is exactly what makes the numbers in the next section uncomfortable: when you host sensitive data behind a public domain and a homegrown firewall, having no backup or exposing ports is no longer a beginner’s mistake — it is debt that gets collected sooner or later.
AI enters the homelab
This is the big methodological addition, and the answer is unambiguous: 60% of respondents use AI to help with self-hosting. The uses are practical first — troubleshooting (3,249), configuration (2,919), learning and research (2,863), scripts and automations (2,670) — before application development (1,838).
Model choice is equally instructive. Claude (2,360) leads ChatGPT (1,436) and Gemini (1,035). But the number that matters for this section: 849 respondents — 23% of AI users — use self-hosted models only. The homelab no longer just hosts services; it is starting to host the intelligence that troubleshoots them.
All within an explicit ethical frame: the majority (3,922) accept AI assistance in development but reject “vibe coding”, and 7% avoid AI-assisted projects altogether.
The blind spots that remain
The survey is not just a ranking: it surfaces two persistent risks. First, 10% of respondents have no backup at all — one in ten is gambling their homelab. Second, 15% still use forwarded ports for remote access, the most obvious exposure vector against automated scans, even though VPN (4,837) and reverse proxy (4,087) are now the norm.
Two more numbers close the picture. 86% still do not self-host email — the historical bugbear of self-hosting — and 62% run their own firewall rather than relying on their ISP’s. Maturity is rising, but the fundamentals (backup, exposure) remain the weak links.
The funding question
The last number worth sitting with is economic: 57% of respondents made no donation to any self-hosted project in the past year. An ecosystem growing at 52% a year where more than half of users fund nothing is a fragile one: the maintainers of Jellyfin, Immich, or authentik rest on a narrow base of contributors. The survey itself is a case in point — it runs on self-hosted Formbricks and survives on sponsorships. If one of these pillars wobbles for lack of funding, the migration this survey just documented will look gentle by comparison. The good news is that the top three favorites are all open source with healthy contributor bases — the risk is concentrated in the long tail of smaller projects.
Verdict
If your homelab runs on Portainer CE, plan a migration to Dockhand, Komodo, or Arcane before the 2.x branch becomes a dead end: selfh.st’s 2026 survey shows half the users have already moved, and a frozen CE is not going to get healthier. If you are still on Gitea, the move to Forgejo deserves a serious look. And whatever your stack, the two numbers to fix first are not software but discipline: 10% without backups and 15% with open ports are the only real emergencies in the report.