Glance
Glance (glanceapp) is a lightweight, open-source, self-hosted dashboard that consolidates feeds, services, and widgets into a single customizable UI for personal homelabs and small teams. It focuses on speed, low resource use, and widget-driven pages. Configurations use YAML files and community widgets extend functionality.
It is aimed at homelab owners, power users, and small teams who want a single-pane view for scattered status feeds and quick launch links. Glance reduces cognitive switching across tabs, bookmarks, and separate monitoring UIs. Typical problems solved include consolidating RSS and service status, quick access to CI or deploy links, and mobile-ready server health checks.
Use Cases
- Monitor home Docker containers, NAS status, weather, calendar, and to-dos.
- Project hub showing CI status, deploy links, and project docs.
- Mobile quick-view for server health and incident alerts away from desk.
- Lightweight incident triage dashboard with links to runbooks and key endpoints.
- Developer morning surface: PRs, CI, deploys, and uptime summary.
Strengths
- Widget ecosystem (built-in plus community) for quick situational awareness.
- Modular YAML configs with $include support for reusable multi-page layouts.
- Basic authentication support to control dashboard access.
- Theme picker and customization for a consistent look.
- Mobile-friendly responsive UI for quick phone access.
- Low resource footprint runs on modest hardware.
- Minimal, fast, YAML-driven approach that is easy to customize.
- Self-hosting fits Coolify deployments and local control (assumed trivial).
Limitations
- Self-hosted maintenance burden: upgrades, backups, and security patching required.
- Dashboard-only scope; not a BI or governed analytics platform.
- Operational security depends on your deployment and configuration.
- Long-term stability depends on community and maintainer activity.
- No publicly advertised paid hosted offering or enterprise SLA (Unverified).
Final Thoughts
Try it now if you run services on a personal server, edit YAML, and accept self-hosting overhead. Wait if you need enterprise governance, formal vendor support, or governed analytics.
A managed cloud makes sense when you cannot accept ongoing operations work or need formal vendor support. Managed options remove self-hosting maintenance and provide external support (availability of such offerings is Unverified).