Self-hosted
Self-host Manager for Craft for free
The self-hosted edition is the same software as the hosted one, under AGPL-3.0-or-later. Not a trial, not a cut-down edition, no per-site fee: every monitoring, findings, backup and notification capability is there, free to run for your own sites and your clients' sites.
Your site data stays on your server. Nothing is pointed at us and there is no usage telemetry to switch off, because there is none. Read the installation guide before you commit to it: the first section is about whether you should.
The difference is who holds the keys
Not what the software does. Both editions run the same core, speak the same protocol and report the same things, so the honest comparison is about operations rather than features.
| Self-hosted | Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| What it costs | Free, for ever, on any number of sites. | £5 a month or £50 a year, on any number of sites. |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0. Read it, fork it, run it. | The same AGPL core, with a private hosting layer on top. |
| Every capability | All of them. | All of them. There is no higher tier. |
| Who runs the server | You. Docker, a reverse proxy and TLS that renews itself. | Us. |
| Postgres and Redis | Yours to provide, back up and monitor. | Ours. |
| Who can open a backup | You, and only you. The wrapping key comes from your own APP_KEY on your own server, so nobody can open a backup you hold. | You, and only you. The wrapping key comes from your own APP_KEY on your own server, so nobody can open a backup you hold. |
| Where backups live | Any filesystem or S3-compatible bucket you point it at. | Storage we run. 2 GB included, more sold in blocks. |
| If something breaks at 2am | You. | Us. |
| Your site data | Never leaves your server. There is nothing pointed at us. | Held by us, under the security model on this site. |
| Changing your mind | Re-pair your sites at the new platform. An afternoon, not a migration. | The same, in the other direction. |
What you take on
Manager is a security-sensitive service holding the keys to your clients' databases. Running one yourself is a genuine commitment, so here is the whole list rather than the flattering half.
| You provide | What that means |
|---|---|
| A server, kept patched | Docker Engine 24 or newer, a reverse proxy, and TLS certificates that renew themselves. |
| PostgreSQL and Redis | Postgres 15+ and Redis 7+, backed up and monitored. Redis failing closed means connectors stop being trusted. That is correct behaviour, and still an outage. |
| Two keypairs and APP_KEY | Backed up separately from the database. Lose the signing key and every site needs re-pairing. Lose the backup key and every stored backup is unreadable for good, deliberately, with no way back. |
| The backup store | A copy of every managed site's database. The most sensitive thing you will hold anywhere. |
| Upgrades and migrations | On your schedule, including reading the release notes before you run them. |
| Somebody on call | A monitoring system nobody watches is decoration. |
One thing worth knowing before you rely on it: self-hosted derives its backup wrapping key from APP_KEY, so whoever holds that can unwrap a backup. It is therefore not end-to-end encrypted, and we do not describe it that way.
Connect a site in about five minutes
- 01 Add the site in Manager for Craft.
- 02 Install the connector through Composer.
- 03 Enter the one-time pairing code.
- 04 Review the requested capabilities.
- 05 Receive the first heartbeat.
Enrolment codes are single-use and expire quickly. Connector credentials can be rotated or revoked at any time, and nothing is reported until a capability is granted.
$ composer require coysh-digital/craft-manager-connector
$ php craft plugin/install manager-connector
Installed.
$ php craft manager-connector/pair mgr_enrol_7qf2k91d
Requested capabilities:
· read craft & plugin versions
· read licence state
· read disk & queue health
· backups (not granted)
Paired. First heartbeat received.Or let us run it
Same core, same connector, same protocol. The difference is that the server, the keys, the storage and the on-call rota are ours. It is £5 a month for unlimited sites, and you can move between the two whenever you like: switching means re-pairing your sites, not rebuilding anything.