For years, Portainer has been my go-to for managing Docker containers. It’s been reliable, familiar, and honestly hard to beat… until now.
I’ve officially made the switch to Arcane, and I don’t see myself going back.
If you know me, you know I’m big on self-hosting. There’s just something deeply satisfying about running your own infrastructure; owning your data, controlling your services, and building everything exactly how you want and need it.
My home setup reflects that passion. I run a full 42U rack server right in my home office, complete with 72TB NAS (thanks to Unraid) which has become the backbone of everything I do. On top of that, I use Proxmox VE to manage my virtual machines and LXC containers, giving me a flexible and powerful environment to experiment, deploy, and scale all my own little side projects.
And then there’s Docker and lots of it. From small utility services to more complex applications, Docker has been the glue holding everything together.
I’ve been a die-hard Portainer fan for years, but over time, I started to feel like things were… plateauing. Nothing was wrong, but nothing was particularly exciting either; which is fine, it is Docker we’re talking about, but finding cool new things is part of the passion here. Things changed when I stumbled across a post on the r/selfhosted subreddit talking about Arcane, a FOSS alternative for Docker management. Out of curiosity, I spun it up. Within minutes, literally minutes, of deploying my first docker-compose file (called Stacks in Portainer and Projects in Arcane), I knew this was different.
Arcane just feels better.
The UI is clean, modern, and actually enjoyable to use. The dashboard gives me exactly the information I want without feeling cluttered or outdated. But the biggest win? The deployment process. Everything is smoother. Faster. More intuitive.
It’s one of those rare tools where you don’t feel like you’re fighting the interface… I’m just getting things done.
Between my Proxmox-powered infrastructure, a rack server humming away in my office, and now Arcane managing my containers, my setup feels more cohesive than ever.
And honestly? I’m excited again. So much so, I had to share!
If you’re into self-hosting and still using Portainer, it might be worthwhile to give Arcane a spin.
