Self-Hosted vs Cloud Internal Tools: What's Right for Your Team?
Should you self-host your internal tool platform or use a managed cloud service? Here's an honest breakdown to help you decide.
One of the first decisions when choosing an internal tool platform is whether to self-host or use a managed cloud service. It’s not obvious which is right — both have real trade-offs.
Here’s an honest breakdown.
The case for self-hosting
Your data stays in your infrastructure. This is the strongest argument, especially for teams handling sensitive business data, customer data, or anything regulated. With self-hosting, your widgets, your data, your API calls — none of it touches a third-party server.
No per-seat pricing. Cloud tools typically charge per user. Self-hosted tools are usually free or have a one-time cost. If your team grows from 5 to 50 people, self-hosting keeps that cost at zero.
Full control over updates. You decide when to update, what version to run, and whether to patch. Cloud services update on their own schedule.
No vendor dependency. If the cloud vendor shuts down, raises prices, or changes their terms, you’re unaffected. You own the deployment.
Customisation. With an open source self-hosted tool, you can modify anything — add features, change behavior, fork it entirely.
The case for cloud
Zero ops burden. No server to maintain, no database to back up, no updates to manage. The cloud service handles it.
Faster to start. Sign up, log in, start building. No Docker, no environment variables, no database setup.
Built-in auth. Cloud services typically include Google OAuth, SSO, and proper session management out of the box. Self-hosted tools require you to configure this.
Support. When something breaks, you have someone to call.
Automatic scaling. You don’t have to think about what happens when your team grows.
The real question: what’s your bottleneck?
The decision usually comes down to which friction hurts more:
If your main friction is data security and cost: self-host. The ops work is worth it for the control and zero licensing cost.
If your main friction is getting something running fast without technical overhead: cloud. You’ll be building in minutes instead of hours.
If you’re a solo developer or tiny startup: cloud starter plans are usually cheap enough that the time saved is worth more than the cost.
If you’re a larger team with a DevOps function: self-hosted is usually the right call. You already have the infrastructure, and the cost savings add up quickly.
AccessAgent’s approach
AccessAgent gives you both options from the same open source codebase.
The self-hosted version is the full product — same features, MIT licensed, deploy in 5 minutes with docker compose up. You bring your own OpenAI API key and your own PostgreSQL database.
The cloud version adds managed hosting, Google OAuth, automatic updates, backups, and priority support — but it’s built on the same open source core. You can export your projects from cloud and import them to self-hosted (or vice versa) at any time.
There’s no lock-in either way.
A practical guide
| You should self-host if… | You should use cloud if… |
|---|---|
| You handle sensitive or regulated data | You want to be running in under 10 minutes |
| Your team is large (10+ people) | You have a small team and the $29/mo is cheap vs ops time |
| You have existing DevOps infrastructure | No one on your team wants to manage servers |
| You want full source access | You want managed updates and backups |
| Cost matters more than convenience | Convenience matters more than cost |
Whichever you choose, you can switch later. AccessAgent was designed specifically to make both options viable — not to trap you in one path.