Does HomeBox support nested containers?

Yes. HomeBox supports parent and child locations, nested items/entities, and a location tree. Its CSV workflow can also create paths such as Kitchen / Cabinet / Top Shelf. Test your desired depth and scanning workflow on the current release.

Can I move from HomeBox to Palstora?

HomeBox supports CSV export and, from v0.26, an experimental full-collection ZIP export/import for HomeBox-to-HomeBox portability. For Palstora, begin with CSV, preserve location paths and parent relationships, and separately verify whether attachments and photos need manual transfer.

Is HomeBox really free?

The official software is open source under AGPL-3.0 and the project publishes container images without a subscription price. You still pay any infrastructure costs and provide the administration, backups, security, and maintenance time.

HomeBox

Palstora vs HomeBox

Compare Palstora with the real HomeBox: a free, open-source, self-hosted home inventory system with nested locations, QR labels, detailed records, CSV workflows, and collection sharing.

Quick verdict

Both products can represent real physical storage and use QR labels. Choose Palstora when you prefer a managed product, built-in AI-assisted capture, and plan-based workspaces without maintaining a server. Choose HomeBox when self-hosting, source-code access, local infrastructure control, rich asset history, API access, and open-source portability outweigh the operational work of deployment, backups, security, and upgrades.

Last reviewed: 2026-07-23

At a glance

Criteria	Palstora	HomeBox
Storage setup	Recursive storage hierarchy	Nested places: room → shelf → box
AI item scan	AI scan on all plans	No AI photo scan. Photos and fields only.
QR or barcode labels	Print QR labels	QR labels for items and places
Export files	CSV and PDF	CSV import and export. ZIP is experimental.
Sharing	Share on paid plans	Share collections on your own server
Price	Hobby $0; Essential $3/mo; Professional $8/mo	Free software. You run the server.

Features and workflow

HomeBox is a self-hosted inventory and organization system for home users. It supports nested locations, categories, tags, custom fields, images, attachments, documents, warranties, purchase information, maintenance schedules, search, and responsive web access. Since v0.26, items and locations share an entity model, allowing both to use fields, attachments, types, and templates. Palstora and HomeBox therefore overlap substantially on physical organization; the largest difference is managed service versus self-hosted software.

HomeBox locations can have parent locations and child locations, and its tree view can include nested items.
HomeBox can generate QR labels for items and locations and includes a page-layout label generator for printing sheets.
HomeBox tracks documents, warranties, purchases, maintenance, images, attachments, tags, categories, custom fields, and entity templates.

Pricing and total cost

HomeBox does not use a consumer subscription plan in the official project. The software is published under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 and can be deployed with the project's container images or compiled directly. Its monetary cost can be very low on existing hardware, but a fair comparison must include server or NAS resources, domain and TLS setup when exposed remotely, backups, monitoring, upgrades, and administrator time.

Ease of use and support

Once deployed, HomeBox provides a responsive browser interface and a public demo, but installation and lifecycle management remain the user's responsibility. Official help is primarily documentation, GitHub issues and discussions, Discord, and the contributor community. The security policy says the project is beta/work in progress and only the latest version receives support; no commercial response-time or uptime SLA is published.

Integrations, security, and privacy

HomeBox keeps the deployment and primary data store under the operator's control and supports SQLite or PostgreSQL. The project offers an API, static API keys, OIDC support, rootless and hardened container images, and an official vulnerability-reporting process. That control is a privacy advantage for capable operators, not an automatic security guarantee: the administrator must configure network exposure, TLS, authentication, secrets, backups, patches, and recovery. Version 0.26 requires a strong API-key pepper and introduced major data-model changes, so backups and upgrade testing are important.

Palstora

Pros

Recursive physical-storage structure
Printable QR labels plus CSV and PDF catalog exports
Free entry point with optional collaboration and AI features on paid plans

Cons

Public documentation was not discoverable in web search, so Palstora claims in this edition come from the supplied source module
Some collaboration and AI capabilities depend on the selected plan
Business-specific workflows such as purchase orders, low-stock alerts, or accounting integrations are not established by the supplied module

HomeBox

Pros

Free, open-source, and self-hosted with direct control over data and infrastructure
Nested locations and items plus built-in QR-label generation
Rich records for attachments, warranties, purchases, maintenance, custom fields, types, and templates

Cons

You must deploy, secure, monitor, back up, and update the service yourself
No AI-assisted photo recognition was documented in the reviewed official sources
The project describes itself as beta/work in progress and only supports the latest version

Choose Palstora if...

You want to start without deploying or maintaining a server.
AI-assisted item capture is more valuable than source-code and infrastructure control.
You prefer a vendor-managed product with plan-based collaboration and support expectations.

Choose HomeBox if...

You want your inventory database and files on infrastructure you control.
Open-source licensing, API access, and deployment flexibility are core requirements.
You are willing to manage backups, security, upgrades, and availability in exchange for avoiding a software subscription.

Switching and migration

Export HomeBox data as CSV for a field-level migration, or use the experimental full-collection ZIP export as a backup reference. Preserve each item's location path and parent relationships, import a small branch into Palstora, and verify attachments separately before moving the full catalog.

A practical way to evaluate

Model the same room, shelf, box, and ten items in both products. Print and scan labels, move one item, attach a receipt, export the catalog, invite a second user, and restore from a backup. Record setup time and ongoing administration separately from day-to-day cataloging time.

Frequently asked questions

No. This page compares Palstora with the open-source, self-hosted HomeBox project at homebox.software and github.com/sysadminsmedia/homebox. The cloud product previously researched at gethomebox.app is unrelated and has been removed from this edition.

Sources

6 sources

HomeBox official documentationChecked: 2026-07-23
HomeBox official GitHub repository and feature overviewChecked: 2026-07-23
HomeBox v0.26 release notesChecked: 2026-07-23
HomeBox QR label generator implementationChecked: 2026-07-23
HomeBox collections and invitations interfaceChecked: 2026-07-23
HomeBox security policyChecked: 2026-07-23