After a lot of experimentation with various software and tools, I have compiled a list of powerful tools that I use daily to boost my productivity. I have been using these tools for over three years, which is sufficient time to test and provide feedback. So let’s start with the powerful tools —

N8N — for Automation

N8N is a powerful open-source tool for automating daily tasks, such as creating AI-based workflows (AI agents, MCP servers), or distributing my blogs across various platforms (Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook, dev.to, etc.). N8N provides more than 500 integrations with almost all important applications available on the internet today.

N8N has a strong, active community of developers that keep updating the nodes, fixing bugs, and adding features. N8N also provides the cloud-hosted service, or you can host it with your server with Docker. I prefer to host open-source tools on my server with Docker.

Ghost — for Content Management

Ghost is another powerful and effective tool for a content management system with a newsletter. Ghost provides the best experience to write and publish the content for my site. I have worked with many CMS systems before, like WordPress, Hugo, and Astro, but I prefer Ghost most due to its theme and site experience.

I was a little bit disappointed in the starting days with Ghost because of the bulk email restriction that you can use only Mailgun to send the bulk emails. But I found a solution to overcome the problem by using an external tool like Ghosler, which provides me with the flexibility to use an external mail SMTP.

FileBrowser — for File Management

Filebrowser is yet another useful tool for me to manage files on my server, like self-hosted Google Drive. This is a lightweight but feature-rich tool developed to manage the files on your system, share, and provide role-based access.

File Manager has a very simple interface, which makes it my first choice to use and share with others. Basically, you can play with your files seamlessly, such as download, upload, edit, delete, zip, unzip, and many more.

Nginx Proxy Manager for Reverse Proxy

I am using Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM) to manage the proxies on my server. Instead of writing the Nginx configuration, installing the SSL certificates, I am using NPM, which provides a nice GUI interface to manage my reverse proxy.

The best part about NPM is that it provides a minimal ui interface, SSL management, SSL autorenew, host redirections, and much more. It worked perfectly with Docker, so you don’t need to care about pointing the domains to your server and managing SSL certificates.

Portainer for Docker Management

Portainer is one of the first tools that I am using while working with Docker. It provides a clean web-based UI to manage the Docker containers, volumes, networks, and images without commands.

Although I am comfortable with the command line interface too, it is good to have a GUI to debug, sometimes it provides more information than the CLI.

NocoDB for Data Management

NocoDB is an alternative to self-hosted Airtable with all the powerful features. I use it to manage the data in a table-like format or to use it with n8n workflows to save or retrieve data while running automations.

I found this is the easiest way to use data in workflows and distribute it with other platforms with api, creating feedback forms, and many more.

It provides a spreadsheet-like editor, many views to manipulate your data easily. To access data outside of the nocodb, we can use its RESTful APIs.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article! If you found it helpful, a couple of claps 👏 👏 👏 would be greatly appreciated — it motivates me to continue writing more.