Self-hosting vs. SaaS: Choosing the Right Deployment for Your Team

The core question: where does your bug data go?

Every bug report contains potentially sensitive information: screenshots of your application's UI (which may include user data), console logs (which may include tokens or PII that slipped into logging), and network request bodies (which may include form data or API payloads).

With SaaS, this data goes to our servers. With self-hosting, it stays entirely within your infrastructure. That difference drives most of the decision.

When to use SaaS (app.sitereviewer.app)

You want zero infrastructure overhead

The cloud version requires nothing from you except an account. No servers, no databases, no Docker, no backups, no uptime monitoring. You get started immediately after verifying your email.

Your bug data isn't classified

For most teams, screenshots of a web UI and console logs from a staging environment don't require on-premise storage. If your organization doesn't have a data residency requirement, SaaS is simpler.

You want automatic updates

SaaS gets new features, security patches, and integrations as soon as they're released. Self-hosted instances require you to pull and redeploy the new image.

You're an individual developer or small team

The free tier and Pro plan are designed for teams that don't need dedicated infrastructure. At $19/month for unlimited reports, it's cheaper than the engineer-hours spent running a server.

When to self-host

Data sovereignty requirements

Financial services, healthcare, defense contractors, and some enterprise organizations have requirements that data must not leave a specific jurisdiction or network boundary. Self-hosting meets these requirements; SaaS does not.

You're reporting bugs against internal applications

If your team is reporting bugs on an internal application that runs on a private network, the bug report screenshots and network traces may contain information that shouldn't travel to a third-party cloud. Self-hosting keeps everything within your perimeter.

You want to integrate with internal infrastructure

Self-hosted deployments can use your internal S3-compatible storage (MinIO, Ceph), your internal PostgreSQL cluster, and your internal network — making the tool a native part of your infrastructure rather than an external SaaS dependency.

You have existing infrastructure to leverage

If you already run Docker on a VM or Kubernetes cluster, adding Site Reviewer is a single container. The marginal infrastructure cost is low.

What self-hosting actually involves

Site Reviewer ships as a single Docker image. A minimal setup requires:

• A PostgreSQL database (any version ≥ 14)
• A server that can run Docker (any cloud VM, your own hardware)
• Optional: an S3-compatible bucket for screenshot and HAR storage (or use local disk)

The Chrome extension points to your server's URL instead of api.sitereviewer.app. Everything else — the dashboard, the API, integrations — works the same as cloud.

Feature parity

Self-hosted deployments have access to all the same features as the Pro cloud plan:

• Unlimited reports and projects
• All integrations (GitHub, GitLab, Linear, Azure DevOps)
• Guest links
• Test suite runner
• REST API access
• HAR export

There's no feature-limited self-hosted edition. The only thing you give up by self-hosting is the convenience of managed infrastructure.

The decision in short

• Choose SaaS if you want to start in minutes with no operational overhead
• Choose self-hosted if you have data residency requirements, internal-only applications, or existing infrastructure to leverage
• Start with SaaS if you're not sure — migrating to self-hosted later is straightforward, as the database schema and API are identical