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Kareadita/Kavita
Kavita is a fast, feature rich, cross platform reading server. Built with the goal of being a full solution for all your reading needs. Setup your own server and share your reading collection with your friends and family.
Kavita is a self-hosted reading server for manga, comics, and ebooks — think Plex but for CBZ/EPUB/PDF files. It handles library scanning, metadata, multi-user access with role-based permissions, and synced reading progress. The target user is someone who has a local collection of manga or ebooks they want to serve to multiple devices or share with family.
The format coverage is genuinely broad — CBR, CBZ, ZIP, RAR, RAR5, 7zip, EPUB, PDF, and raw image folders all in one server, which eliminates the usual 'one tool per format' headache. The reader is a first-class web UI, not an afterthought: webtoon mode, continuous scroll, virtual pages for EPUB, and per-user reading profiles. OPDS feed support means it works with dedicated reader apps (Moon+ Reader, Chunky, etc.) without needing the web UI. The migration history goes back to 2020 and runs on SQLite, so upgrades have been production-tested on a real user base for years.
Kavita+ is a paid subscription gate on top of an otherwise GPLv3 project — external metadata (AniList scrobbling, MAL sync, cover databases) all live behind it, which is a meaningful chunk of what people actually want from a media server. The codebase is still explicitly labeled beta ('you may lose data'), which is a real concern given how much state it manages per-user. Performance on large libraries (10k+ items) gets brought up repeatedly in community discussions — the SQLite backend and in-process scanning can choke when you throw a serious collection at it. Docker setup works fine, but native installs are poorly documented; the INSTALL.txt is thin and the wiki does most of the work.