When it comes to IT service management software — ticketing, assets, signatures, contracts — the market is dominated by closed SaaS. You pay per seat, your data lives on someone else's servers, and the only way to extend the product is to wait for the vendor to do it.
For a lot of MSPs, IT freelancers, and small internal teams, that model clashes with one simple need: staying in control of your own data and infrastructure.
So we released a free, self-hosted Community Edition of Meridian ARC. This post isn't a sales pitch — it's the why behind the decision and the how to get it running in a few minutes, so you can judge it for yourself.
The problem: too many tools, no source of truth
If you manage IT — for clients or for your own company — you know the drill:
- the asset inventory lives in a spreadsheet
- tickets come in over email
- signed documents end up in a shared folder
- contracts sit somewhere else entirely
Every piece of information lives in a different place, and none of them is the place.
The cost isn't just wasted time. It's being unable to answer trivial questions — who is this laptop assigned to? when does this contract expire? — without a treasure hunt. The fix is well known: a single source of truth. The hard part is adopting one without chaining yourself to a proprietary SaaS.
The approach: self-hosted, with Docker
We built the Community Edition so it could be installed by anyone comfortable with a terminal — no exotic dependencies. Distribution is containerized: the image is public and orchestration runs with a plain docker compose.
In practice, you need three things:
- A machine (even a small VPS or a mini-PC in the office) with Docker and Docker Compose installed.
- A
docker-compose.ymlwith the services (app + database). - An
.envfile with the basics (URL, database credentials, SMTP for outgoing email).
First boot is the usual:
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d
After a few seconds the app is reachable in the browser and you go through the initial instance setup. No mandatory cloud account, no forced telemetry — the data stays on your server.
What you actually get
The Community Edition isn't a crippled demo. It covers the operational core:
- Help desk / ticketing with a client-facing portal
- IT asset management, including serialized assets (serial numbers, IMEI, asset-to-person assignment)
- Electronic document signing and a signed-document archive
- Contract and expiry management
All in a single install, with one set of credentials and one place to look. It's the "source of truth" idea applied to IT operations.
Why open source makes sense here
Open-sourcing a tool like this isn't altruism — it's the best way to make it trustworthy for the people self-hosting it.
An MSP putting client data into a piece of software wants to see what that software does, adapt it, and not fear the day the vendor shuts down and takes everything with them. The Community Edition answers that: use it for free, self-host it, and if you outgrow it there's an Enterprise edition — but the core stays available to everyone.
Try it
If you manage IT for a living — or even just for your own small shop — the best way to evaluate it is to spin it up on a test box and load two or three real assets into it. Half an hour is enough to tell whether it makes your life easier.
Install guide and requirements are on the site: meridian-arc.io.
If you try it, I'd genuinely like to hear how it went — feedback is how a self-hosted project gets better. Drop a comment below. 👇
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