How does Grist self-hosted deployment work technically?

The graph above is a good summary of Grist's high-level architecture. For complete technical documentation, please check out our Help Center .

What are the infrastructure requirements for self-hosted Grist?

Every Grist document is a separate database, so it is difficult to state absolute minimum requirements without knowing what documents will be used. Memory and CPU requirements will scale with the number of documents simultaneously in use by your team. See this page for more information on hardware requirements.

What happens to our data if we stop using Grist?

Grist data is always portable and exportable, subject to access rules that you define. You can export tables as CSV, TSV and XLSX files, as well an entire Grist documents with or without change history. Grist documents can be downloaded in their entirety as an SQLite database file with a .grist extension. The downloaded file will contain all your tabular data, any attached files within those tables, metadata about your tables, pages, and widgets, and a history of recent modifications of the document.

Can self-hosted Grist integrate with our existing SSO?

Yes. Grist connects directly to your identity provider via OIDC or SAML, fully supported with an activation key — see our detailed authentication documentation . All editions include forwarded headers, as well as "Sign in with getgrist.com", our own authentication service, if you don’t have existing SSO already set up. Self-hosted Grist also supports the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) for managing large organizations with dynamic user bases. Learn more.

What does it cost to self-host Grist?

Self-hosting the Grist Community edition is free. To run the full edition of Grist requires a paid plan. See this page for a breakdown of the additional features included in the full edition. Self-hosters can get access to a free trial of all of them by selecting the full edition of Grist on the Admin Panel . The full edition of Grist is also free for individuals and small orgs with less than US $1 million in total annual funding. Learn more about that here .

How to self-host Grist

Answer data security concerns, meet residency requirements, and own your data.

Quick install via Docker.

Build from source via GitHub.

AWS & Azure packages.

More examples.

Docker quickstart

The quickest way to self-host Grist is using containers. Here’s one-liner that can get you started:

docker run -p 8484:8484 -v ~/grist:/persist -it gristlabs/grist

Then, visit: http://localhost:8484.

Start a free 30-day trial of the full edition, or request an activation key for ongoing use. For production-grade configuration (SSO, external storage, sandboxing) see the self-hosted documentation.

Security and data sovereignty

Our foundational software principles flow directly into the features we build.

psychology

Principles

Software should be for the people: to enable and serve them, not limit and control.
The security and privacy of software users are fundamental and must not be for sale.
Quality of software is important: functionality, reliability, usability, and performance.

build

Features

Grist data is always portable and exportable.
Grist is built around granular role-based access rules to lower the risk profile of complex documents.
Grist is built on a feature-packed open source foundation.

What kind of organizations self-host Grist?

Grist is in production across government, aerospace, manufacturing, and utilities. Grist’s flexibility solves specific use cases in many industries, and its emphasis on self-hostability makes it viable in regulated sectors.