Self-Hosted PIM Solutions Compared

The symptoms are recognisable: the same product described differently on your website and your marketplace listing. A spreadsheet called products_final_v3_USE_THIS.xlsx. Someone retyping descriptions by hand because you added a new sales channel. A translation that was updated in one place and nowhere else.

A Product Information Management system — PIM — is the tool that fixes this. It holds one authoritative version of every product’s data and pushes it out to wherever you sell. This article covers the open-source options you can self-host, and what separates them.

What a PIM actually does

It sits between your suppliers and your sales channels.

Product data comes in — from supplier spreadsheets, manufacturer feeds, or your own team. The PIM stores it as structured attributes rather than free text: dimensions, materials, compatibility, care instructions, whatever your category needs. Your team enriches it there, translates it there, adds images there.

Then it pushes out. Your shop gets the full description. A marketplace gets the fields it requires in the format it demands. A wholesale catalog gets different pricing and no consumer marketing copy. Same source, different outputs.

A PIM is not a shop, and it is not an ERP. Your shop sells; your ERP handles stock, orders and money. The PIM owns what a product is — the descriptions, specs, images and translations. Some businesses run all three; small ones often start with a shop and a PIM and add the ERP later.

When you don’t need one. If you sell a hundred products on a single channel, a spreadsheet is fine and a PIM is overhead. The threshold isn’t a product count so much as a channel count plus a team size. Two people selling on one shop can hold it in their heads. Five people selling on four channels cannot.

The self-hosted options

Four open-source systems are worth knowing about. All can run on your own infrastructure.

They’re listed here by deployment weight — lightest first — since for most small businesses that’s the constraint that decides it. The last one is included because it’s the name you’ll hear most often, not because it’s where you should start.

UnoPIM

Newer, and built specifically as a PIM rather than a broader platform. Laravel-based, which matters if your team already works in Laravel — a lot of small-business PHP shops do.

Lighter to deploy than Pimcore and more focused, at the cost of a smaller ecosystem. Fewer third-party connectors and a smaller community mean fewer people to ask when something breaks. Ships a Docker Compose configuration, which removes most environment setup problems.

Best fit: teams who want product data management specifically, on a familiar stack.

Licence: MIT · Stack: Laravel/PHP

Pimcore

Actively developed, and considerably more than a PIM — it also covers digital asset management, content management and master data management in one platform.

That breadth is the appeal and the cost. If you want product data, media library and website content unified, Pimcore does it. If you only want product data, you’re deploying a lot of platform to get it. It expects Symfony familiarity and a real implementation effort rather than an afternoon of setup.

Best fit: businesses consolidating several systems, with developer capacity available.

Licence: GPL-3.0 · Stack: Symfony/PHP

AtroPIM

API-first, and its distinguishing feature is that you configure the data model through the interface rather than through code. Entities, attributes, relations and workflows can all be changed without a developer.

That’s genuinely useful if your product structure changes often — if you keep adding categories with different attribute requirements, reconfiguring through a UI beats a migration every time.

Best fit: teams whose product structure isn’t settled, without developers on hand to change it.

Licence: GPLv3 · Stack: PHP

Akeneo Community Edition

The best-known name in open-source PIM, and for years the default recommendation.

The important caveat: Community Edition development has been paused since 2023, and community support ended in September 2026. The commercial Enterprise Edition continues, but the free self-hosted version is no longer actively maintained.

It still works, and there’s a large body of documentation and community knowledge built up around it. But deploying a frozen application today means accepting no security patches and gradual drift away from current PHP versions. If you’re evaluating fresh, start elsewhere. If you’re already running it, you have a decision to make.

Licence: OSL-3.0 · Stack: Symfony/PHP

How to choose

Four questions, in order of how much they narrow the field:

What’s your stack? If your team knows Symfony, Pimcore is a natural fit. If Laravel, UnoPIM. This matters more than feature lists — the system you can maintain beats the system with more checkboxes.

Do you need more than a PIM? If you also want a DAM or CMS, Pimcore consolidates. If you just want product data, a purpose-built PIM is less to run.

How often does your data model change? Stable catalogs suit any of them. Frequently changing structures favour AtroPIM’s UI configurability.

Who maintains it? The honest question. All four need someone to own upgrades, backups and the job queue.

What self-hosting actually involves

Worth being specific, because “self-hosted” sounds simpler than it is.

A queue worker, running permanently. Every one of these systems processes imports, exports and media in background jobs. That needs a supervised worker process, not something started in a terminal. This is the most common deployment mistake — imports appear to hang forever because nothing is processing them.

More storage than you’d guess. Product data is small. Product images are not. Ten thousand products with five images each, plus generated thumbnails, runs to serious volume. Plan object storage separately from the application rather than filling a local disk.

Memory headroom for bulk operations. These systems idle quietly and then spike during a large import. A server that runs the interface comfortably can still fail on a full catalog re-import. Test with your real data, not a sample.

Backups you’ve actually restored. If the PIM is your source of truth for product data, the database is not something you can rebuild. Automated dumps stored off the server, and one tested restore, is the minimum.

Ongoing updates. A few hours a month, and a day or two for major versions. Not much — but it has to belong to someone specifically, or it doesn’t happen.

The cost question

There’s no licence fee, and against per-SKU SaaS pricing that’s a real saving — SaaS PIM pricing typically scales with catalog size, which is exactly the wrong direction as you grow.

But self-hosted isn’t free. You’re trading a licence cost for an infrastructure and maintenance cost. For a business with someone who owns servers, that trade is clearly worth it. For a business without, it can quietly become more expensive than the SaaS it replaced — usually discovered at the worst moment.

The middle option is managed self-hosting: you keep the data ownership and the licence savings, and someone else owns the queue worker.

Managed PIM hosting from VPS1

We handle deployment, the queue worker, backups and version upgrades, so your team works on product data instead of infrastructure. Get a free consultation →

Where to start

Install two candidates and load your actual products into them. All four are free to install, and a weekend with your real catalog tells you more than any comparison — including this one.

Specifically: import your messiest supplier file. That’s what will actually break, and it’s better to find out now than after you’ve committed.