It’s worth clarifying that those ‘unavailable’ things are only not present ‘out-of-the-box’, it’s completely possible to have a multi-user setup, with all the same custom widget plugins, using Docker, it just needs a little extra setup. (I do exactly this).
- For custom widgets, see: https://github.com/gristlabs/grist-widget
- For authentication, you need an external authentication provider. You can either use a SAML provider, or a reverse proxy with authentication middleware. This is not exactly trivial to set-up, I just thought it worth mentioning as being possible. I personally use Authelia with forwardauth, and it works brilliantly.
As for pros, I find a few key pros to using the self-hosted version:
- Ownership of my own data (it’s not on someone else’s server)
- No limitations based on pricing-plan (10 documents on the free version etc.)
- It is possible to customise the environment with other python libraries which can be used inside sheets.