OpenRun vs Posit Connect, Streamlit Cloud, Hugging Face Spaces

Posit Connect, Streamlit Community Cloud and Hugging Face Spaces are the common ways to share data apps built with Streamlit, Gradio, Shiny and similar frameworks. Streamlit Community Cloud and Hugging Face Spaces are hosted services aimed at public apps and demos. Posit Connect is a commercial product for sharing data science work inside a company. OpenRun is an open-source platform which hosts the same apps on your own server or Kubernetes cluster, with single sign-on and access control for every app.

Summary: Choose OpenRun to host internal data apps on your own infrastructure, close to your data, with SSO, RBAC, audit logs and deployment from Git, without per-user licensing. Choose Streamlit Community Cloud to share a public Streamlit app for free. Choose Hugging Face Spaces for public machine learning demos and apps which need GPUs. Choose Posit Connect if your team works mainly in R, publishes scheduled reports and wants a commercially supported product.

Hosting Data Apps for a Team

A Streamlit or Gradio app is easy to write and run on a laptop. Sharing it with the team raises other questions:

• Who can open it? Internal apps usually show internal data. Access has to be limited to employees, often to one group.
• Where does it run? The app needs to reach the data warehouse or internal APIs, which are normally not reachable from a public cloud service.
• How is it updated? Changes should come from Git, be checked before users see them and be easy to roll back.
• What does it cost? Most internal apps are used a few times a day. Keeping a server running for each one is wasteful, and per-user licensing adds up when the audience is the whole company.

OpenRun is built for this case. Apps are declared in a config file in Git:

app(path="/sales", source="github.com/myorg/sales-dashboard", spec="python-streamlit", auth="oidc_okta")
app(path="/forecast", source="github.com/myorg/forecast-demo", spec="python-gradio", auth="oidc_okta")
app(path="/survey", source="github.com/myorg/survey-explorer", spec="python-shiny", auth="oidc_okta")

One command sets up the pipeline:

openrun sync schedule --approve --promote github.com/myorg/platform/apps.star

OpenRun builds a container for each app, serves it on a path or domain with a TLS certificate and stops the container when the app is idle. The apps need no code changes and no Dockerfile.

The auth property selects the login required for the app, here an OIDC provider configured in openrun.toml under the name oidc_okta. New apps use none authentication unless an auth type is set on the app or a server default is configured.

Feature Comparison

Details for the OpenRun column: app specs, declarative app management, authentication, RBAC, audit events, scale-to-zero, staging apps, automatic TLS, secrets and Kubernetes.

Comparison last verified on November 9, 2026 against the Posit Connect documentation (version 2026.10.0), including the licensing, Git-backed content, authentication, process management and requirements pages and Posit pricing; the Streamlit Community Cloud documentation, including the manage your app, share your app and status and limitations pages; and the Hugging Face Spaces documentation, including the overview, hardware, custom domains, SSO and audit logs pages and Hugging Face pricing. Plans, prices and limits of the hosted services change often; check the linked pages for current values.

Where OpenRun Differs

SSO and RBAC Without Per-User Licensing

OpenRun can protect every deployed app with OAuth, OpenID Connect, SAML or client certificates. The provider is configured once at the server level, and is selected per app or set as the default for all apps. RBAC controls which users and IdP groups can access which apps. There is no license and no user count, so an app can be opened to the whole company.

Posit Connect has comparable authentication and access control, in a product licensed by named users. On Hugging Face, SSO and audit logs are part of the Team and Enterprise plans. Streamlit Community Cloud has no SSO; private apps are shared by inviting viewers by email, and an account can have one private app.

Apps Run Next to Your Data

Streamlit Community Cloud and Hugging Face Spaces run apps on their own infrastructure. An app which reads from an internal database needs that database to be reachable from the Internet, and the data passes through a third party service. OpenRun runs on your own server or cluster, and can run fully behind a VPN. Service bindings give each app its own PostgreSQL or MySQL credentials.

Any Framework

Streamlit Community Cloud runs Streamlit apps. Posit Connect supports a fixed list of content types, with API hosting and Node.js limited to the higher license tiers. OpenRun runs anything which can run in a container. App specs cover the common data app frameworks without a Dockerfile, and the same server can host an internal API, a Go service or a static site next to the dashboards.

GitOps, Staging and Rollback

The other platforms update an app when its code changes in Git. Creating the app, setting its access rules and changing its configuration are done in a UI. OpenRun manages those through Git as well: the declarative config lists every app with its settings, and changes go through pull request review. Each app has a staging version which receives changes first, and an earlier version can be switched back to.

Faster Scale to Zero

All four platforms stop idle apps. On the hosted free tiers this happens after 12 or 48 hours and exists to limit the provider’s cost. OpenRun stops an idle app container after three minutes by default and starts it again on the next request, which lets a single server host a large number of apps which are used occasionally.

Where the Alternatives Are Better

• No infrastructure to run. Streamlit Community Cloud and Hugging Face Spaces need no server. OpenRun needs a server or a Kubernetes cluster which you operate.
• Public sharing and discovery. Both hosted services have a community gallery, and a public demo which should be found by other people belongs there. Streamlit Community Cloud is free. On Hugging Face, static Spaces are free, and creating a Gradio or Docker Space needs a paid plan, with a limited exception for ZeroGPU Spaces on personal accounts.
• GPUs on demand. Hugging Face Spaces rents GPU hardware by the hour and offers shared ZeroGPU capacity. With OpenRun, apps can use only the hardware of the servers you provide.
• R and report publishing. Posit Connect has first-class support for Shiny for R, R Markdown, Quarto, Plumber and pins, renders reports on a schedule and sends them by email, and publishes from RStudio, Positron and VS Code. OpenRun has no bundled spec for R; an R Shiny app needs a Dockerfile in its repo. OpenRun does not render notebooks or reports.
• Package and runtime management. Posit Connect rebuilds the R or Python environment of each content item on the server. OpenRun relies on the container image built from the app’s dependency file.
• Commercial support. Posit sells support with Connect. OpenRun is a community supported open-source project.

Tool by Tool

OpenRun vs Posit Connect

Posit Connect is the closest of the three to OpenRun: it is installed on your own infrastructure and provides authentication, access control and audit logs for data apps. The differences are in licensing, scope and how apps run. Connect is a commercial product in Basic, Enhanced and Advanced tiers, with pricing available from Posit sales. Some features depend on the tier: hosting APIs needs Enhanced, and Node.js content and running content in containers on Kubernetes need Advanced. By default Connect runs content as sandboxed processes on the Connect server, which needs the R and Python versions installed there. OpenRun is free, runs every app in its own container and adds declarative GitOps and staged deployments. Connect is the better choice for R teams and for scheduled reports and documents.

OpenRun vs Streamlit Community Cloud

Streamlit Community Cloud is the fastest way to put a public Streamlit app online: connect a GitHub repo and the app is deployed for free. Its limits are those of a free community service. It runs Streamlit apps only, from GitHub only, in the United States, with about 2.7 GB of memory per app. An account can have one private app, and viewers of a private app sign in with Google or an emailed link. For apps used at work, Streamlit points to Streamlit in Snowflake. OpenRun is an alternative for self-hosting Streamlit apps for a team: any number of private apps, company SSO, your own domain and direct access to internal data.

OpenRun vs Hugging Face Spaces

Hugging Face Spaces hosts machine learning demos next to the models and datasets on the Hugging Face Hub. A Space is a Git repository on the Hub which is rebuilt on each push, using the Gradio, Docker or static HTML SDK. The CPU Basic hardware has 2 vCPUs and 16 GB of memory at no hourly charge, and GPU hardware is rented by the hour. Creating a Gradio or Docker Space needs a PRO plan for a personal account or a Team or Enterprise plan for an organization; static Spaces are free. Private Spaces are visible to the owner and organization members; SSO, resource groups and audit logs come with the Team and Enterprise plans. OpenRun is an alternative when the apps are internal tools rather than public demos: they run on your own servers, deploy from your existing Git host and use your identity provider. Spaces is the better choice for public demos and for apps which need a GPU you do not own.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is OpenRun an open-source alternative to Posit Connect?

Yes, for hosting Python data apps and other web apps for a team. OpenRun is Apache-2.0 licensed and provides SSO, RBAC and audit logs for apps built with Streamlit, Gradio, Shiny for Python, Dash, FastAPI and other frameworks, each running in its own container. It is not a replacement for Posit Connect’s R publishing features: scheduled R Markdown and Quarto reports, Plumber APIs without a Dockerfile, pins and publishing from the RStudio IDE.

How do I self-host a Streamlit app with authentication?

Install OpenRun on a server with Docker or Podman and configure an OAuth, OIDC or SAML provider in openrun.toml. Create the app with the python-streamlit spec and select the provider for it, with auth="<provider name>" in the declaration file or --auth <provider name> on openrun app create. OpenRun builds the container from the repo, serves the app over HTTPS and requires login before any request reaches the app. The Streamlit code does not change.

Configuring a provider does not by itself protect apps: new apps use none authentication by default. To cover every app, set security.app_default_auth_type to the provider name, and set security.auth_required = true so that requests to any app without authentication are refused. See default authentication type and require authentication for all apps.

Can OpenRun host private Streamlit apps?

Yes. There is no limit on the number of private apps. Each app can require login through its auth setting or the server default, and RBAC can limit an app to specific users or identity provider groups.

Can OpenRun deploy Gradio apps?

Yes. The python-gradio spec deploys a Gradio app from its source repo with no Dockerfile. See the app specs listing for the parameters.

Does OpenRun support Shiny apps?

Shiny for Python apps are supported with the python-shiny spec. Shiny for R apps can be deployed with the container spec, which needs a Dockerfile in the app repo.

Do apps go to sleep on OpenRun?

Idle app containers are stopped after 180 seconds without activity and are started again on the next request. The timeout can be changed or turned off for the server or for one app.

What does OpenRun cost?

OpenRun is free and open source. The cost is the infrastructure it runs on. Because idle apps are stopped, a single server is enough for a typical set of internal data apps.