First off, I started self hosting about a year or so ago so I’m not an expert. However, I decided to migrate a couple of my books from CWA to both Komga and Kavita so I could compare and reply to you. That led me down a rabbit hole of error messages and I was ready to tell you to just use CWA. But it was user error due to corrupted files lol. After getting that sorted, I’ve come to the conclution that Komga and Kavita are nearly identical. The only difference I could see is, IMO, Kavita is prettier. But they both manage their files roughly the same and if you have the metadata in a .opf inside the same folder as the epub both will pull the metadata with no additional config needed. TBH, Kavita looks better to me. However, Komga has a better web reader IMO. Sometimes with Kavitas web reader I have to change the view settings to scroll rather than columns because it bugs and doesn’t continue to the next page. Whereas I haven’t had that issue with Komga. If you just want a virtural library to download your books off of, then I would recommend Kavita because of it’s UI. However, if you’re planning on mostly using the web reader, I would recommend Komga. Hopefully that was helpful.


I’ve never used Calibre-web so I wouldn’t know the difference but Calibre Web Automated is supposed to be a blend of Calibre and Calibre-Web. I don’t run a calibre server at home anymore because it wasn’t needed after implementing CWA. I did have to copy some Calibre files to run the CWA container (it’s in the setup doc) but I haven’t needed Calibre since setting up CWA. Whenever I get more books I move the files to the “booksync” folder and it uploads it to CWA. You can also upload them via the webpage. The downside, I usually have to manually fetch the metadata for the books. But that’s not a big deal to me. At least I can do everything in one place. I think CWA supports CW plugins, but I’m not 100% certain. I would recommend it if you’re looking for one place to hold and update your books metadata.