There’s nothing wrong with the small PC/NAS route. Certainly more powerful and flexible. I’m currently running the *arr stuff in containers on a Synology 1520 (also storing a bunch of other stuff), with Plex running on a Shield Pro. It’s pretty low power draw, and so far does everything I need.

Main thing with running Plex on the NAS is transcoding - audio and/or video. Depending on what your Plex client is, you want to make sure everything you’re streaming can direct play.

Obvious next question: how’s the privacy policy on 3rd party stereo makers like Pioneer, Kenwood, Alpine, Jensen, etc.?

I have VPN, BitTorrent and prowlarr in one “stack” (a project in Synology Container Manager). Everything else is bundled into a separate project. Not sure how portainer would make this work differently. I don’t have much experience with that.

FWIW, all of my *arr, and VPN containers use the same network bridge. Prowlarr and torrent use the VPN service, though having Prowlarr on there is maybe overkill. They’re all able to access one another using the bridge gateway + port as the host, e.g.: 172.20.0.1:5050

I mostly used this guide, where he suggests:

I have split out Prowlarr as you may want this running on a VPN connection if your ISP blocks certain indexers. If not copy this section into your compose as well. See my Gluetun guides for more information on adding to a VPN.

One thing I had to make sure of was that the ports for Prowlarr were included in the VPN container setup, rather than the Prowlarr section (b/c it’s just connecting to the VPN service):

    ports:
      - 8888:8888/tcp # HTTP proxy
      - 8388:8388/tcp # Shadowsocks
      - 8388:8388/udp # Shadowsocks
      - 8090:8090 # port for qbittorrent
      - 9696:9696 # For Prowlarr

It’s succinct. I’ll give you that!