Show HN: A directory of open source alternatives to proprietary software
openalternative.coHi, Piotr here
I was collecting nice open-source companies for quite some time now. Mostly to take some inspiration and learn from their code.
Last week, I though it would be fun to learn this Astro thing everyone's talking about. So I thought building a directory website out of this collection was pretty good idea.
After 2 days of building, OpenAlternative was born. It's a community driven list of open source alternatives to proprietary software and applications.
Enjoy and thank you for your support! There's also https://alternativeto.net/, tagged with licencing model Great site! That one's been my "go-to" site for this need for many years now. Was especially helpful back when I was new to Linux. This was my jam when I switched to Linux, many years ago. I love it that they updated with pro-contra comments. As software are usually not drop-in replacements to one another, you can learn a lot about the differences before switching. I like it that they also include descriptions, general comments, license and screenshots. Personally don't like this one. I don't like the design of the site. If I'm at a page listing the alternatives, such as https://alternativeto.net/software/mtr It doesn't have direct links to the alternatives, if you hover over an alternative it shows a "copy link" icon, but that just goes to the same page you are already on, instead you have to press into the alternative's page and scroll until you see a "official links" section A lot of the software on this list is "freemium" open source. For example Strapi and SuperTokens are open source. But require a paid plan/license when growing the application to a bigger scale, because you are going to need their paid features at some point. Would "freemium" mean "currently trying to leverage free labour from external developers while gaining traction, at which point we'll switch to closed source with an abandonware 'free' version in order to extort companies who have found themselves with vendor lock into what they thought was free software but actually isn't"? That's very often the path forward. The community usually doesn't invest a lot into those projects, so they rarely get forked into a community driven version. Some projects like that are also a minefield, because they mix code with different licenses in one repository. Exactly! That was kind of the point of this to pick freemium software which gives me more confidence of the future of the project in oppose to free open-source without a proper business model. I don't agree that this model of open source software has a positive impact on the quality and future of the open source core. Usually the open source part gets less and less usable and lacks more and more documentation. It also scares off external contributors. I think both models have some space in the open source community. You can still learn and get value from a commercial product even if they only share the source code. I like this. Sadly most alternative sites are a cesspool of intrusive ads and popups while the actual information seems suspiciously shallow and canned. Human curated information would be the best. I'm still looking for a "search", but have already found the link to add my adverts to the site via email, with nice form set up with subject "Advertise on OpenAlternative". So I'd say that's probably the game plan here. That's unfortunate, so it looks like OpenAlternative will also succumb to the same fate of other alternative software sites. More ads. Do you have an alternative source of revenue to suggest? It might be good to catch the site owner early while it's still small to get your suggestion in. I mean if they're making direct deals with other businesses instead of just throwing up AdSense I don't really see the problem. What's the running cost of a static html page? If it's below $10 for the life of the site, maybe it doesn't need a revenue stream. Honestly, a static site that accepted pull requests would cost nothing. Free code hosting on GitHub and page hosting on GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages. Literally $0, forever. It does take time and effort to review pull requests, but there are no $ costs involved. On the other hand that's a really easy way to handle the community updating the listing. Generate a static page from text files, use PRs to add entries to the text files. Making advertising very specific, small, essential and not obtrusive, for example restricting ads on each products only to businesses offering services related to that product, I mean not a similar product but that exact one. Imagine searching for a software or library that does X, then on the product/project page there's a small area showing someone/some company offering services (install, customization, maintenance, etc) for the very same product: one per line, no unnecessary graphics or animation, just plain old links, complete with verified customers feedback.
I'm sure, albeit not perfect, this would reassure many potential users, including companies, concerned abut the bus factor or other similar problems that sometime discourage the use of Open Source software. Many sites like Open Alternative do just well with asking for donations and patreon. Totally, seeing that heavily for sites like G2, Capterra and others. Have been trying to build something more meaningful (going more deep on information) although it's just taking years to build out. It's definitely a grind, but it stems from just loving software: https://efficient.app + https://stacks.efficient.app Also https://github.com/sfermigier/awesome-foss-alternatives (made by me). another great resource similar to your list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted You should add Zim [1] to the "Personal Knowledge Management" section :) It’s the one I use. Thanks There is already https://www.opensourcealternative.to/, what is the value proposition of your site? Yes, indeed. I didn't know this site until I launched mine, but it seems to me they're just listing all of the popular open source projects. I've tried to mostly curate the projects that are actively maintained, and have some sort of hosted, paid alternative. This gives you more confidence, that the app will be maintained as they're making money out of it. You consider it a good sign that the project is charging money for its use. Others consider that a sign that it's going to become increasingly customer hostile on a short enough timeframe that you don't want to go anywhere near it. Ardour charges for Windows builds and has for a long time. It's also the only open source DAW I consider remotely comparable to proprietary options. It looks like this page is further along indeed. First mistake I see on this page is that Home Assistant is called "Core" which is just the name of the core repo. The thing both projects do that I don't think is useful is state that the project is open source in each description and push out the actual description of what the project does. In general if I'm looking for open source alternatives I'm mostly interested in projects that are well maintained and are big enough to stay that way. If there is a website that is able to somewhat make this distinction it can have real value. That's what I was trying to achieve. You can find information like latest commit date which can indicate that the projects is actively maintained. Plus, I picked mostly hosted, freemium applications which have incentives to keep the software up to date and maintained. As pre your comment about descriptions, I took them directly from the repositories where most of them brag about being "open source". That could be a good idea to modify that to me more informative. Good work. I collect and recommend catalogues like this to clients because an
angle some people miss is how alternatives help security. They fall
at the first hurdle by thinking that Microsoft, Google or whatever are
the only solutions. Or thinking that popularity tracks security. But
lack of maneuverability is a key weakness in any defensive position
and diversity is a hugely overlooked factor in resilience and security
engineering. Lots of perfect examples on this page why OpenSource on its own is no benefit for the customer. "On its own", your argument is a tired dismissal made by people can not see beyond their most immediate own needs. I'm having an "am I getting old?" moment by barely knowing anything on that list, and not finding Photoshop for example. Is Photoshop open source? No, but people don’t generally want to browse for "an open source tool that is an alternative to some random thing", they want to find "an alternative to Photoshop". As far as I can tell there's no search at all, maybe that's just on mobile? No search on desktop either. I also found this a very strange list, but it's short and probably limited to what the author uses for now. No Gimp, no Inkscape, no Blender. But Discord of all things is there, you're not even allowed to use third party-software like WeeChat to connect. Nothing open about that platform. And where's Mutt or Thunderbird? Cool. It would be more useful if it was organized by the tool the visitor is trying to replace In the footer there's a link to this page which seems to do that Could probably do with being the default view, aye Suggestion: it would be great if I typed the software I was looking for a replacement, and the OSS alternative was returned as result. Great suggestion! I plan to add search functionality soon. A lot of these applications have either an SSO tax or BSL licensing, i'd recommend adding tags for that. Thanks! Will do. If you do, you may want to change your descriptions or use clearer labeling. BSL is kinda neat but not open, e.g. hashicorp describes it as "an alternative to closed source or open source licensing models". So listing it under "open source alternatives" calls into question the accuracy of other entries. Note: paid and open is very much encouraged. Gotta wonder if the people at PostHog workshopped the name at all before launching... Nice! I would suggest Nextcloud for google drive slash microsoft onedrive alternative. I have been using in production for years, and it has been awesome. Note sure about licensing. Another is Proxmox. It is freemium, yet solid. Neat, thanks for sharing this, will definitely be a good back pocket list. Trying to submit something, you are bound to a fixed list of categories and alternatives. If what you want to submit doesn't fit the fixed values in there, you are blocked. I think categories would be helpful. So you could have a category of mathematical optimization solvers and have Highs, Coin-OR, SCIP...etc in that category. firefox https certificate error "PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR" Works fine for me. Could you check again? Another good one is the "awesome self hosted" list.