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List of top Open Source alternatives to popular products.

Fayaz Ahmed on May 26, 2020

So I am collecting new and amazing tools for a directory app I am making, v2 of Appydev. I found out there are some great alternatives to some ver...
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Simme • Edited

Great list! However, money needs to come from somewhere. It's unsustainable to expect great technology to just be free.

If you use any of these projects, consider also supporting them on opencollective.com, GitHub Sponsors, ko-fi.com, or patreon.com - wherever they might accept donations or support. Every dollar makes a difference!

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Fayaz Ahmed • Edited

Agreed, the title might be misleading.

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Jordi Cabot

Fully agree. Even if a certain user cannot contribute to the open source project with a monetary donation, there are many different ways to contribute to open source projects, e.g. by publicizing it so that it reachers others that can help with the funding

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Fayaz Ahmed

Yes totally agree, Not paying to these awesome people who make these open source tools and Projects was not my motive, instead the other way around.

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Fayaz Ahmed

Added a small note about this. Thanks.

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miguel michelson

Hey Fayaz, Chaskiq.io founder here. Thanks for the mention, greatly appreciated.

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Fayaz Ahmed

Thanks for making it

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Fayaz Ahmed • Edited

I had some questions, would you mind answering them?

I am available on t.me/fayazara or twitter.com/fayazara

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miguel michelson

sure, just drop me a line at Chaskiq.io chat :D or send me a DM at twitter @michelson / @chaskiqapp

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Edited

Firebase is a series of products...

What's a safe alternative to Firebase Auth / Google Auth, or do you collect Oauth2 client ID / secrets, by yourself?

Firebase Auth is a guaranteed way to work with Google OAuth2, BTW. I have problem with getting permission from Facebook and Twitter...

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Fayaz Ahmed

Auth0 & Okta are good alternatives. Or you could directly implement oAuth 2.0 client authentication with respective sdk's

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

Not sure if Auth0 is better or cheaper than Firebase Auth. Actually, I moved from Auth0 to Firebase Auth.

MongoDB Stitch also have an Auth.

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Fayaz Ahmed

Why not handle the authentication yourself? I did it recently with Nuxt + Node + Mongodb + Google sign in

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

I still need some kind of Object / Image storage, though. But I don't think I should use MongoDB Atlas's 500 MB of GridFS...

That's why I come to Firebase Auth + Firebase Storage.

I use Google Cloud for hosting BTW, not AWS.

Nuxt Auth Module might be nice, but still I fear security and not being able to track...

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Fayaz Ahmed

Honestly, Mongodb atlas free tier is good for small apps.

If you do need image storage, you could probably use imgur or imgbb

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Lauri Ojansivu
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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt

Still looks complicated, but I will consider...

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Corentin Bettiol

Openoffice is nearly dead, I would not use it :/

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Fayaz Ahmed

Just an alternative, would definitely add something if you know anything similar.

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Corentin Bettiol • Edited

All kde applications have a great UI and are easy to use :)

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Fayaz Ahmed

Adding this

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Corentin Bettiol

Thanks :)

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Ali Aljowaher

Take a look at WPS office

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Vincenzo Buttazzo

There is also owncloud.org/ as alternative for Google Drive/Dropbox.

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Ben Sinclair

And Syncthing for a different approach.

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Matthieu Cneude

And Nextcloud!

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Fayaz Ahmed

Nextcould is already added

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Edited

Trying to see if I can find a Cloudflare alternative, possibly FOSS.

Can I really trust Cloudflare, BTW?

Another downside of Open Source and Free, is sometimes they don't provide hosting / support. And self-hosting, especially VPS, does cost something.

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Fayaz Ahmed

You mean the CDN?

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Pacharapol Withayasakpunt • Edited

Proxying, and security shield.

Asset loading performance comes after that. But in the end, it also matters.

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Garret

Why would you not trust cloudflare?

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Alex Brindley

Probably worth noting that not all open-source is a good alternative to a paid option.

For example magento is historically one of the worst platforms to work in, and definitely not easy for non-dev people. Where as shopify has tools that make it much simpler for average people to get started as well as a whole developer toolkit.

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Fayaz Ahmed • Edited

Agreed, but I had developers in mind while making this list.

A company I worked for, used magento and handled thousands of orders a month smoothly, I think if you have people in your team who know the stuff they're using, then its not an issue.

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Aditya Rachman Putra

Fof firebase alternative, I've just found out about Supabase recently and it seems decent :)
Haven't tried it yet btw

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Rémi Lavedrine

For Google Drive/Dropbox, you should add Syncthing which is by far the most efficient solution I found to replace Dropbox or Google Drive.
I actually wrote an article about it as I was so enthusiastic about that software.

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Maciej Cieslik

Taiga isn't open source, it just have free tier.

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Fayaz Ahmed
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Maciej Cieslik

Ok, my mistake, sorry

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Peter Saxton

Is anyone interested in open source alternatives to "Sign in with Google/Facebook" buttons.
We are in the process of open sourcing did.app (taking a little while we kept user notes in our source in one big mono repo) but we should get there soon.
Seam's like a key piece of the internet that would be good to open source, and would also be awesome if there was more than one option

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Vinay Hegde

Thoroughly compiled list Fayaz! While apps like Polr, Rocketchat, ElasticSearch, Nextcloud are good free alternatives but there's the effort of hosting, maintaining/debugging & upgrading them.

This would imply only people with the requisite know-how can use them rather than all. Given the complexity of some of those apps, wouldn't that lead people to switch back to paid options?

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Fayaz Ahmed

I guess so, but sometimes you need to build something on top of these OSS projects, say a client has a requirement of something like Google Drive for his organization, you dont have to build it from scratch, just build on top of these projects.

I recently read a post by @ben on how someone built a forum/blogging platform on top of dev.to as it is open source. That is a great example actually.

But for individuals, its best to use the free versions of these proprietary software.

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Vinay Hegde

In that use-case, yes OSS projects would help save time & effort.

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Santi Scalzadonna

Thanks Fayaz, great work!!
Just one thing I found outdated, Google Analytics alternatives, the ones that you mentioned are no longer free :(

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Fayaz Ahmed

Yes, I need to update this.

You can still host them yourself though.

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Santi Scalzadonna

Yes, that's what I'm planning to do, thanks for your response

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Fayaz Ahmed

I shd just remove it from the list, lot of people mentioned this.

😂

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Oluwatobi Owolabi

Great list, you may want to add Mautic as alternaty to MailChimp and Sendgrid although it is more than just email but marketing automation.

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Amritanshu Pandey

I think you should put Gitea (gitea.io/en-us/) as a FOSS alternative to Github/Bitbucket.
It is lightweight, simple and self hosted.

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Paulo

I'd also add ProtonMail and Tutanota as alternatives to gmail

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Lauri Ojansivu

If you mean anonymity related, here more:

fsf.org/campaigns/surveillance

prism-break.org/en/

Also see other campaings at fsf.org/campaigns/

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Elvis Iraguha

I would add httpie a command-line alternative to Postman

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Liyas Thomas

Thanks for featuring Postwoman 🌱✨

GitHubSponsor us

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Itachi Uchiha

Thank you. I’ll share this in Turkish. Can I? I’ll mention this URL.

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Fayaz Ahmed

Sure, please go ahead

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Supun Kavinda

Google Analytics is free and others are paid 🤔 Start paying?

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Fayaz Ahmed • Edited

Open source, that was the point of this list, people cant take a hint.. I guess I'll have to update the title.

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Daragh Byrne

The picture you chose says "Stop Paying" so I got confused :)

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Matthieu Cneude

A humble suggestion: ActivityWatch, an open source version of RescueTime with privacy.

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Marko Saric

Great list Fayaz and thanks for including Plausible Analytics!

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Liyas Thomas

Postwoman has been rebranded to Hoppscotch

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Fayaz Ahmed

Updated

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Shaiju T

AppyDev is useful 😄, Is AppyDev Open Source ?

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Bin

seems it is not open-sourced 😄

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𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️

Sad to see kong is not on the list

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Saurav Pathak

Nice Collection of alternatives. May I suggest, if you can add Krayin CRM as in alternative list of Salesforce. krayincrm.com/

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Tech2Blog.com

Amazing list. Thanks for sharing.

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Nextloop

May I suggest adding Grow CRM to list the alternatives for Trello

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Lauri Ojansivu

As mentioned here crust.tech/products/corteza/

Upstream project of Crust is Corteza:

cortezaproject.org

github.com/cortezaproject

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Basix

Mattermost is awesome replacement for Slack too :)

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Jakeer

Salamalaikum,
Jazakallah khair

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Rodolfo Silva

Heroku

1 - CapRover - caprover.com/
2 - Dokku - dokku.viewdocs.io/dokku/
3 - Flynn - flynn.io/

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skoontastic

Fathom is a great alternative to Google Analytics, but it's not open source.

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Bernard Baker

Awesome list of alternatives.

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jalpesh Vadgama

Also now github is free for teams also.

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Felipe Maza

Github/Bitbucket -> gitea
Lastpass -> keepass

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Simon Daniel Haan Kristensen

You should add Photopea as free alternative to Photoshop! (It's only partially open source, but still such a great alternative, that it should make the cut!)

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Nguyen Kim Son

Great list! I think you can also Bitwarden, open-source alternative for Dashlane, 1Password.

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Jing Xue

The link to Polr actually goes to postwoman.

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Fayaz Ahmed

Updated

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Mubasshir Ahmed

Great !!

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Douglas Okolaa

To the list add perfex CRM as alternative to Salesforce