Creating a startup can be really hard especially when you are bootstrapping. Most popular tools like Asana and Slack can get relatively expensive as your team grows.
Let's do simple math. Imagine you have 10 people on your team, both tools for the cheapest paid plan would cost approximately $170 every month. This is the cost for just two essential tools most teams can't do without for the cheapest paid plans. Let's not forget that tools like these reserve the best features for the most expensive plans. By the time you factor in the cost for some other essential tools teams use, an average team of 10 people might spend $1000 or more per month. I have nothing against these tools, they are awesome tools that I have used personally. But what if there were totally free tools that could completely replace the paid tools with similar features?
The tools listed below were selected after months and years of rigorous research, tests, and factoring in good UI/UX, RAM usage, and some other important factors such as rich and vital features when compared to their paid alternatives.
Here are some very useful free and open-source tools that can save your startup or team money :
1. Mattermost
This is one of the best open-source software out there for teams. It has features for team chat like Slack, and task/project management features like Asana. Before I discovered this tool, I spent many weeks researching and testing multiple free and open-source tools in its category but none came close. Little wonder it's used by organizations like the US Airforce and NASA. You can extend it with a ton of plugins and if you are a Golang developer, you can easily write your own extensions and plugins. Mattermost is just awesome, it's my favorite in its category for various reasons including the fact that it's built with Golang, which means relatively better memory usage. They have apps for macOS, Android, iOS, Windows, and of course Linux. Mattermost is so awesome that it would probably take me one month to go into details of all its features.
2. Rocket
I discovered this app during my time with a previous company I worked with. It's a perfect free replacement for Slack. If you want one app that does just the job of replacing Slack and excluding features like task management, then Rocket is a perfect choice. It has a great, easy-to-use, and intuitive interface. A complete novice would probably spend less than 10 minutes learning how to use the app. It's slick, feature-packed, and straight to the point. It's built with Node.js, which is a bit of a disadvantage when compared to Mattermost. Rocket is more resource and RAM-hungry. But if RAM usage isn't an issue for you and you want a chat/collaboration app with inbuilt voice and video calls for your team with most of the features of Slack then Rocket is a great choice. Apps are available for macOS, Android, iOS, Windows, and of course Linux
3. BookStack
I was searching for an open-source app with a complete set of tools with a great, yet simple UI for internal team documentation, and no app came close to BookStack. You can use this awesome app for just about any kind of documentation you can think of, and I am not exaggerating. It's better than some paid tools available in its category. It's built with Laravel/PHP. It has really cool features including integrating the awesome tool Draw.io, and advanced authentication options such as LDAP, SAML, Slack, and Azure AD! You really need to check BookStack out!
4. Cattr
I love it when open-source software adds a premium feel to their UI and Cattr did just that. Cattr is a tool for time logging/tracking. When the desktop app is installed on your team members' PC, they can use it to track time on the project they are working on and it takes periodic screenshots. Of course, there is also a backend server that is also open-source and has a well-documented API, should you need to integrate it with other apps. Cattr is so good that I was confused why it isn't popular. It's simple, easy to use, and does what it was built to do exceptionally well.
5. Vikunja
Vikunja is named after a mammal in the Llama family. It's a task management app like Asana and has most of the features any team would need. It's intuitive and very easy to use. It's straight to the point with vital and common features such as Kanban, task dependencies, two-factor authentication, and CalDAV! If you want a simple, decluttered tasks management app for personal use or for your team Vikunja is a wise choice.
6. Portainer
Portainer is a brilliant container management system. It's a perfect combination of lightweight and powerful. You can use this to manage local and even remote Docker containers, Kubernetes, Swarm, and Nomad on any cloud, data center, or device. If you want a GUI to manage almost anything related to containers this is a very great choice.
7. Drone
If you need a free CI platform that you can host yourself that is easy to use and learn even for a complete beginner yet powerful enough for any workload, then Drone is one of the best options. Just like most apps on my list, it's very lightweight, and when it's idle it consumes less than 60MB of RAM and that's for the docker containers. If installed manually it would consume less !. I am not surprised because it's built with Golang. It's used by companies like eBay, CISCO, and VMware.
8. Gitea
Github and Gitlab are basically free, but if you have ever wanted the privacy of your data and host your own Github clone then Gitea is a perfect option. It's worth mentioning that Gitlab also has a free self-hosted option, but it's super resource-hungry, you would need a relatively large amount of RAM to run it. Gitea when run with docker takes about 200MB of RAM. Just like most apps on this list, it's built with Golang.
9. WordPress
Yes, I said it, fight me. I don't understand why people spend so much money on website builders and the likes when this tool basically gives it to you for free. It's true that over-familiarity breeds contempt and that's the case with WordPress. WordPress is not the same clunky tool you knew 5-10 years ago, it has gotten even more powerful with the relatively new feature "Blocks". You already know how powerful WordPress is, I don't need to talk much.
10. MailHog
Straight to the point, if you are building any application where you need to test email functionalities, I have not found a better free tool than MailHog. It's lightweight, and it's built with Golang. I know I am a Golang fanboy, for good reasons!
https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog
11. Vault
If you are building any application it's unsafe to store API keys and passwords in .env files. This is where secret managers come in like Cloud KMS and AWS Secrets Manager, they allow you securely include passwords and API keys into your applications. They may not be very expensive to run, but I am always wary of vendor "lock-in". Imagine how stressful it's going to be migrating your secrets when you want to move to another cloud provider. Vault manages your passwords, API keys, and other types of secrets efficiently and very securely. It's built with Golang too and is relatively lightweight and feature-packed.
12. Let's Encrypt
Let's Encrypt needs no introductions. It's a free service to get SSL certificates for your domains, websites, and APIs. If you are just starting out or looking to save some money, it's practically the best choice for SSL certificates.
In conclusion, imagine for a team of about 10 people you could literally spend less than $50( 8GB RAM 2vcpus 200GB storage E2 Standard) hosting ALL these apps on Google Cloud. And I can confidently tell you that I overestimated the RAM needs, and you most likely would spend about $20 for a team of 10 people. Imagine what you would be saving. Now scale the team up to 100 or even 500 people you would be saving a lot of money using these apps.
Do you need help setting any of these apps up? Or would you like to hire me for consultancy or something else ? . You can send me a DM here
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