6mo ago

A collection of 150+ self-hosted alternatives to popular software

Attention Required! | Cloudflare

Hey, community :)

I run a website that showcases the best open-source companies. Recently, I've added a new feature that filters self-hosted tools and presents them in a searchable format. Although there are other options available, like Awesome-Selfhosted, I found it difficult to find what I needed there, so I decided to display the information in a more digestible format.

You can check out the list here: https://openalternative.co/self-hosted

Let me know if there’s anything else I should add to the list.

Thanks!

80 comments

Love the list, but scrolling through, the one liners don't mean much for a lot of these.
The descriptions are just too short and vague to even understand what a lot of them actually do.
- Noted! I have longer descriptions in the db, but didn't want to bloat the listings. Will try with a longer description soon.
  
  It's a tough balance, you don't want a whole page for each one. Maybe if there was a clear list of tags so it's easier to understand even what category they're talking about?
  For example:
  Penpot
  Design freedom meets open-source collaboration
  I really don't know what this product category even is. Is it for web layout? Is it a drawing program? Is it for CAD?
  
  A "more" button after the one liner would be very nice. Or make the one-liner a link that gives a longer description.
  Thanks for the work. I've bookmarked it!
- Added longer description and major alternative when you hover over the cards. Hope that'll make it easier to browse.
  
  Yeah, that looks amazing, and it's really quick. That's a huge improvement!
I'm tired of Cloudflare ... 😔
- Yeah I havent been able to load the cf verification on my android for like over a week now lol
  
  I installed umatrix recently, and having to enable cloudfare on each site is a pain.
  
  Maybe your phone is compromised! Thanks cloudflare
- Sorry about that, had to enable attack mode temporarily to fight bots. Should be fine now.
There are awesome self-hosted, awesome non-free self-hosted and awesome sysadmin too
Appreciate the effort, but without categories it's not going to sail too far.
Right now it's just a long list of everything that it's out there, awesome-selfhosted is much more usable for looking up what you need.
Also, did you join any kind of affiliate programs/partnerships for these "10% off" green boxes? If so, would be great to disclose it. Nothing bad with getting some cash, but community will just appreciate the honesty.
- They do have categories, via the menu at the top:
  https://openalternative.co/categories
  
  I stand corrected, thank you!
- Added categories now so you can filter directly in the list.
- There are some affiliate links on the website, but the discounted products are not affiliated. I just reached out to the owners asking for an exclusive discount for paid plans.
  There are categories on the website, but not directly on the list. But here is "full-text" search, so you could technically search by category or an alternative. Try "analytics" or "google analytics" for example.
One thing I would like to see is a way to distinguish which apps do Real™ Open Source vs fakie open source. For example, I see Joplin on there saying "Your secure, open-source note-taking companion". I guess that's technically true at this point in time, but they also force contributors to sign a CLA so they have the option to pull the rug later on. (Something which does happen.)
They even say so explicitly:
This is necessary so that if we ever want to change the license again we are able to do so
— https://joplinapp.org/news/20221221-agpl/#what-does-it-change-for-developers
And fine, if they want to do that it's up to them. I'd just like a quick way to tell the difference between open source 😒 and Open Source 😄.
- The Free Software Foundation requires "CLAs" as well. I have no fear that they're going to rug-pull. I don't think we can use that as the indicator. IMO, it's even a good idea to have a CLA so that's no conflict that the project owns the code.
  The warning for me is if the project is run by a company, especially a VC-backed company. Joplin isn't, so I would be comfortable using it (although I don't).
  
  Interesting! I didn't realize this! https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.en.html
  only the copyright holder or someone having assignment of the copyright can enforce the license. If there are multiple authors of a copyrighted work, successful enforcement depends on having the cooperation of all authors.
  So it seems like the FSF does this in order to be able to enforce GPL. Buuut, these guys really gotta be the exception. I feel like the probability of the FSF selling out and going full corporate evil is pretty low...
  a good idea to have a CLA so that’s no conflict that the project owns the code.
  That's exactly the problem though. The project owning the code, instead of the contributors owning the code.
- How would you determine if a thing is true open source, or capitalism masquerading as open source like you've described, if you were to just stumble onto a software randomly and wanted to check?
  
  For the specific case I'm talking about (CLAs), I check if the project (on GitHub or wherever) requires signing a CLA to contribute. In Joplin's case, they do:
  https://joplinapp.org/news/20221221-agpl/#what-does-it-change-for-developers
  https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/blob/dev/readme/dev/index.md#signing-the-individual-contributor-license-agreement
  Basically, with a CLA they can change the license at any time to whatever they want. If they want to go closed source tomorrow they can with zero trouble. Without a CLA, they would need approval from everyone who has contributed to the project to do a license change, giving the project proper open source protections.
- Maybe a filter by license?
  
  I don't think the type of license matters too much if you have to sign a CLA, since the company can just change it whenever they want. For example, you can be AGPL today (Joplin) and then not AGPL tomorrow.
Never heard of 99% in that list.
Also, Gitea should not be there. It is a corporate -owned open core project that was hostilely taken away from the community.
- While I don't disagree with your sentiment, it seems like this list is just "self hosted open source alternatives". Even if there are better options, Gitea still falls under that definition, no?
  
  It falls under self hosted, at least. If it is still truly open source is highly debatable.
- Didn't know that. Do you have more info/source?
  
  There – of course – won’t be a singular official source stating “Hey guys, we’re open core now”. You need to put this together bit-by-bit.
  Here are some links for research
  Official statement on the takeover
  Gitea Enterprise/Gitea Cloud hiding features behind a cloud solution and a paywall which makes Gitea itself open-core
  Open Letter to the new Gitea owners with a summary and a reply, signed by a lot of Gitea devs and FOSS scene people.
  As @gratux@lemmy.blahaj.zone mentioned: A fork under the name Forgejo was done due to new Gitea owners did not care much about the concerns. (Started as asoft-fork but with 10.0 it became a hard fork.)
  Gitea owners made it mandaroy to remove copyright headers and set the corporation as copyright holder. Here, here, and here
  
  Forgejo is the fork that sprung from this whole debacle. https://forgejo.org/2022-12-15-hello-forgejo/
- When you hover over the card, it should show the most popular alternative now.
I wish more software wasn’t “hosted” these days.
I miss app ass apps.
Don’t mind me. I’m just feeling old.
- Hosted apps means you can use them on multiple devices. Otherwise, I have to wait until I get home, power up my laptop, wait for the OS to boot, wait for the app to load, then do the thing I wanted to do.
  Any thoughts on how to solve the data sync problem without hosting? I guess I remember some apps doing a local network sync to get data to multiple devices. I kinda remember having problems with that not working all the time....
  
  I guess when I complain, I’m not really talking about hosting at all. I’m talking about things being written in stuff like python, with web UIs instead of native software.
  I miss native software. And native software could be placed on a server. I prefer to run a Mac Mini for my home server, because I can use as many native apps as possible. Along with the all the other web-interface-based scripts and things.
  People like to act like Docker containers and environment variables are simple. But so often these things are not.
  Anyway. As someone else pointed out, it’s strange for me to be posting these lamentations in this community. I don’t mean to throw shade or talk shit.
  So I’ll leave it there.
  
  Considering this is a self-hosted specific community, I would say to host the app on your home server, and create your own private portal.
- I mean this lemmy is for self hosting apps. Not sure what you were expecting to come across lol. If you don't have a Nas or server or dedicated host computer you're probably not gonna enjoy anything in this lemmy
  
  That’s fair. Ran across it in All.
I love this idea, because I often have questions like this as I transition away from proprietary software to open source alternatives
I think listing what software equivalents it might replace listed in the card.
I do see its listed when you click on the info card in the main list, but having it be visible before that might be helpful.
I know a lot of people won't like the little ad cards when you do click on a software to review its page, but I think the way you implementted it is good. Its not intrusive and clearly states its an ad.
Edit: removed bit about categories.
- I do like the idea of adding the "this product replaces X, Y, or Z" in the info card without needing to click on it.
It's really surprising how fast people forget about the shady shit rustdesk has done.
- Near as I understand it: years ago some dumb engineering decisions were made, acknowledged, and corrected. Is there some recent scandal I'm out of the loop on?
- I'm new to self hosted in the last 6 months or so. What have they done
I think it would be important to include current version information on the cards. For example, Pocketbase is still very much in beta and they make breaking changes pretty frequently.
Why does it list Gitea instead of Forgejo?
- What's wrong with gitea?
  
  Seems like the owners of Gitea did something like a self-coup and kicked out community members from the project. https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/
  Forgejo is the community-driven fork of Gitea.
I don't see any Fediverse platforms on there, how would you feel about adding them? Seems like they'd fit.
https://openalternative.co/categories/social-media
Could add Lemmy, Mastodon, MBin, PieFed, PixelFed, Loops, PeerTube, NodeBB...
Maybe you wanna collaborate with selfh.st to complete each others list?
Edit: Looked at the list. Good job on the design and content. Bookmarked it :)
- We've talked with Ethan (owner of selfh.st) and shared some insights, but I'd definitely be open to collaboration. I don't think merging both sites is possible since we're focusing on different topics, but maybe we can figure something out.
Can you change the color of the ad badge? I'm fine with ads, but it blends in too well :/
So sorry for all the errors! I got crazy traffic to the website and the database is not holding on as it should. Will have to upgrade the server very soon🫡
Thank you all for the comments and the feedback! I've implemented most of the things reported. You can now filter the self-hosted tools by category directly in the filters. Tool cards should now show more info about the product on hover (longer description and the most popular alternative).
If you see anything else to improve, let me know.
Can you add Nephele to the list? It’s not a full fledged replacement for cloud storage, but with something like OwlFiles on your phone, it’s close. And it’s very useful.
https://hub.docker.com/r/sciactive/nephele
Also, I wrote it. :)
- There's a submission link on the top of the page
  
  I tried and I got the following error:
  
  Invalid \`prisma.tool.findFirst()\` invocation: Can't reach database server at \`5.161.113.232:5432\` Please make sure your database server is running at \`5.161.113.232:5432\`.
Your self hosted page should have the categories listed too.
- Done 👍
  
  Great stuff.
UPDATE: I've added advanced search filters directly on the listing, so you can now filter self-hosted tools by their alternative, category, tech stack used and licence they're released on 🔥
Wow, that's a really complete list. Thanks for sharing! I might check out Dokploy some time, it sounds interesting.
- You should check it for sure! I actually use it to deploy some of the services I need for running OpenAlternative.
This is neat! Bookmarking this. Not sure what you’re using on the backend, but are you open to contributions for more detailed descriptions?
- I use NextJS for both front and backend. I'm open for any contributions if you're interested.
What self-hosted alternative would you recommend for document collaboration? Word processing docs, spreadsheets, pdf’s, etc.
I was using Nextcloud, but it’s not been as straightforward for file-sharing as I’d like, multiple people can’t work on a document at once, and it doesn’t save changes consistently (especially with fillable PDF’s).
- Onlyoffice + Nextcloud. Is a little complex to self host the Onlyoffice Document server (the backbone of Onlyoffice collaboration), but it works very nice for multi user document collaboration, it even works on federated instances when using same document server.
  
  Thanks! I’ll give it a whirl.
Search seems broken. The following gives me a "Something went wrong" page
https://openalternative.co/?q=firebase
- Should be fixed now. DB was down due to high traffic.
- I think vTiger community efition is still open source?

80 comments