Awesome-Selfhosted
Alternative to Other lists of free / software
A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own servers
Every open-source altro project we track, scored on maintenance, momentum and licence — so you can tell the live competitors from the abandoned repositories.
Altro has 96 open-source implementations in this dataset, of which 0 show real momentum and 0 are dormant or abandoned. The leader is 11ty with 0 stars against a category median of 0 — roughly 0x the typical project. Saturation score 50/100: Contested. Several maintained alternatives exist, but no one owns the category.
Winnable, but differentiation is not optional. Pick one underserved segment and be visibly better for it rather than competing feature-for-feature with a free tool.
The practical test in this category: 11ty is the reference implementation at 0 stars, and 0 of 96 projects are still shipping. A buyer evaluating you will find at least one maintained free option, so your pricing and positioning have to answer "why not self-host 11ty?" in the first minute.
Alternative to Other lists of free / software
A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own servers
Alternative to Static website generator
Alternative to Icons
Alternative to Time-series database
Alternative to Static website generator
The web framework for content-driven websites. ⭐️ Star to support our work!
Alternative to Programmatic videos
Alternative to Static website generator
Alternative to Scheduling tool
Scheduling infrastructure for absolutely everyone.
Alternative to Vector database
Alternative to API development
Alternative to Continuous integration
Alternative to Artificial intelligence chatbot/ LLM
Alternative to File uploader
Alternative to Continuous integration
Alternative to Icons
Alternative to Code hosting & collaboration
Alternative to To-do app, Kanban board
Alternative to Icons
Alternative to Search
Alternative to Static website generator
A simpler site generator. Transforms a directory of templates (of varying types) into HTML.
Alternative to Other lists of free / software
Awesome list of open-source startup alternatives to well-known SaaS products 🚀
Alternative to Knowledge Bases
NOW MANAGED ON CODEBERG
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Alternative to Search
Alternative to Smart spreadsheet
🚀🎉📚 APITable, an API-oriented low-code platform for building collaborative apps and better than all other Airtable open-source alternatives.
Alternative to Platform-as-a-Service/ PaaS, Platform as a Service / PaaS
Scalable PaaS (automated Docker+nginx) - aka Heroku on Steroids
Alternative to AI code completion
Alternative to User authentication
Alternative to Password manager
Bitwarden client apps (web, browser extension, desktop, and cli).
Alternative to Static website generator
Alternative to Annotation
Alternative to Monitoring/Observability
Alternative to Artificial intelligence chatbot/ LLM
ChatRWKV is like ChatGPT but powered by RWKV (100% RNN) language model, and open source.
Alternative to Session replay and analytics
Alternative to Vector database
Deeplake is AI Data Runtime for Agents. It provides serverless postgres with a multimodal datalake, enabling scalable retrieval and training.
Alternative to Website builder
Alternative to ERP
Alternative to Invoicing
Alternative to Icons
Alternative to Icons
Official open source SVG icon library for Bootstrap.
Alternative to Monitoring/Observability
Coroot is an open-source observability and APM tool with AI-powered Root Cause Analysis. It combines metrics, logs, traces, continuous profiling, and SLO-based alerting with predefined dashboards and inspections.
Alternative to Team communication, Chat & Team Communication
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A flexible event/agent & automation system with lots of bees 🐝
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Existence is not competition. A project competes with you only if it is maintained, findable, deployable by your buyer and licensed for their use. Most projects fail at least one of those tests. Run all four before you shelve an idea — or before you assume you have a clear run.
Stars are a lifetime counter with no decay, so a project abandoned in 2022 still looks like a leader in 2026. In this dataset 222 projects are dormant, abandoned or archived, and several of them sit in the top decile by stars. Sort by momentum and commit activity instead — popularity tells you the project was once interesting, maintenance tells you whether it will still be there when your customer needs a bug fixed.
When a prospect says 'we could just self-host the free one', they are usually comparing your price against zero. The real comparison is your price against hosting, upgrades, backups, security patching, integration work and the engineer hours behind all of it. Quantifying that number is the single most effective response to a free-alternative objection — and it is more persuasive coming with a spreadsheet than with a feature list.
Founders treat licensing as a legal footnote and then discover it dictates strategy. Permissive licences allow closed commercial forks, which is why so many managed services exist around MIT and Apache projects — and also why your differentiation cannot be the code itself. Copyleft licences, especially AGPL, remove the closed-wrapper option entirely, which reduces competition but restricts you too. Source-available licences exist precisely to stop the wrapper business.
Search this database by category and by the commercial product you would replace. It covers 1665 projects across 130 categories, each mapped to the paid tool it substitutes. If your category shows a "Crowded" verdict, a maintained free version almost certainly exists and your positioning has to account for it.
No. It means free is your price anchor. Plenty of large companies were built next to a good open-source project — the ones that failed were the ones selling the same job at a price the free tool made indefensible. Find the part of the job the project deliberately does not do, and sell that.
Each category gets a 0–100 score built from three inputs: how many implementations exist, what share of them are still actively maintained, and how far ahead the leading project is compared with the category median. 62+ is Crowded, 38–61 Contested, under 38 Open. 11 categories are Crowded and 88 are Open.
A project has momentum when it committed code in most of the last twelve months, shipped a release recently and is not archived. 911 of 1665 projects qualify. This is the single most useful filter here — it strips out the popular-but-dead repositories that make a category look more competitive than it is.
It depends entirely on the licence. MIT, Apache and BSD let you build and sell closed products on top. GPL and AGPL require derivative work to stay open, and AGPL extends that to network use, which blocks most SaaS wrappers. BSL, SSPL and Commons Clause are source-available, not open source, and usually restrict competing commercial use outright.
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