Home Assistant
Internet of Things (IoT)
Home automation platform.
Actively maintained
Real momentum
Apache-2.0
Every open-source internet of things (iot) project we track, scored on maintenance, momentum and licence — so you can tell the live competitors from the abandoned repositories.
Internet of Things (IoT) has 20 open-source implementations in this dataset, of which 10 show real momentum and 0 are dormant or abandoned. The leader is Home Assistant with 90k stars against a category median of 2.3k — roughly 40x the typical project. Saturation score 52/100: 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: Home Assistant is the reference implementation at 90k stars, and 10 of 20 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 Home Assistant?" in the first minute.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Home automation platform.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Open source firmware for ESP devices. Total local control with quick setup and updates. Control using MQTT, Web UI, HTTP or serial. Automate using timers, rules or scripts. Integration with home autom
Internet of Things (IoT)
Browser-based flow editor that helps you wiring hardware devices, APIs and online services to create IoT solutions.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Open-source IoT Platform - Device management, data collection, processing and visualization.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Scalable MQTT broker. Connect 100M+ IoT devices in one single cluster, move and process real-time IoT data with 1M msg/s throughput at 1ms latency.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Extensible Electric Vehicle Charge Controller and home energy management system.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Home Automation System that lets you monitor and configure various devices like: Lights, Switches, various sensors/meters like Temperature, Rain, Wind, UV, Electra, Gas, Water and much more.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Privacy-first home assistant.
Internet of Things (IoT)
WebThings is an open source implementation of the Web of Things, including the WebThings Gateway and the WebThings Framework.
Internet of Things (IoT)
IoT Asset management, Flow Rules and WHEN-THEN rules, Data visualization, Edge Gateway.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Integration platform for the Internet of Things, focused on building automation, smart metering, ambient assisted living, process automation, visualization and data logging.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Vendor and technology agnostic open source software for home automation.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Open source software for sprinkler/irrigation control.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Deploy Node-RED applications in a reliable, scalable and secure manner. The FlowForge platform provides DevOps capabilities for Node-RED development teams.
Internet of Things (IoT)
A server to communicate with the FMD (Find My Device) Android app, to locate and control your devices.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Photovoltaic dashboard that displays energy production and consumption with cost and savings calculations.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Light Home Automation application that is fully extensible using Blockly, HTML or Lua. It includes extensions such as ConBee, Philips Hue or Z-Wave JS.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Web-based serial interface and charting tool for visualizing and logging data from UART pollution sensors (PM2.5, VOC, etc). Features live data acquisition, dynamic charts, CSV export, and webhook int
Internet of Things (IoT)
Track and share your location in real time. Control and lock stolen or lost phones.
Internet of Things (IoT)
Automate common tasks in the household like switching lamps and heating. It can also be used to log events like temperature or power consumption. You can control it via web or smartphone frontends, te
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 149 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. 736 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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