Every open-source polls and events project we track, scored on maintenance, momentum and licence — so you can tell the live competitors from the abandoned repositories.
Polls and Events has 19 open-source implementations in this dataset, of which 8 show real momentum and 0 are dormant or abandoned. The leader is Formbricks with 13k stars against a category median of 626 — roughly 20x the typical project. Saturation score 46/100: 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: Formbricks is the reference implementation at 13k stars, and 8 of 19 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 Formbricks?" in the first minute.
Alternative to Typeform, Google Forms, React Hook Form, Online forms
Experience Management Suite built on the largest open source survey stack worldwide. Gracefully gather feedback at every step of the customer journey to know what your customers need.
Polls and Events
Form builder that allows anyone to create engaging conversational forms for surveys, questionnaires, quizzes, and polls.
Polls and Events
Open platform to collect and prioritize feedback (alternative to UserVoice).
Alternative to SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Online Survey Platform
Feature-rich web-based polling software. Supports extensive survey logic.
Polls and Events
Beautiful open-source form builder.
Polls and Events
Flexible tournament system to build a tournament setup, add teams, schedule matches, keep track of scores and present ranking live to the public.
Polls and Events
A free, open-source expert system for guided interviews and document assembly, based on Python, YAML, and Markdown.
Polls and Events
The ultimate tool to interact with your audience (alternative to Slido, AhaSlides and Mentimeter).
Polls and Events
Manage complex group hierarchies with members, events and a lot more.
Polls and Events
Self-destructing, shareable, no-registration event pages.
Polls and Events
Community-feedback tool for managing incoming feedback and prioritizing a public roadmap (alternative to Canny, UserVoice, Upvoty).
Polls and Events
Create a simple place for your entire family to use to find gifts that people want, and to avoid double-gifting.
Polls and Events
Conduct polls about dates, times or general questions.
Polls and Events
Minimal events aggregator.
Polls and Events
Community-focused event management and ticketing platform.
Polls and Events
Share events, sell tickets, and bring communities together.
Polls and Events
Online service for planning an appointment or make a decision quickly and easily: Make a poll, Define dates or subjects to choose, Send the poll link to your friends or colleagues, Discuss and make a
Polls and Events
Local community event and agenda sharing.
Polls and Events
Federated tool that helps you find, create and organise events and groups.
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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