Home Assistant
Internet of Things (IoT)
Home automation platform.
Actively maintained
Real momentum
Apache-2.0
Apache-2.0 is what enterprise procurement prefers to see. You can build closed products and hosted services on top; you must keep notices, state significant changes and ship the NOTICE file. The patent grant is the real value — it removes the ambiguity MIT leaves around contributor patents, which is why large vendors standardise on it.
Apache-2.0 is MIT with lawyers: same commercial freedom, plus an express patent grant that terminates if you bring a patent claim against contributors. This dataset tracks 138 Apache 2.0 projects (8% of 1665 total), 91 of them actively maintained, led by Home Assistant with 90k stars. Verified against repository metadata as of August 2026; this is engineering guidance, not legal advice.
Running the software inside your own company, without redistributing it, is permitted under every licence family here except undeclared/proprietary code.
Permitted. You can host, modify, close your changes and charge for access with no obligation beyond attribution.
Permitted. Keep the notices, rename the product, and expect competitors to do the same to you.
| Project | Category | Stars | Maintenance | Licence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Home Assistant | Internet of Things (IoT) | 90k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Stirling-PDF | Document Management | 90k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Caddy | Web Servers | 75k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Superset | Analytics | 74k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Apache Airflow | Automation | 47k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Kong | Software Development | 44k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| HyperSwitch | Money, Budgeting & Management | 43k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Appsmith | Software Development | 41k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| filebrowser | File Transfer | 36k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| CyberChef | Miscellaneous | 36k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| SeaweedFS | File Transfer | 34k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| changedetection.io | Automation | 33k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Hasura | Software Development | 32k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Jitsi Meet | Communication | 30k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Harbor | File Transfer | 29k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Kestra | Automation | 28k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Zulip | Communication | 26k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Node RED | Internet of Things (IoT) | 24k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Thingsboard | Internet of Things (IoT) | 22k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Neko | Miscellaneous | 22k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Opik | Software Development | 21k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Teleport | Miscellaneous | 21k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| Etherpad | Office Suites | 18k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
| ZincSearch | Search Engines | 18k | Slowing down | Apache-2.0 |
| EMQX | Internet of Things (IoT) | 17k | Actively maintained | Apache-2.0 |
Internet of Things (IoT)
Home automation platform.
Document Management
Local hosted web application that allows you to perform various operations on PDF files, such as merging, splitting, file conversions and OCR.
Web Servers
Powerful, enterprise-ready, open source web server with automatic HTTPS.
Alternative to PowerBI, Tableau, Mode Analytics
Modern data exploration and visualization platform.
Automation
Platform to programmatically author, schedule, and monitor workflows.
Software Development
Microservice API Gateway and Platform.
Money, Budgeting & Management
Payment switch to make payments fast, reliable and affordable. Connect with multiple payment processors and route traffic effortlessly, all with a single API integration.
Alternative to Retool, Internal tools
Build admin panels, CRUD apps and workflows. Build everything you need, 10x faster.
File Transfer
Web File Browser with a Material Design web interface.
Miscellaneous
Perform all manner of operations within a web browser such as AES, DES and Blowfish encryption and decryption, creating hexdumps, calculating hashes, and much more.
File Transfer
SeaweedFS is an open source distributed file system supporting WebDAV, S3 API, FUSE mount, HDFS, etc, optimized for lots of small files, and easy to add capacity.
Automation
Stay up-to-date with web-site content changes.
Software Development
Fast, instant realtime GraphQL APIs on Postgres with fine grained access control, also trigger webhooks on database events.
Alternative to Zoom, Video conferencing, Video Conferencing
WebRTC application that uses Jitsi Videobridge to provide high quality, scalable video conferences.
File Transfer
Cloud native image registry that stores, signs, and scans content.
Alternative to Fivetran
Event-driven, language-agnostic platform to create, schedule, and monitor workflows. In code. Coordinate data pipelines and tasks such as ETL and ELT.
Alternative to Slack, Team communication, Chat & Team Communication
Zulip is a powerful, open source group chat application.
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.
Miscellaneous
Virtual browser that runs in docker and uses WebRTC.
Software Development
Evaluate, test, and ship LLM applications with a suite of observability tools to calibrate language model outputs across your dev and production lifecycle.
Miscellaneous
Certificate authority and access plane for SSH, Kubernetes, web applications, and databases.
Office Suites
Highly customizable online editor providing collaborative editing in real-time.
Search Engines
Search engine that requires minimal resources (alternative to Elasticsearch).
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.
Communication
Knowledge-based community software. You can use it to quickly build your Q&A community for product technical support, customer support, user communication, and more.
Remote Access
Clientless web-based server management platform with SSH terminal, tunneling, and file editing capabilities.
Analytics
Distributed, column-oriented, real-time analytics data store.
Search Engines
Distributed and RESTful search engine.
Communication
Fully-featured Matrix client for Web, iOS & Android.
Personal Dashboards
Dead simple static homepage to expose your server services, with an easy yaml configuration and connectivity check.
Alternative to Smart spreadsheet
Next-generation spreadsheet with relational structure, formula-based access control, and a portable, self-contained format (alternative to Airtable).
Database Management
Explore and publish data with easy import and export and database management.
Feed Readers
Minimalist news reader.
Software Development
Git platform powered with easy installation, high extensibility & GitHub API compatibility (alternative to GitHub).
Alternative to OpenVPN Access Server
Secure remote access gateway that supports the WireGuard protocol. It offers a Web GUI, 1-line install script, multi-factor auth (MFA), and SSO.
Media Streaming
Extensible music server. Offers a superset of the mpd API, as well as integration with 3rd party services like Spotify, SoundCloud etc.
Remote Access
Fully transparent SSH, HTTPS, Kubernetes, MySQL and Postgres bastion/PAM that doesn't need additional client-side software.
Note-taking & Editors
Diagram software for making flowcharts, process diagrams, org charts, UML, ER and network diagrams.
Self-hosting Solutions
Personal server for running self-hosted apps easily and securely.
Remote Access
Run your own web server to remotely manage and control computers on a local network or anywhere on the internet.
DNS
Fast and lightweight DNS proxy as ad-blocker for local network with many features (alternative to Pi-hole).
Software Development
High-performance API Gateway.
Maps and Global Positioning System (GPS)
Fast routing library and server using OpenStreetMap.
Automation
StackStorm (aka _IFTTT for Ops_) is event-driven automation for auto-remediation, security responses, troubleshooting, deployments, and more. Includes rules engine, workflow, 160 integration packs wit
Proxy
A proxy server that runs a Shadowsocks instance for each access key and a REST API to manage the access keys.
Note-taking & Editors
Realtime collaborative notebook app based on Markdown that supports running Elixir code snippets, TeX and Mermaid Diagrams. Easily deployed using Docker or Elixir.
File Transfer & Synchronization
File Sharing and Collaboration Platform.
Showing 48 of 138
Apache-2.0 is MIT with lawyers: same commercial freedom, plus an express patent grant that terminates if you bring a patent claim against contributors. Apache-2.0 is what enterprise procurement prefers to see. You can build closed products and hosted services on top; you must keep notices, state significant changes and ship the NOTICE file. The patent grant is the real value — it removes the ambiguity MIT leaves around contributor patents, which is why large vendors standardise on it.
138 of 1665 tracked projects carry a Apache 2.0 licence — about 8%. 91 of them show real momentum (commits in most of the last twelve months plus a recent release), so the practical shortlist is smaller than the raw count suggests.
Licence breach is copyright infringement, and the usual consequence is not a lawsuit — it is a failed diligence review. Acquirers and Series A investors run automated licence scans over your dependency tree; an unresolved copyleft or source-available dependency in a closed product either delays the deal or gets priced into it. The cheap fix is choosing correctly at week one.
Yes — Apache 2.0 is an OSI-approved open-source licence family. What varies is the obligation that comes attached, not whether the code is open.
Licence data comes from repository metadata and can lag a relicensing event. Confirm the LICENSE file in the repository before shipping. This page is engineering guidance, not legal advice.
IdeaProof checks whether your idea is already built, how saturated the category is, and where the remaining wedge sits — in about two minutes.
Validate your idea freeSearch 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.