Categories with few maintained open-source implementations and no dominant leader — the clearest openings in the dataset.
These categories have thin open-source coverage: few implementations, weak maintenance rates, no runaway leader. They are where a commercial product still has room to define the category. This view holds 40 categories, refreshed August 2026.
3 projects · 0 maintained · leader DeepSeek-V3 / R1 (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
3 projects · 0 maintained · leader Firecamp (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
3 projects · 0 maintained · leader Coder (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
3 projects · 0 maintained · leader Formio (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
3 projects · 0 maintained · leader GlitchTip (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
5 projects · 0 maintained · leader 21st.dev (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
5 projects · 0 maintained · leader Jitsu (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
5 projects · 0 maintained · leader Focalboard (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
5 projects · 0 maintained · leader Authentik (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
5 projects · 0 maintained · leader CrateDB (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
4 projects · 0 maintained · leader Ceph (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
4 projects · 0 maintained · leader ArangoDB (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
4 projects · 0 maintained · leader Cube.js (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
10 projects · 1 maintained · leader imgproxy (11k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
6 projects · 0 maintained · leader Airbyte (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
6 projects · 0 maintained · leader AppBase (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
6 projects · 0 maintained · leader Cortex (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
6 projects · 0 maintained · leader AFFiNE (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
5 projects · 1 maintained · leader webtrees (810)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
8 projects · 0 maintained · leader Builder (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
8 projects · 0 maintained · leader CloudQuery (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
8 projects · 0 maintained · leader Athens Research (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
8 projects · 0 maintained · leader Coolify (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
7 projects · 0 maintained · leader Chaos Genius (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
11 projects · 0 maintained · leader BoxyHQ (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
10 projects · 0 maintained · leader AceBase (0)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
6 projects · 2 maintained · leader Etherpad (18k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
9 projects · 4 maintained · leader YOURLS (12k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
8 projects · 1 maintained · leader Open Food Network (1.3k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
7 projects · 3 maintained · leader wger (6.7k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
9 projects · 5 maintained · leader Inventree (7.4k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
3 projects · 1 maintained · leader Frappe HR (8.6k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
15 projects · 2 maintained · leader Canvas LMS (6.8k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
13 projects · 2 maintained · leader Colanode (5.0k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
5 projects · 4 maintained · leader indico (2.1k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
12 projects · 7 maintained · leader MyIP (12k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
10 projects · 6 maintained · leader Termix (15k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
21 projects · 10 maintained · leader Zammad (5.9k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
10 projects · 6 maintained · leader ActivityWatch (19k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
27 projects · 8 maintained · leader Umbrel (12k)
Thin or poorly maintained open-source coverage.
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.
IdeaProof scores your idea against live competitors, market size and 1,000+ documented startup failures in about two minutes.