Mastodon
Alternative to Social network/ Micro-blogging
Federated microblogging server.
Actively maintained
Real momentum
AGPL-3.0
Complete and fully featured mail server for use by websites & web servers.
Postal is an open-source communication project positioned as an alternative to Email delivery, with 17k GitHub stars and a health score of 45/100. It committed 25 times in the last twelve months across 4 of those months, and its status is actively maintained. Licence: MIT. It has real momentum, so treat it as a live competitor rather than a stale repository.
| Status | Actively maintained — Committed within the last 45 days. |
|---|---|
| Last commit | 2026-06-03 |
| Days since last commit | 75 |
| Commits, last 3 months | 7 |
| Commits, last 12 months | 25 |
| Months with activity | 4 of 12 |
| Last release | 2026-06-03 |
| Archived | No |
| Licence | MIT |
| Category | Communication |
| Positioned against | Email delivery |
Health score combines commit recency, twelve-month commit volume, months with activity, release recency and archive state. Metadata refreshed August 2026.
Permissive (MIT, Apache, BSD): you can fork it, close the source and sell it. Lowest legal friction for a commercial product.
This matters most when you plan to sell a hosted version. A permissive licence means anyone — including a competitor with more capital — can do the same, so your defensibility has to come from distribution, support or data, not from the code.
Postal is shipping code consistently, so a buyer comparing your product will find a maintained free option. Price and position against the total cost of self-hosting it, not against the paid incumbent's list price.
Assume every prospect can find a free version in five minutes. Your wedge has to be something open source structurally cannot deliver: compliance, support SLAs, managed hosting at scale, or a workflow the maintainers refuse to build.
Actively maintained. Postal recorded 25 commits over the last twelve months, with activity in 4 of those months and 7 commits in the last quarter. Last commit: 2026-06-03. Last release: 2026-06-03. Committed within the last 45 days.
Postal is published under MIT. Permissive (MIT, Apache, BSD): you can fork it, close the source and sell it. Lowest legal friction for a commercial product.
Postal targets the same job as Email delivery and is actively shipping. Adoption sits at 17k stars. Whether it is a good replacement depends on your deployment constraints: self-hosting adds infrastructure, upgrade and security work that a commercial subscription absorbs for you.
177 open-source implementations, 100 of them actively maintained, led by Mastodon at 50k stars. Saturation score 77/100 — Crowded. Free, maintained alternatives already dominate this category.
Alternative to Social network/ Micro-blogging
Federated microblogging server.
Alternative to Tribe, Circle, Community management
Advanced forum / community solution based on Ruby and JS.
Alternative to Slack, Team communication, Chat & Team Communication
Communications platform that puts data protection first (alternative to Gitter.im and Slack).
Alternative to Courier, MagicBell, Knock, Notification infrastructure, Push notifications
Notification infrastructure for developers.
Communication
Platform for secure collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle, can be integrated with Gitlab (alternative to Slack).
Alternative to Intercom, Zendesk, Live chat
Customer communication platform (alternative to Intercom and Zendesk).
IdeaProof scores your idea against live competitors, market size and 1,000+ documented startup failures in about two minutes.