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Open Source alternatives to tools you Pay for

John Rush on December 09, 2023

Hi, I'm John, Multi Startup Builder. I enjoy both coding and marketing. See all my 20 products here → johnrush.me → my BIO → Say Hi to me On Twit...
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Ben Sinclair

I prefer to see these as the real deal. The proprietary stuff is the "alternative".

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Ara Ara no Mi

For them to be the real deal they must work better and have more features than the proprietary stuff they are based on.

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Ben Sinclair

I disagree. I think having a deliberately limited version of something is always going to make it worse.

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John Rush

:)

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Jesper Ordrup

Which came first? The second is the alternative

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Ben Sinclair

In the general history of software? Open source, I suppose...

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Prayson Wilfred Daniel

I 🫶🏾 metabase or superset as alternative to PowerBI or Tableau

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RachelGl

Ghost is not free

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John Rush

but the code is on github?

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Shubham Kumar

Open source software doesn't mean that it won't have pricing :) You can read more about it here: opensource.org/osd/

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Vincent A. Cicirello

Source code appears to be licensed with the MIT license, so if you self-host it can be free.

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Shubham Kumar

Yes!! 😄

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Paweł Świątkowski

Ghost is free. It's pretty explicitly said in the docs. Their hosted offer is not.

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Tanvir Shaikh

Amazing, this is very helpful. Thanks

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Iuliia Shnai

Yes please! Love to see Papermark here @mfts

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Alex

You missed OpenSign github.com/opensignlabs/opensign

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John Rush

gonna add

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sammie

Amazing, thank you for sharing.
I know a tool called ServBay, which is alternative to MAMP. It's not open source, but it's free.

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Manish Soni

Great!, Thanks for sharing

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John Rush

ur welcome

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Kaamkiya

This is awesome! Best top X list I've ever seen 😀. This is extremely useful, and something I will be saving for a while.

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John Rush

thank you

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gupta

Is Supabase better than Firebase?

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John Rush

most say yes

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Thabet Amer

Didn't know about such self-hosted open source passowrd manager! thanks for sharing on Passbolt. I've been using the free-tier Bitwarden for years.

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Tasrie IT Services

Awesome curated list

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John Rush

thx

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AaravPatel1985

Thanks for sharing

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Chandra Panta Chhetri

Bookmarked osssoftware.org. What a great site, has everything in one place.

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Saurabh Rai

This reminds me of this post:

'Open source' is not 'free software'

opensource.com/business/16/11/open...

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Jean-Michel 🕵🏻‍♂️ Fayard • Edited

I don't like that title

Open Source alternatives to tools you Pay for

I would have chosen something like that

42 tools which you are using that have a better open source alternative.

Why ?

Because there is a very bad confusion that Open Source = free as in beer stuff = cheap low quality stuff

And every time we choose to insist to the fact that open source is usually free as in beer, then we encourage the confusions.
And we lose in the real world.
In the real world, free things are considered automatically to be low quality stuff.
Also in the real world, open source would need much more money to reach its full potential.
In the real world, there are lots of free things.

facebook is free in order to spy on you
bad press is free
freewares are free
skypwares are free

Cal is not a cheap Alternative to Calendly

Cal is better than calendly, and also unlike calendly, it is open source.

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Liyas Thomas

We are building an open source {free} Postman alternative: Hoppscotch - API request builder for web.

GitHub logo hoppscotch / hoppscotch

Open source API development ecosystem - https://hoppscotch.io (open-source alternative to Postman, Insomnia)

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John Rush

it's added

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Eckehard

Hoppscotch is great and - if you need such a tool occasionally - the better option. Postman is a fairly heavy package to install (125 MB installer), while hoppscotch is only 15 MB.

You can also run hoppscotch as a free web service (hoppscotch.io/), which I often prever (no installation). I honestly do not know if this option exists for postman.

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Paweł Ciosek

Thank you for the post! 🙏 Great job! 👏

I noticed there is corrupted link to @shadcn, it should be ui.shadcn.com 🫣

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Julio Cordero

What about ERPNext instead of Odoo? Because Odoo is open source, but too limited. The complete version charge you by headcount, ERPNext offers a flat fee for much more (but you could self host the complete version too, it's up to you)

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Mirat

pocketbase.io/ needs a place in this list

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Mirat

Gimp is not alternative to photoshop. It's never been. This is misleading and changing the view to open source products in a bad way.

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Arnaud Dagnelies

Gratis != Open source 🧐

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Rajesh Joshi • Edited

Here's one 🔥

Get Job Execution Reminders via Webhook using WebhookPlan

View on GitHub

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Nadia Sylvester

Very helpful. Thanks

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Ezile Mdodana

Thank you very much for sharing!

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Derek

You should have glitchtip.com/ as the OSS for Sentry.

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Amruth Pillai

There's also Reactive Resume, completely free and open-source resume builder alternative.

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Abraham

Thank you

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Marco Afonso

Any Open Source alternative to Contentful? Besides Strapi (i feel it is cumbersome and missing some crucial features like Releases). Thanks!

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MT

Open Source Alternative to Bitly github.com/ccbikai/sink

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opensas

any recommended floss alternative to jira???

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Johannes

How can you not list Formbricks? 💔

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exoad
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sammie

Good list.
ServBay is a good tool, a local server environment for web developers. It's not open source, but it's free.

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val von vorn

Even worse than paid products are free proprietary tools, because then it is you who is the product!

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Mr. Algorithm

@johnrushx Can I share this post on my Linkedin??

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Gabriel Akinbile

I'll take my time to explore some of these "open source alternatives".

Thanks a bunch.

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vinit gurjar

Liked the blog

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Jesper Ordrup

Thanks for the list. You should add Pocketbase. And fix the formatting error with shadcn

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Markus Meier

For a pasword manager I recommend Vaultwarden (A free and very fast bitwarden clone)