There are a lot of great products and proprietary software out there. Chances are, there are also open source alternatives.
Do you use any open source alternatives? Do you have favorite alternatives?
Share your open source discoveries and what drew you to them in the comments below!
Top comments (30)
Dub is an open-source alternative to Bitly, with built-in analytics, free custom domains, and a strong feature set. Recommend 10/10.
S/O to its maker @steventey
We use dub! It's been great.
nextCloud as an alternative to any cloud storage solution - at least for the documents part. It has a web front end with a WYSIWYG markdown editor, and sync apps for mobile. Can do public share links as well, and multi-user to host say your friends and family.
It also has a bunch of other features like calendar, official and community plugins, and stuff I don't make use of myself, and I think they also added word processing and spreadsheets (originally via OnlyOffice, but now I think they have a native solution?)
Pretty much that, and Bitwarden for password management (if you want to host without C# runtimes, use the Rust implementation Vaultwarden as a back-end, with regular Bitwarden clients).
I also used to host an Etherpad instance for collaborative text editing, though it kind of fell apart ...
esProc SPL is a data analysis engine with four main characteristics: low code, high performance, lightweight and versatility. To be specific, SPL allows you to write simply, and makes the running speed faster; SPL can be used either independently or embedded in applications; SPL is suitable for a variety of application scenarios. Analyzing the data through esProc SPL can reduce the overall application cost by several times compared with SQL-represented traditional technologies. Details will be given below.
GIMP is an open-source alternative to Adobe Photoshop, which is a powerful and versatile image editing software. GIMP can perform various tasks, such as photo retouching, image manipulation, graphic design, and digital painting. GIMP is free and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
May I just mention Linux? 🐧
I mean, I can mention all the kinds of programming languages and development tools which I like, but I think let's just start off with the operating system and the how of a foundation in the open source world it has always actually been.
Alright, together with Git, which is actually just as important.
i mean, is there a better answer?
I love Joplin for note-taking (Evernote/Notion/Obisidian alternative). Open Source, cross-platform, uses Markdown under the covers, lots of plugins, all good.
I just learned about Joplin yesterday!
I should really do a write-up of my plugins / setup / workflow. It's an app that makes me happy.
You definitely should!
Affine is an alternative to Notion.
Its Electron client is open source. The backend is only source available though.
I love using LibreOffice as an open source alternative to proprietary office suites. It's feature-rich, compatible with various document formats, and fosters collaboration. The community-driven development and commitment to open Download Slide Share standards make it my go-to choice. What's your favorite open source alternative? Share your discoveries
RainLoop with SMTP and IMAP configured, instead of GMail's own interface. I actually have my own email server set up using Postfix with RainLoop as the PWA, but I think using RainLoop with GMail's mail servers is a good start.
I go with Calcom instead of Calendly. One of the things they have an advantage in it is that they have more features and support other languages like Arabic!
AWX as an open source alternative to Ansible Automation Platform. VaultWarden for password management. Uyuni as an alternative to Satellite. Of course Zabbix for system monitoring.
many redhat upstream projects are opensource, you can use them to replace the redhat enterprise stacks. Such as fedora,awx,ovirt,ceph etc..
It was SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop vs. Visual Studio. Really hoping DotDevelop becomes it's successor.
Hmm, how serious is that project? I have never heard of DotDevelop before but it looks like it's a new fork. I can imagine in the case you worked with MonoDevelop or SharpDevelop in the past, that this matters a lot more.
Though I really believe it would be far more healthy when not so much .NET related stuff came from just Microsoft only. Things should have much more spreading.
Personally I use both VS and VSCode/VSCodium for software development, and occasionally also Vim (I am also both Windows and Linux oriented these days).
For this reason I am also interested in the world of open source extensions/plugins.
It seems that Microsoft their main focus is now a lot on the DevKit, but which is closed source even though it uses the open source OmniSharp as a base, and is just for VSCode, not for Vim/Neovim as far as I know. And I think that's also not great.
And of course if you like none of those there's Rider but yeah, expensive.
Inkscape is an awesome alternative to Adobe Illustrator.
notion.so is a very good app
But obsidian.md/ is absolutely incredible
Obsidian revolutionized my workflow last year.
Highly recommended
Edit: not Open Source, my mistake
Appflowy is the open source alternative to both that comes to mind.
It is not open source.
And neither are open source
You are right, I thought it was open core like intellij with obsidian sync and obsidian publish bringing the money that is missing in so many open source projects.
Anyway i would still recommend it because it's like visual studio code for wtiters. The data stay yours, is stored in open formats and there are so much plugins, you can do basically anything with it
I use Actual Budget as an alternative to YNAB because the YNAB's syncing feature is not supported in my country. Besides, it is more affordable.
I tried but failed at using YNAB earlier this year, purely because of discipline and consistency reasons 😂