11 ms·

Open Source Alternative To

304 points by saikan 4y ago

MaikaDiHaika 4y ago
Very helpful. Thanks!
badsectoracula 4y ago
Are you only listing projects on GitHub (i clicked on a bunch of projects and they all had the GitHub logo)? If so, kinda weird that at the top of the Developer Tools category most of the entries are about GitHub alternatives that anything using them would never show up in the site :-P
josephcsible 4y ago
Why does this contain fauxpen source stuff like Memgraph and open core stuff like GitLab?
- andrewstuart2 4y ago
  GitLab Community Edition is MIT licensed. I don't know that it gets much more open source than that. I've survived at very very large companies on CE, never needing any of the paid features.
  - thayne 4y ago
    not having multiple approvers on merge requests is a pretty big limitation.
    - andrewstuart2 4y ago
      It's pretty trivial to emulate with a bit of code as a bot and the "conversations must be closed" setting. But if you're relying on that feature rather than just agreeing, training, and trust, then I'm also not sure that's the best way to go about it. I'd personally much rather be somewhere where the rule is flexible and can be left to the MR submitter to decide when it's important to have more eyes on a change.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    The existence of paid features at all is exactly what makes it open core.
    - cortesoft 4y ago
      So if a company sells any closed source software, you don’t count any of their open source software as legitimate?
      - josephcsible 4y ago
        Not necessarily. The key is whether the closed-source software is an extension to the open-source software or something completely unrelated to it.
    - pretext-1 4y ago
      Open core is a business model not a license. You can download GitLab CE and use it under MIT license. You can use all the features it contains and do whatever you want with the code. Yes, GitLab Inc. has other products and some of them are paid, but that doesn't change the fact that GitLab CE is open source.
mrintellectual 4y ago
The list of projects seems to be at least partially based on https://github.com/RunaCapital/awesome-oss-alternatives https://github.com/RunaCapital/awesome-oss-alternatives.
- victor9000 4y ago
  Here's a similar list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
I honestly had no idea Brave was an open source. Why is it being so heavily criticized on HN ( from what I saw whenever it comes up )?
- manigandham 4y ago
  It's an ad network that replaces ads you get on the website with their own, wrapped up in a fancy token.
- yata69420 4y ago
  Probably because of https://basicattentiontoken.org/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/ For a group that's largely bet their fortunes on internet companies, it's kind of funny that anything crypto is so toxic here, but that's probably the reason. The actual browser is under good technical stewardship from what I know. It's essentially not-evil Chrome with an optional crypto-for-ads monetization model, a crypto wallet, and some primitive default privacy and adblocking tools. It suffers from the same technical deficiencies as Chrome (installing addons is harder than it should be, addon API is weak compared to firefox, Google controls the "store" for extensions), but I'd recommend it over any other Chromium-based browser.
  - themerone 4y ago
    Firefox has adopted the Chrome addon api. There are some difference, such as Chrome's changes that weaken adblockers are not being implemented. The old (insecure) firefox extension api is long gone.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    My particular gripe with BAT is noted here[0] and AFAIK nothing has changed; you still have to use their KYC-compliant platform to ever exchange BAT for real-world money, as they'd much rather you re-donate the BAT to websites via brave's reward system instead of ever exchanging for USD. Other problems that they'd had: - were inserting referral tokens into the URL when visiting popular websites, so presumably brave was getting a lot of referral credit[1]. In particular it seems to be bad-faith to inject referral codes since Brave really isn't driving traffic to these sites, unless when you type "crypto" it autocompletes "binance.us". - They've since stopped doing this, but previously tipping BAT to a website or creator meant users would lose that BAT with it basically being held in escrow until the website/creator did their own KYC and redeemed the tokens.[2] 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27549826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27549826 1: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caught-adding-its-own-referral-codes-to-some-cryptcurrency-trading-sites/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caugh... 2: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...
clircle 4y ago
I just typed in “word” and the results did not come close to my expectations
- HKH2 4y ago
  Look for 'docs'.
shasheene 4y ago
A much better website is https://alternativeto.net https://alternativeto.net Really great crowd-sourced recommendations with useful reviews. Though while AlternativeTo allows filtering by open-source status, it doesn't do so by license.
- 0des 4y ago
  huh, I had assumed they were the same folks. Thanks for pointing that out, the name is pretty close.
- aasasd 4y ago
  Yeah, AT managed to gather good non-spammy ratings somehow—even though I do sometimes suspect that certain high ratings are artificial, but those are isolated cases. The site also clearly prioritizes open-source software, raising it even among higher-rated proprietary apps. Since AT is crowdsourced, perhaps instead of discussing yet another list of alternatives, fellow HNers could go upvote software that they already use. Though this does require registration, of course.
lalaithion 4y ago
Also, see https://github.com/jhuangtw/xg2xg https://github.com/jhuangtw/xg2xg, a list of open source alternatives to internal Google tech stacks.
BaronVonSteuben 4y ago
What do people use as an alternative to SQS? I've had Kafka mentioned a few times but that's way heavier/more complicated than I need. Just a simple queue is perfect, and SQS' API is gloriously simple.
- manigandham 4y ago
  If SQS meets your needs then you don't need an alternative, but there are Azure Storage Queues and GCP PubSub are the closest.
- erikcw 4y ago
  RabbitMQ is a more natural alternative to SQS than Kafka I’d say. Redis can also be leveraged as a message broker depending on your needs.
  - BaronVonSteuben 4y ago
    Rabbit is definitely interesting. How is the maintenance/management on RabittMQ? Is it comparable to say a Postgres instance, or is it more or less?
- augusto-moura 4y ago
  Going simpler as possible: Redis has a simple (but extremely powerful) Pub/Sub implementation[1] that should get you going for a long time. Postgres also have a simple notify API[2] you can mix it with your own tables and just "notify" that some changes were made (when people say you can do anything with postgres nowadays they are not joking). You probably can also roll your own implementation in any ACID database. Just keep adding records to an event table and consume them in scheduled batches. Should be more than enough for non real-time applications. [1]: https://redis.io/docs/manual/pubsub/ https://redis.io/docs/manual/pubsub/ [2]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-notify.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-notify.html
  - Havoc 4y ago
    >Redis has a simple (but extremely powerful) Pub/Sub Interesting - I had just assumed everyone is doing MQTT or cloud pub/sub
pvg 4y ago
List of mod comments about why lists of things don't work well as HN posts: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=author%3Adang%20%22lists%20don%27t%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  No, dang says they don't work well, which is not the same thing. Remove the "author=dang" and you can see that it's not a sentiment rarely (ever?) expressed by anyone else.
  - pvg 4y ago
    Remove the "author=dang" Then they wouldn't be mod comments. not a sentiment rarely (ever?) expressed by anyone else. This is unsurprising given other people rarely if ever publicly moderate HN.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
culi 4y ago
Add it to the list? https://ethical.net/resources/ https://ethical.net/resources/ https://switching.software/ https://switching.software/ https://www.privacytools.io/ https://www.privacytools.io/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/alternatives https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/alternatives https://opensourcesoftwaredirectory.com/ https://opensourcesoftwaredirectory.com/ I think if alternativeto.net just adds a setting to only view FLOSS alternatives maybe this genre of websites would be threatened
- culi 4y ago
  https://opensource.builders/ https://opensource.builders/
- remram 4y ago
  That setting exists, you can show only open source, or only proprietary, or only Linux, etc.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  For a more updated version of privacytoolsio: https://www.privacyguides.org/ https://www.privacyguides.org/ (Some history: the privacytoolsio website was created by the subreddit r/privacytoolsio. A while ago the founder was kicked out after being inactive for over a year, but that founder happened to own the website domain and refused to give it to the remaining moderators. The founder also started adding affiliate links into the privacytoolsio website. So the remaining mods decided to rebrand completely, creating a new sub r/privacyguides and a new website as well. You can read more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/pnhn4a/rprivacyguides_privacyguidesorg_what_you_need_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/pnhn4a/rpriv...)
  - culi 4y ago
    Interesting, thanks for the context! Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to edit my original comment, but I'll keep that in mind for next time
behnamoh 4y ago
umm, “mastodon is an open source alternative to Facebook “?
- augusto-moura 4y ago
  Yes? I would put mastodon as a competitor of Facebook, don't you?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - neilsimp1 4y ago
    Isn't it a lot closer to Twitter?
cntrl 4y ago
Brave is listed there as an open source alternative to Firefox (as well as Chrome and Edge). But isn't Firefox (which itself is not listed on this website) open source as well or am I missing something?
- toastal 4y ago
  Perhaps this goes back to the logo having copyright (not Creative Commons) which is why IceWeasel and IceCat were created.
  - btdmaster 4y ago
    https://brave.com/terms-of-use/ https://brave.com/terms-of-use/ > All Brave logos, marks and designations are trademarks or registered trademarks of Brave. All other trademarks mentioned in this website are the property of their respective owners. The trademarks and logos displayed on this website may not be used without the prior written consent of Brave or their respective owners. Portions, features and/or functionality of Brave’s products may be protected under Brave patent applications or patents.
- titaniumtown 4y ago
  Thought this exact thing, sad to see brave being recommended and not firefox itself :(
- turboponyy 4y ago
  Are you implying it's not both an alternative and open-source? ;)
  - cntrl 4y ago
    I'm just wondering why Brave is mentioned and Firefox not, especially since they already mention Firefox (as Brave being an alterantive to it) It kinda implies Firefox not being open source
kodah 4y ago
Can someone explain this to me? > Verdaccio > Open Source Alternative to npm in lieu of https://github.com/npm https://github.com/npm
- augusto-moura 4y ago
  Verdaccio is an NPM registry server implementation, for hosting private packages. NPM doesn't provide an implementation for the server, they have their own closed source version that they provide as a free/tiered SAAS. The CLI and API specification are open source though
pvsukale3 4y ago
I have also been building something similar at https://ossdatabase.com https://ossdatabase.com Recently released code under AGPL-3.(https://github.com/prithvi16/ossdatabase https://github.com/prithvi16/ossdatabase) But I want to go beyond aggregation and add following things - User reviews, ratings - Researcherd guides comparing features in most common usecases - Interviews with Opensource maintainers, founders. - Being able to create collections like awesome lists - Everything being user editable and basic karma system for accepted edits. Edits: Formatting and added links.
- akpa1 4y ago
  You might want to add some tags to the Vaultwarden entry - I was just in the process of submitting it because it wasn't tagged under password managers, when I stumbled across it by accident when looking for the original Bitwarden entry.
- culi 4y ago
  This looks beautiful. Are the alternatives simply listed in order by their GitHub stars? How do you handle projects hosted on Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. Surely it wouldn't be fair to do a 1-1 comparison, right? Have you looked at alternatives to your site like AlternativeTo and LibHunt? Do you plan on using any of that data as well or perhaps even linking to pages on those relevant sites? Sorry for the unsolicited advice, but I feel like being able to take advantage of the work already done by those platforms in some way could be a big step towards setting you apart. Just saying as someone who uses/contributes to AlternativeTo a lot
  - pvsukale3 4y ago
    Thanks. > Are the alternatives simply listed in order by their GitHub stars? No specific algorithm for now, but that is a good idea. Yes, I have seeded the data from multiple open source projects for now. But I will also check how can I leverage APIs or maybe scraping to gather relevant data to this project. Libhunt and Saashub are under CC4 but not alternative.to I guess.
- dizhn 4y ago
mrweasel 4y ago
As others point out, there are a few of these alternatives that are a little off. They're not wrong as such, it's just not the complete picture. Grafana is listed as an New Relic alternative, but if you ever used New Relic to do application monitoring on a Python application I think you would be disappointed. There's a huge difference in being able to view and navigate collected metrics and then just having an agent collect everything and UI that will allow you to pin point exactly where your code is slow.
rubenfiszel 4y ago
Pipedream is listed as an OSS alternative to Integromat ... except it is just the automation that are open-sourced: https://www.opensourcealternative.to/project/Pipedream https://www.opensourcealternative.to/project/Pipedream https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream The platform itself is not even source available. I think it's a bit disingenuous in that case. At Windmill (https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill), we are actually building the OSS platform that you can self-host and that is an actual OSS alternative to ... pipedream.
- klysm 4y ago
  Just fyi your login page layout is busted on my phone.
  - rubenfiszel 4y ago
    Fixed, yeah I don't know why I thought it was a good idea to have the login button be of a fixed size. Thanks!
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- fmajid 4y ago
  Same with Netdata (DataDog alternative) where only the agent seems to be open-sourced (so is DataDog’s BTW). Seems like a bait-and-switch.
  - remram 4y ago
    You are wrong. Netdata does have a paid hosted service, but you can self-host the whole thing.
    - fmajid 4y ago
      Including the cloud component? I can understand a freemium model, but an agent without the analytics service is “free” as in “free puppy”.
cgb_ 4y ago
I love the idea of these crowd-sourced systems, but is there any appetite to open source the data behind them? In theory the collective knowledge of all of these platforms could converge on a single data-source that's freely available to analyse in any way we see fit, but more often the knowledge is behind the platform and ends up gated behind a Pro or commercial edition and the crowd is left to rebuild it again on some other platform...
CrazyGentleMan 4y ago
An Open source alternative to (opensourcealternative.to): https://github.com/SimoMay/find-oss/ https://github.com/SimoMay/find-oss/
firecall 4y ago
I've never found a good alternative to tools like Buffer for social media post scheduling!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
shafyy 4y ago
Cool! Submitted my open source projects Fugu (alternative to Amplitude. Mixpanel, https://github.com/shafy/fugu https://github.com/shafy/fugu) and Mapzy (alternative to Storerocket, https://github.com/mapzy/mapzy https://github.com/mapzy/mapzy).
luoc 4y ago
Anyone here managed to like Odoo? It's the first ERP system I work with and the experience is sobering so far. - no useful documentation aka read the code bro, it's open source - "FIXME don't ever do this" comments all over the code base - no update routine: download source of enterprise edition, patch your private repo, feed it in your CD/CI. I'm pretty sure vulnerabilities get patched quickly all over the world ;) - weird design decisions like undocumented semantics for identifiers (variables, module names etc.) - Python/JS/XML code living in the database (i.e. need the production DB to develop/test) - performance - addons needed for serious business use cases are not open source - code quality of third party addons is a nightmare Maybe this is still harmless compared to its competitors, I don't know...
- mariusmg 4y ago
  Having XML/JSON stored in DB is pretty common actually (sometimes you need to store same/related info with different "schemas"). Storing Python and JS.....WTF?
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    Such systems are usually divided into platform and customization, so that customization can be tweaked without reinstalling the whole thing.
caffeine 4y ago
I’m finding this more useful as a reverse search! “Paid, supported, professional alternative to”
xcambar 4y ago
Sentry is among these products that are open-source but hardly self-hostable. I mean, unless you fancy an Ops team to run your error reporting. But generally speaking, unless you have extreme privacy concerns, the economics favor SaaS subscriptions.
V-2 4y ago
I'm not sure how it works at first glance. OK, let's search for "Word". I'd assume LibreOffice and the like would come up - but instead, I get "WooCommerce" and "Wordle Global, Open Source Alternative to Wordle". I understand apparently this is not how the page is supposed to be used - but isn't it how an average user would use a service named "opensourcealternative.to"? What am I missing?
- HKH2 4y ago
  'office' and 'docs' both have relevant matches.
  - V-2 4y ago
    True, because their descriptions literally contain the words "Office" and "Docs". But one of the alleged alternatives for Docs is Athens Research, which is totally unrelated; there's just a link to its "docs" in the description. These are not the docs you are looking for. And again, "Excel" or "PowerPoint" return zero results. Same goes for "Photoshop". "Windows" returns, among others (also completely unrelated): "Brave Browser" - because the description happens to mention that the browser works on Windows.
    - V-2 4y ago
      I don't want to sound mean, but it really looks like no effort has gone into matching the open source projects with their proprietary equivalents (that they're suggested to replace). And that makes its name essentially misleading. Given the above, the website doesn't appear to be much more than a glorified data dump of open-source projects in general, possibly trying to exploit the "I see open source, I upvote" knee-jerk reaction.
      - HKH2 4y ago
        Yeah it does seem a bit rushed.
harry8 4y ago
Canva, Photoshop, excel, word all returned no results...
ghostfoxgod 4y ago
This is awesome, I am myself jotting down the list of open source alternatives I have tried and planning to try. Some of these lists are available on my blog site https://akashrajpurohit.com/blog/open-source-alternatives-you-must-try-part-1/ https://akashrajpurohit.com/blog/open-source-alternatives-yo... https://akashrajpurohit.com/blog/open-source-alternatives-you-must-try-part-2/ https://akashrajpurohit.com/blog/open-source-alternatives-yo... Planning to write more parts as and when I try more solutions :)
SkipperCat 4y ago
This is a cool site, and I use a lot of these open source products. But let's not forget, when operating at scale, using a commercial version of these products becomes the right choice. While OSS InfluxDB is a great piece of software, we need HA and other features which are only available via their commercial version. You can administer a group of peoples vaults with 1Password, I don't think you can do that with Keepass. I guess all I'm saying is that there is a time and a place for everything. And there's nothing wrong with paying people for good software (or how else would we make a buck).
- josephcsible 4y ago
  The right solution to that problem is to avoid open core. Instead, use products that are fully open source, so that even the "commercial" features are free.
  - SkipperCat 4y ago
    I'd argue that open core products are what keeps open source alive. Without the ability to monetize the enterprise features, there'd be no justification for products like InfluxDB or others to exist.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      But there are a bunch of companies with open source projects that aren't open core, like Red Hat and Grafana.
      - SkipperCat 4y ago
        I thought Grafana was open-core. They're OSS product is in Github - https://github.com/grafana/grafana https://github.com/grafana/grafana and they also offer their enterprise version which requires a paid license. RH is pretty much the same. Maybe my definition of open-core is different than yours.
        4y ago
aasasd 4y ago
The site looks like it was slapped together yesterday. Really light on navigation, in the bad way of me not being able to navigate almost anywhere. I can't actually search for an alternative to a thing that I already use or know, which is the whole premise of sites like these. Of which there are plenty. Basically, just use the old AlternativeTo instead.
gitgud 4y ago
> "Discover 300+ popular open source alternatives to your proprietary SaaS" It's ironic that this site is a closed-source SAAS platform too...
0daystock 4y ago
So the site lists software licenses, type of code used, how many people watch it, how many forks there are, how many open issues there are ... but doesn't actually link to the project? What an odd design.
AishwaryaVenkat 4y ago
Atatus is an alternative to Grafana - open source observability platform. However, open source is not always user-friendly when it comes to alerts and charts

304 points by saikan 4y ago

Very helpful. Thanks!

Are you only listing projects on GitHub (i clicked on a bunch of projects and they all had the GitHub logo)? If so, kinda weird that at the top of the Developer Tools category most of the entries are about GitHub alternatives that anything using them would never show up in the site :-P

josephcsible 4y ago

Why does this contain fauxpen source stuff like Memgraph and open core stuff like GitLab?

andrewstuart2 4y ago
GitLab Community Edition is MIT licensed. I don't know that it gets much more open source than that. I've survived at very very large companies on CE, never needing any of the paid features.
- thayne 4y ago
  not having multiple approvers on merge requests is a pretty big limitation.
  - andrewstuart2 4y ago
    It's pretty trivial to emulate with a bit of code as a bot and the "conversations must be closed" setting. But if you're relying on that feature rather than just agreeing, training, and trust, then I'm also not sure that's the best way to go about it. I'd personally much rather be somewhere where the rule is flexible and can be left to the MR submitter to decide when it's important to have more eyes on a change.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  The existence of paid features at all is exactly what makes it open core.
  - cortesoft 4y ago
    So if a company sells any closed source software, you don’t count any of their open source software as legitimate?
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      Not necessarily. The key is whether the closed-source software is an extension to the open-source software or something completely unrelated to it.
  - pretext-1 4y ago
    Open core is a business model not a license. You can download GitLab CE and use it under MIT license. You can use all the features it contains and do whatever you want with the code. Yes, GitLab Inc. has other products and some of them are paid, but that doesn't change the fact that GitLab CE is open source.

mrintellectual 4y ago

The list of projects seems to be at least partially based on https://github.com/RunaCapital/awesome-oss-alternatives https://github.com/RunaCapital/awesome-oss-alternatives.

victor9000 4y ago
Here's a similar list: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted

A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago

I honestly had no idea Brave was an open source. Why is it being so heavily criticized on HN ( from what I saw whenever it comes up )?

manigandham 4y ago
It's an ad network that replaces ads you get on the website with their own, wrapped up in a fancy token.
yata69420 4y ago
Probably because of https://basicattentiontoken.org/ https://basicattentiontoken.org/ For a group that's largely bet their fortunes on internet companies, it's kind of funny that anything crypto is so toxic here, but that's probably the reason. The actual browser is under good technical stewardship from what I know. It's essentially not-evil Chrome with an optional crypto-for-ads monetization model, a crypto wallet, and some primitive default privacy and adblocking tools. It suffers from the same technical deficiencies as Chrome (installing addons is harder than it should be, addon API is weak compared to firefox, Google controls the "store" for extensions), but I'd recommend it over any other Chromium-based browser.
- themerone 4y ago
  Firefox has adopted the Chrome addon api. There are some difference, such as Chrome's changes that weaken adblockers are not being implemented. The old (insecure) firefox extension api is long gone.
- judge2020 4y ago
  My particular gripe with BAT is noted here[0] and AFAIK nothing has changed; you still have to use their KYC-compliant platform to ever exchange BAT for real-world money, as they'd much rather you re-donate the BAT to websites via brave's reward system instead of ever exchanging for USD. Other problems that they'd had: - were inserting referral tokens into the URL when visiting popular websites, so presumably brave was getting a lot of referral credit[1]. In particular it seems to be bad-faith to inject referral codes since Brave really isn't driving traffic to these sites, unless when you type "crypto" it autocompletes "binance.us". - They've since stopped doing this, but previously tipping BAT to a website or creator meant users would lose that BAT with it basically being held in escrow until the website/creator did their own KYC and redeemed the tokens.[2] 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27549826 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27549826 1: https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caught-adding-its-own-referral-codes-to-some-cryptcurrency-trading-sites/ https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/06/07/brave-browser-caugh... 2: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-browser-no-longer-claims-to-fundraise-on-behalf-of-others-so-thats-nice/ https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...

clircle 4y ago

I just typed in “word” and the results did not come close to my expectations

HKH2 4y ago
Look for 'docs'.

shasheene 4y ago

A much better website is https://alternativeto.net https://alternativeto.net Really great crowd-sourced recommendations with useful reviews. Though while AlternativeTo allows filtering by open-source status, it doesn't do so by license.

0des 4y ago
huh, I had assumed they were the same folks. Thanks for pointing that out, the name is pretty close.
aasasd 4y ago
Yeah, AT managed to gather good non-spammy ratings somehow—even though I do sometimes suspect that certain high ratings are artificial, but those are isolated cases. The site also clearly prioritizes open-source software, raising it even among higher-rated proprietary apps. Since AT is crowdsourced, perhaps instead of discussing yet another list of alternatives, fellow HNers could go upvote software that they already use. Though this does require registration, of course.

lalaithion 4y ago

Also, see https://github.com/jhuangtw/xg2xg https://github.com/jhuangtw/xg2xg, a list of open source alternatives to internal Google tech stacks.

BaronVonSteuben 4y ago

What do people use as an alternative to SQS? I've had Kafka mentioned a few times but that's way heavier/more complicated than I need. Just a simple queue is perfect, and SQS' API is gloriously simple.

manigandham 4y ago
If SQS meets your needs then you don't need an alternative, but there are Azure Storage Queues and GCP PubSub are the closest.
erikcw 4y ago
RabbitMQ is a more natural alternative to SQS than Kafka I’d say. Redis can also be leveraged as a message broker depending on your needs.
- BaronVonSteuben 4y ago
  Rabbit is definitely interesting. How is the maintenance/management on RabittMQ? Is it comparable to say a Postgres instance, or is it more or less?
augusto-moura 4y ago
Going simpler as possible: Redis has a simple (but extremely powerful) Pub/Sub implementation[1] that should get you going for a long time. Postgres also have a simple notify API[2] you can mix it with your own tables and just "notify" that some changes were made (when people say you can do anything with postgres nowadays they are not joking). You probably can also roll your own implementation in any ACID database. Just keep adding records to an event table and consume them in scheduled batches. Should be more than enough for non real-time applications. [1]: https://redis.io/docs/manual/pubsub/ https://redis.io/docs/manual/pubsub/ [2]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-notify.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-notify.html
- Havoc 4y ago
  >Redis has a simple (but extremely powerful) Pub/Sub Interesting - I had just assumed everyone is doing MQTT or cloud pub/sub

pvg 4y ago

List of mod comments about why lists of things don't work well as HN posts: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=author%3Adang%20%22lists%20don%27t%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

KennyBlanken 4y ago
No, dang says they don't work well, which is not the same thing. Remove the "author=dang" and you can see that it's not a sentiment rarely (ever?) expressed by anyone else.
- pvg 4y ago
  Remove the "author=dang" Then they wouldn't be mod comments. not a sentiment rarely (ever?) expressed by anyone else. This is unsurprising given other people rarely if ever publicly moderate HN.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

culi 4y ago

Add it to the list? https://ethical.net/resources/ https://ethical.net/resources/ https://switching.software/ https://switching.software/ https://www.privacytools.io/ https://www.privacytools.io/ https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/alternatives https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/alternatives https://opensourcesoftwaredirectory.com/ https://opensourcesoftwaredirectory.com/ I think if alternativeto.net just adds a setting to only view FLOSS alternatives maybe this genre of websites would be threatened

culi 4y ago
https://opensource.builders/ https://opensource.builders/
remram 4y ago
That setting exists, you can show only open source, or only proprietary, or only Linux, etc.
woojoo666 4y ago
For a more updated version of privacytoolsio: https://www.privacyguides.org/ https://www.privacyguides.org/ (Some history: the privacytoolsio website was created by the subreddit r/privacytoolsio. A while ago the founder was kicked out after being inactive for over a year, but that founder happened to own the website domain and refused to give it to the remaining moderators. The founder also started adding affiliate links into the privacytoolsio website. So the remaining mods decided to rebrand completely, creating a new sub r/privacyguides and a new website as well. You can read more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/pnhn4a/rprivacyguides_privacyguidesorg_what_you_need_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacyGuides/comments/pnhn4a/rpriv...)
- culi 4y ago
  Interesting, thanks for the context! Unfortunately I don't seem to be able to edit my original comment, but I'll keep that in mind for next time

behnamoh 4y ago

umm, “mastodon is an open source alternative to Facebook “?

augusto-moura 4y ago
Yes? I would put mastodon as a competitor of Facebook, don't you?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- neilsimp1 4y ago
  Isn't it a lot closer to Twitter?

cntrl 4y ago

Brave is listed there as an open source alternative to Firefox (as well as Chrome and Edge). But isn't Firefox (which itself is not listed on this website) open source as well or am I missing something?

toastal 4y ago
Perhaps this goes back to the logo having copyright (not Creative Commons) which is why IceWeasel and IceCat were created.
- btdmaster 4y ago
  https://brave.com/terms-of-use/ https://brave.com/terms-of-use/ > All Brave logos, marks and designations are trademarks or registered trademarks of Brave. All other trademarks mentioned in this website are the property of their respective owners. The trademarks and logos displayed on this website may not be used without the prior written consent of Brave or their respective owners. Portions, features and/or functionality of Brave’s products may be protected under Brave patent applications or patents.
titaniumtown 4y ago
Thought this exact thing, sad to see brave being recommended and not firefox itself :(
turboponyy 4y ago
Are you implying it's not both an alternative and open-source? ;)
- cntrl 4y ago
  I'm just wondering why Brave is mentioned and Firefox not, especially since they already mention Firefox (as Brave being an alterantive to it) It kinda implies Firefox not being open source

kodah 4y ago

Can someone explain this to me? > Verdaccio > Open Source Alternative to npm in lieu of https://github.com/npm https://github.com/npm

augusto-moura 4y ago
Verdaccio is an NPM registry server implementation, for hosting private packages. NPM doesn't provide an implementation for the server, they have their own closed source version that they provide as a free/tiered SAAS. The CLI and API specification are open source though

pvsukale3 4y ago

I have also been building something similar at https://ossdatabase.com https://ossdatabase.com Recently released code under AGPL-3.(https://github.com/prithvi16/ossdatabase https://github.com/prithvi16/ossdatabase) But I want to go beyond aggregation and add following things - User reviews, ratings - Researcherd guides comparing features in most common usecases - Interviews with Opensource maintainers, founders. - Being able to create collections like awesome lists - Everything being user editable and basic karma system for accepted edits. Edits: Formatting and added links.

akpa1 4y ago
You might want to add some tags to the Vaultwarden entry - I was just in the process of submitting it because it wasn't tagged under password managers, when I stumbled across it by accident when looking for the original Bitwarden entry.
culi 4y ago
This looks beautiful. Are the alternatives simply listed in order by their GitHub stars? How do you handle projects hosted on Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. Surely it wouldn't be fair to do a 1-1 comparison, right? Have you looked at alternatives to your site like AlternativeTo and LibHunt? Do you plan on using any of that data as well or perhaps even linking to pages on those relevant sites? Sorry for the unsolicited advice, but I feel like being able to take advantage of the work already done by those platforms in some way could be a big step towards setting you apart. Just saying as someone who uses/contributes to AlternativeTo a lot
- pvsukale3 4y ago
  Thanks. > Are the alternatives simply listed in order by their GitHub stars? No specific algorithm for now, but that is a good idea. Yes, I have seeded the data from multiple open source projects for now. But I will also check how can I leverage APIs or maybe scraping to gather relevant data to this project. Libhunt and Saashub are under CC4 but not alternative.to I guess.
dizhn 4y ago

mrweasel 4y ago

As others point out, there are a few of these alternatives that are a little off. They're not wrong as such, it's just not the complete picture. Grafana is listed as an New Relic alternative, but if you ever used New Relic to do application monitoring on a Python application I think you would be disappointed. There's a huge difference in being able to view and navigate collected metrics and then just having an agent collect everything and UI that will allow you to pin point exactly where your code is slow.

rubenfiszel 4y ago

Pipedream is listed as an OSS alternative to Integromat ... except it is just the automation that are open-sourced: https://www.opensourcealternative.to/project/Pipedream https://www.opensourcealternative.to/project/Pipedream https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream https://github.com/PipedreamHQ/pipedream The platform itself is not even source available. I think it's a bit disingenuous in that case. At Windmill (https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill https://github.com/windmill-labs/windmill), we are actually building the OSS platform that you can self-host and that is an actual OSS alternative to ... pipedream.

klysm 4y ago
Just fyi your login page layout is busted on my phone.
- rubenfiszel 4y ago
  Fixed, yeah I don't know why I thought it was a good idea to have the login button be of a fixed size. Thanks!
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
fmajid 4y ago
Same with Netdata (DataDog alternative) where only the agent seems to be open-sourced (so is DataDog’s BTW). Seems like a bait-and-switch.
- remram 4y ago
  You are wrong. Netdata does have a paid hosted service, but you can self-host the whole thing.
  - fmajid 4y ago
    Including the cloud component? I can understand a freemium model, but an agent without the analytics service is “free” as in “free puppy”.

cgb_ 4y ago

I love the idea of these crowd-sourced systems, but is there any appetite to open source the data behind them? In theory the collective knowledge of all of these platforms could converge on a single data-source that's freely available to analyse in any way we see fit, but more often the knowledge is behind the platform and ends up gated behind a Pro or commercial edition and the crowd is left to rebuild it again on some other platform...

CrazyGentleMan 4y ago

An Open source alternative to (opensourcealternative.to): https://github.com/SimoMay/find-oss/ https://github.com/SimoMay/find-oss/

firecall 4y ago

I've never found a good alternative to tools like Buffer for social media post scheduling!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

shafyy 4y ago

Cool! Submitted my open source projects Fugu (alternative to Amplitude. Mixpanel, https://github.com/shafy/fugu https://github.com/shafy/fugu) and Mapzy (alternative to Storerocket, https://github.com/mapzy/mapzy https://github.com/mapzy/mapzy).

luoc 4y ago

Anyone here managed to like Odoo? It's the first ERP system I work with and the experience is sobering so far. - no useful documentation aka read the code bro, it's open source - "FIXME don't ever do this" comments all over the code base - no update routine: download source of enterprise edition, patch your private repo, feed it in your CD/CI. I'm pretty sure vulnerabilities get patched quickly all over the world ;) - weird design decisions like undocumented semantics for identifiers (variables, module names etc.) - Python/JS/XML code living in the database (i.e. need the production DB to develop/test) - performance - addons needed for serious business use cases are not open source - code quality of third party addons is a nightmare Maybe this is still harmless compared to its competitors, I don't know...

mariusmg 4y ago
Having XML/JSON stored in DB is pretty common actually (sometimes you need to store same/related info with different "schemas"). Storing Python and JS.....WTF?
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  Such systems are usually divided into platform and customization, so that customization can be tweaked without reinstalling the whole thing.

caffeine 4y ago

I’m finding this more useful as a reverse search! “Paid, supported, professional alternative to”

xcambar 4y ago

Sentry is among these products that are open-source but hardly self-hostable. I mean, unless you fancy an Ops team to run your error reporting. But generally speaking, unless you have extreme privacy concerns, the economics favor SaaS subscriptions.

V-2 4y ago

I'm not sure how it works at first glance. OK, let's search for "Word". I'd assume LibreOffice and the like would come up - but instead, I get "WooCommerce" and "Wordle Global, Open Source Alternative to Wordle". I understand apparently this is not how the page is supposed to be used - but isn't it how an average user would use a service named "opensourcealternative.to"? What am I missing?

HKH2 4y ago
'office' and 'docs' both have relevant matches.
- V-2 4y ago
  True, because their descriptions literally contain the words "Office" and "Docs". But one of the alleged alternatives for Docs is Athens Research, which is totally unrelated; there's just a link to its "docs" in the description. These are not the docs you are looking for. And again, "Excel" or "PowerPoint" return zero results. Same goes for "Photoshop". "Windows" returns, among others (also completely unrelated): "Brave Browser" - because the description happens to mention that the browser works on Windows.
  - V-2 4y ago
    I don't want to sound mean, but it really looks like no effort has gone into matching the open source projects with their proprietary equivalents (that they're suggested to replace). And that makes its name essentially misleading. Given the above, the website doesn't appear to be much more than a glorified data dump of open-source projects in general, possibly trying to exploit the "I see open source, I upvote" knee-jerk reaction.
    - HKH2 4y ago
      Yeah it does seem a bit rushed.

harry8 4y ago

Canva, Photoshop, excel, word all returned no results...

ghostfoxgod 4y ago

This is awesome, I am myself jotting down the list of open source alternatives I have tried and planning to try. Some of these lists are available on my blog site https://akashrajpurohit.com/blog/open-source-alternatives-you-must-try-part-1/ https://akashrajpurohit.com/blog/open-source-alternatives-yo... https://akashrajpurohit.com/blog/open-source-alternatives-you-must-try-part-2/ https://akashrajpurohit.com/blog/open-source-alternatives-yo... Planning to write more parts as and when I try more solutions :)

SkipperCat 4y ago

This is a cool site, and I use a lot of these open source products. But let's not forget, when operating at scale, using a commercial version of these products becomes the right choice. While OSS InfluxDB is a great piece of software, we need HA and other features which are only available via their commercial version. You can administer a group of peoples vaults with 1Password, I don't think you can do that with Keepass. I guess all I'm saying is that there is a time and a place for everything. And there's nothing wrong with paying people for good software (or how else would we make a buck).

josephcsible 4y ago
The right solution to that problem is to avoid open core. Instead, use products that are fully open source, so that even the "commercial" features are free.
- SkipperCat 4y ago
  I'd argue that open core products are what keeps open source alive. Without the ability to monetize the enterprise features, there'd be no justification for products like InfluxDB or others to exist.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    But there are a bunch of companies with open source projects that aren't open core, like Red Hat and Grafana.
    - SkipperCat 4y ago
      I thought Grafana was open-core. They're OSS product is in Github - https://github.com/grafana/grafana https://github.com/grafana/grafana and they also offer their enterprise version which requires a paid license. RH is pretty much the same. Maybe my definition of open-core is different than yours.
      - 4y ago

aasasd 4y ago

The site looks like it was slapped together yesterday. Really light on navigation, in the bad way of me not being able to navigate almost anywhere. I can't actually search for an alternative to a thing that I already use or know, which is the whole premise of sites like these. Of which there are plenty. Basically, just use the old AlternativeTo instead.

gitgud 4y ago

> "Discover 300+ popular open source alternatives to your proprietary SaaS" It's ironic that this site is a closed-source SAAS platform too...

0daystock 4y ago

So the site lists software licenses, type of code used, how many people watch it, how many forks there are, how many open issues there are ... but doesn't actually link to the project? What an odd design.

AishwaryaVenkat 4y ago

Atatus is an alternative to Grafana - open source observability platform. However, open source is not always user-friendly when it comes to alerts and charts