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KronisLV
executesorder66
N.B. KeePassX hasn't been maintained since 2016!
Use https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc instead. (They are compatible)
KronisLV
Fair point! I actually still use KeePass on some machines that are stuck on Windows, as well as run the original KeePass on Linux ones as well thanks to Mono (IIRC).
npteljes
Bitwarden for password manager also. They specifically endorse enterprise usage.
andrewzah
For selfhosting bitwarden, I recommend vaultwarden [0] (previously known as bitwarden_rs).
xtracto
Even though it is not as general as some of those, I think https://fineract.apache.org/ should be in the list: An Open Source Loan Servicing System.
Cthulhu_
There's one of those speech bubbles down below which you could probably use to get in touch with the authors, not sure if they will read this comment section.
deeptichopra
Great list, thanks so much. Will review these and add!
dotCOMmie
Looker / Tableau alternative - Redash ( https://redash.io/ )
federation
Set to be end of life in November after Databricks Acquired it. Try Superset / Preset https://preset.io/
justinclift
Don't count Redash out yet. ;)
Although Databricks acquired it and is EOL-ing the hosted platform at the end of November, the main piece people care about and use is OSS.
There are people working to spin up a new hosted platform around that OSS piece, to continue things on and provide continuity to existing users.
Saying that as I'm one of the people involved, and used to work for Redash prior to the Databricks acquisition.
stephane-klein
Do you have an opinion about https://github.com/metabase/metabase ?
g19fanatic
app.keeweb.info for a great pw manager off of keepass too.. Its my goto for every platform!
artemonster
Everytime I look into B2B software space (I am a complete outsider, btw), I see that here and there always pop up some new company, offering something similar to competitors and what can be stiched together using open source (and almost free, not counting the support) tools. How these companies thrive? Why customers keep buying new stuff, when there are solutions already to most of the business neeeds out there (and even free ones!). Is this still the case of idiot-managers doing decisions like "nobody was fired for buying IBM" (and now SAP, salesforce, <yourcompany>) or am I not seeing something? Genuine qustions, really interested.
pembrook
I think a good way to get an understanding of this is to start a company yourself.
You’ll quickly learn why businesses make the decision to pay for software instead of cobbling together open source.
Let’s say you’re a small, but growing company doing $2M ARR. You absolutely could run your email marketing using an open source tool hooked up to Amazon SES and save a thousand bucks a month over something like Mailchimp.
But the problem is, it’ll take you up to a week to get setup (thousands of dollars lost already) and then none of your employees will understand how to send emails with it (thousands of dollars wasted in training). Once they do understand how to use it, it will likely still be slower than a dummy-proof visual UI that has been battle tested on thousands of customers instead of an esoteric open source solution. If it wastes 8 hours of employee time per month, that’s another $1k a month lost.
Then when something goes wrong, which it always does, it’ll require expensive developer time (likely costing the company $1000-$1500/day per engineer all-in) instead of a simple support phone call.
And when you realize the open source version is missing a feature you need, you have to build it yourself, of which any trivial engineering task inside the company will cost at least $5k in employee time. Not to mention the cost to maintain the feature when the open source team breaks it with an update.
So, you’re already in the hole and losing money compared to Mailchimp.
This says nothing about the opportunity cost of engineering time that could have been spent serving your own customers, allowing you to generate more revenue.
You can generate revenue to infinity, but can only cut costs to zero. For a growing company, time spent on cost saving over making new sales is likely time wasted.
xtracto
Let me give you a counterpoint on this: non-developed countries (non 1st world countires?).
A startup in say, Mexico or LatAm will look at the OpenSource version of say Business Intelligence applications (Metabase, Superset in the link), then look at the commercial versions of them (Tableau, Lookr). With the price needed to pay for the commercial versions, the startup can hire 2 or 3 developers (at local rates) to do whatever improvements they need to the open source application.
Something similar happened to me with Jumio about 5 years ago: I wanted to use it. I spoke with their sales 2 or 3 times in 4 years. THe problem is that, every "verification" was costing more than $1 USD... for less than that cost, my company could hire 3 people a month to do manual verification and more (considering the cost of hiring + cost to the company, including Mexico's hefty employer costs). It never made economic sense to do implement automation.
ASalazarMX
Mexican here. We used to run our own mail server ten years ago: it was fast, each mailbox had a lot of space, we ran our own mail campaigns, in general it was awesome... until it wasn't.
Doing your own maintenance, antivirus, spam detection can be a demanding job, but getting out of a blacklist is ten times worse. We gladly pay Google Workspaces to leave that suffering to the specialists, we couldn't do it better if we tried our best.
You either pay with time and work, or you pay with money. Sometimes spending the money is the better trade off.
typhonius
This is where the maxim of open source being 'free as in puppies not free as in beer/lunch' comes from.
I started my career in open source and still strongly believe in FOSS tenets, but enterprises are looking more to de-risk their projects and platforms.
Risk is reduced when you have a vendor you can hold accountable for issues in the product, hence making proprietary solutions (and sometimes open source but wrapped in enterprise support solutions) the only viable choice for a business.
Andrew_nenakhov
Any luck holding Microsoft, Google or Apple accountable for issues in their operating systems?
Icathian
While I understand and generally agree with your points, I do find the idea of "holding a vendor accountable" to be more of a philosophy than something I've generally witnessed happen in real life. At some point that needs to stop being weighed on the scales when doing "build vs buy" math for any but the largest companies or most attentive vendors.
agentdrtran
“free as in puppies” is an excellent phrase
yakshaving_jgt
> If it wastes 8 hours of employee time per month, that’s another $1k a month lost… it’ll require expensive developer time (likely costing the company $1000-$1500/day per engineer all-in)
That's not universally true, of course. That money would buy you a week of developer time in most of Europe, and even a month of developer time in some developing economies.
KronisLV
Pitching in to confirm - currently i work as a full stack dev in Latvia with 5 years of experience and a Master's degree, my net salary is around 1500 euros per month.
Most SaaS offerings without free tiers indeed are unlikely to be used.
I even had to buy the JetBrains tools myself to be able to navigate 1M SLoC Java codebases easily, refactor with confidence, whilst not resorting to piracy like some of my countrymen do. Even if definitely worth it, i still had to look at the price tag for a while, seeing as it's essentially food for a month or two: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#personal?billing=yearly
Developer salaries vary wildly over the world, though i guess some SaaS solutions also do location based pricing, which may or may not have historically worked.
pembrook
> That money would buy you a week of developer time in most of Europe
That's only true if you live in Poland and also ignore the all-in cost of your employees. A good rule of thumb is to assume 2-3x salary for the all-in cost of having a workforce.
fnomnom
if you look at the numbers raw it might be salary for a week but assuming your developer has stuff on his/her plate and this stuff actually will make you more money in the long run (why would they be employed by you otherwise?) its more than their raw salary and the cost of hardware and rent. opportunity cost.
jasode
>Is this still the case of idiot-managers doing decisions like "nobody was fired for buying IBM" (and now SAP, salesforce,
Enterprise software like SAP and Salesforce are gigantic comprehensive business process management tools for Fortune 1000 companies that can't be replicated by stitching together open source projects.
Even tech companies with expert domain knowledge of software programming like Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, etc all buy SAP licenses to use. Google recently switched from Oracle Financials to SAP. None of those tech companies are strangers to the open source ecosystem and yet they pay millions every year in SAP licenses.
Yes, a small business might be able to use an open source accounting package instead of paying $150 for Intuit QuickBooks. In contrast, no free software has the same scope and integration of SAP to save $millions.
Analogous situation with GIMP vs Photoshop. Why do so many pay for Photoshop when GIMP is free? Because as great as GIMP is... it is still missing many features that Photoshop has had for years. CMYK color support, layer effects, latest algorithmic filters, action macros without requiring script programming, etc.
This is the problem with most of these "open source alternatives to $TOOLS$" type of lists: they usually don't tell you what critical features are missing that prevent them from being realistic substitutes.
xvilka
Gigantic part of products like SAP etc (maybe the main part) is their integration with local standards and legislation in every jurisdiction the company operates. Yes, writing code that can substitute their products is probably easy. Knowing what exactly to write is hard, especially for multinationals.
gmueckl
Another big part is the under the hood flexibility, at least in SAP. What you usually see as a user is a specific configuration of the package that has been adapted to your company's workflows. There is a lot of domain knowledge and implementation effort hidden within that configurability.
Radim
I live on both sides of this divide, so maybe I can offer my 2 cents:
* Created & maintain Gensim and other open source, used by thousands of companies for free.
* Created & sell an (unrelated) B2B product.
Yes, I've had B2B prospects who thought they could "stitch my product together using open source".
These people are invariably either low budget & high-maintenance, or unsophisticated = don't realize how much work the "just stitching" part is. Plus how little the stitched-together-from-open-source part actually is of the whole.
Good riddance of the former – go ahead and use open source, god speed. Your time is free, mine is not. The latter often come back after being burned & learning the ropes.
Maybe it helps to think of it this way: savvy companies are much more risk-averse than your typical open source hacker. They price in risk into their decision making. So your assertion of "almost free" is the root of the issue: a business sees the lack of business scaffolding (stability, continuity, legal, management…) and thinks "Expensive! We'll have to do this ourselves! Headache! Liability! Extra cost!".
Sure, "free code" helps, everybody likes free, but the code is not the only consideration.
carschno
This sounds so familiar. I have worked in several startups that were commercializing NLP-based solutions for different problems. The approach of management (although relatively educated in the field, but obviously not knowledgeable in everything) was essentially expecting from their research engineers:
- look into state-of-the-art related to our problem - think very hard about how to apply the academic state-of-the-art to our problem - stitch a fully fletched software solution together
The problem obviously emerged reliably in the last step, which was supposed to take negligible time and should be done by more junior team members (because they were not smart enough for step 2).
The result was a bunch of prototypes running in production, and huge costs for keeping the whole thing somehow running.
hdjjhhvvhga
It's not so much about being open source or not, but rather how easy it is to set up, integrate and maintain. People know this so many companies offer their products as open source plus a nice hosted (usually marketed as "cloud") version for easy access. So your choice is between two clicks and paying a few bucks using company card vs. spending a few hours or in complex cases days dealing with setup, resolving dependencies, solving any problems that arise when you deal with any complex piece of software and so on. Moreover, you need to maintain it yourself, so again you have a choice of updating it with each new version to stay up to date, without any guarantee that there are no problems with each update, or withhold the updates - but then you risk either a security incident or delaying it so long that updating gets difficult. So for non-essential services it's a no-brainer, you just pay a bit and forget it. Especially if it's open source so in the worst case you can just migrate to a self-hosted solution as nobody holds your data (incl. configurations etc.) hostage.
It's quite different with core and expensive proprietary services though. In this case you better think and calculate everything precisely as you may regret going with a proprietary solution in the long run and switching can be painful.
rozenmd
I built a website monitoring service (last I checked, 191 alternatives on AlternativeTo).
Customers really really really don't want to have to run their own solution. They want to be able to pay someone to make the pain go away.
(https://onlineornot.com if you're curious)
TAForObvReasons
I personally feel that uptime monitoring, status pages and similar solutions should always involve a third party. You can run your own service, but you would have to trust your service to be working properly. And in the exact cases where uptime monitoring is relevant, you may end up facing issues with your own monitoring service.
kaloryfer
"Rated 5 stars by the founder, and his mates" that's so funny. ;)
snowwrestler
This question may be easier to understand in the general case: why don’t people do everything themselves?
Why don’t people paint their own houses? Why don’t people fix their own cars? Why don’t people sew their own clothes? Why don’t people cook their own food?
Of course a lot of people do do these things themselves! Just like a lot of people do use free and/or open source software tools.
But a lot of people don’t do these things, at least not all of them, and probably not all the time. If you can think of the reasons you pay for things you might be able to do yourself, you can start to understand why a business does too. It usually comes down to opportunity cost and specialization—answering the question “how is my limited time best spent?”
input_sh
Not enough resources? I work as a sysadmin in an org that highly prefers self-hosting (paid or non-paid, doesn't really matter). I spend a fairly considerable amount of time on updating services, updating plugins for our services, making sure backups work, integrating our SSO, testing updates on non-live environments etc etc.
You can't just set it and forget it. When you approach a dozen or so self-hosted projects, you have to dedicate resources to keep everything running and up to date. Therefore, we consciously off-load some of the stuff to third parties — sometimes just for a couple of rough months, sometimes for far too long, sometimes permanently. It's far from being our only responsibility.
handrous
I've worked at a couple small companies that strongly prefer self-hosting services that aren't core to their business. I'm at one now, in fact (though it's not nearly as bad as the first one). My conclusion from these experiences is that it's almost always a bad idea. It's a waste of money if you have people dedicated to managing them, and if you distribute the tasks to people who'd otherwise be working on your product(s)—even if their contributions to that would also look like sysadmin/ops work or whatever—then you're engaging in pointless distraction.
Some managers/owners seemingly don't mind spending $4,000+/m in payroll to chase $2,000/m savings in paid services, though, for whatever reason.
I say, just pay the $$-$$$/month for each thing, and be done with it. If paying for the service isn't worth it, paying someone to manage the tool internally almost certainly isn't, either, so prefer attempting to do without it over that option.
[EDIT] obviously, this can change with scale. If you're a huge company then putting an average of 1/4 of the hours for five sysadmins to managing a self-hosted chat tool can absolutely save you lots of money over paying for one—provided the reliability's at least as good. A small slip on that and you're back on the wrong side of things.
kilroy123
Interesting, I've always worked at places that prefer to pay someone else for the trouble and use a ton of third-party tools for all the things.
In the end, do you think the self-hosting route is worth all the trouble and costs?
input_sh
It's certainly cheaper to have a couple of sysadmins, but then again, it depends on how valuable is the stuff you're dealing with. Small web agency? Probably not. Supporting dozens of journalists (like my org)? Absolutely.
There are also trade-offs. A few sysadmins can't host emails against hostile (sometimes state-sponsored) parties like Google can. We can't roll out a better messaging service than Signal. We could roll out our own VPN, but if the goal is getting lost in the noise, you want a popular VPN, not routing journalists' traffic through unique IPs.
On the other hand, just Nextcloud and GitLab (two fairly common services) require about 10h/month if you don't want to be major versions behind or miss security patches in minor versions.
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skyfaller
Some of these "open source" options are not really open source.
- Outline uses the Business Source License 1.1, which eventually becomes open source (Apache 2) four years after each release. https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE
- Invoice Ninja uses Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2), which allows you to host it for yourself, but not for other people. https://github.com/invoiceninja/invoiceninja/blob/master/LIC...
Source code available is not the same thing as open source.
janober
Also https://n8n.io is not OSI approved open-source, it is rather https://faircode.io licensed instead. Disclaimer: I am the founder
curtis3389
I'm actually not sure if the 2 cases you cited actually violate the OSI's Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/docs/osd
Anyone care to clarify? I know that open source != free software, and you can read about that on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Open_source_as_a_t...
yellowapple
IIRC the OSI has outright stated that the Elastic License ain't open source. Not sure about that first one, though.
xtracto
Right, they should also note the "freemium" ones like Odoo, which has a botchered "Open Source" version vs the Enterprise version.
Tajnymag
Open Source Browser Alternative: Brave
Really? No other browser comes to mind?
pratio
Haha yes, I didn't notice that firefox and chromium aren't mentioned at all
deeptichopra
Yep, sorry. Made more sense to remove the browser category, so I've done that now.
koilke
How about Bitwarden for password manager?
vsnf
It would be helpful to list what you consider to be the primary commercial solutions in each category. A lot of these categories I am unfamilar with by name but would understand if I saw some concrete companies or products listed alongside them.
deeptichopra
Yep absolutely!
We already have that. For eg: https://www.btw.so/open-source-alternatives/slack-alternativ...
vsnf
Yeah, I noticed that actually. The search bar is pretty good at recognizing the principal competitors.
But when I go to, say, https://www.btw.so/open-source-alternatives/api-documentatio..., no where on that page does the word "Swagger" appear. Same story for https://www.btw.so/open-source-alternatives/business-communi... and Slack.
It seems like you already have the data, so it would just be a matter of finding the right UI for it.
Edit:
Now that I look real closely, I see in a tiny box on each alternative what the each thing competes with. I guess that works. Kind of obscure, though.
pinky07
You mentioned Odoo in CRM, but Odoo has apps in a lot of extra categories (that are not yet listed): - ERP: https://odoo.com (alternative to Ms. Dynamics, SAP) - Website Builder: https://www.odoo.com/app/website (alternative to Wix, SquareSpace) - POS: https://www.odoo.com/app/point-of-sale-shop (alternative to VendHQ, LightSpeed) - Kanban & Project: https://www.odoo.com/app/project - Human Resources / HR: https://www.odoo.com/app/employees (alternative to SuccessFactors, BambooHR) - Manufacturing - MES: https://www.odoo.com/app/manufacturing - Invoicing: https://www.odoo.com/app/invoicing (alternative to bill.com)
throwaway744678
Odoo (core) is indeed open-source, but some of the apps (modules) you mentioned are part of the "Enterprise" which require you to buy a licence.
Disclaimer: happy (paying) Odoo customer!
SylvieLorxu
Why is Matomo not in the Analytics category but listed below "Check out alternatives to popular commercial products"? Matomo is Open Source too?
(Also, "Open Source" is not the opposite of "commercial")
deeptichopra
Fixed this, thanks!
edhelas
Regarding the IM/Slack alternatives you can maybe consider adding Movim ( https://movim.eu/ ). Fully based on XMPP with plenty of features already packed in. It can easily be deployed on a simple web-server.
PS: I'm the author and maintainer
dinedal
It's weird that Node-RED is listed as closed source software? But it is open source? https://github.com/node-red
deeptichopra
Thanks for pointing this out, fixed!
majormjr
It's also marked as not self hostable despite the comment above mentioning it running on Raspberry Pis.
dgb23
Under Content Management System there is OctoberCMS listed.
Their LICENCE.md:
https://github.com/octobercms/october/blob/develop/LICENSE.m...
Not sure if this counts as open source. Around here there is a stricter notion of what open source means I think.
deeptichopra
Thanks! Removed October CMS, and added https://github.com/wintercms/winter
pbreit
An exhaustive list is totally useless. The question is the handful of options that are credibly viable.
deeptichopra
We've narrowed it down to just the top 2-3 options in each category. :)
robjan
Is this curated based on experience or some metric?
pratio
You guys are using cloudinary to server images it seems which is blocked by most adblocker lists because it's to serve video ads a lot. Assets seemed to be served under https://res.cloudinary.com/adaface so I can't unblock just your one company.
Great effort though, seems similar to github awesome lists. I use https://github.com/topics/awesome to always get the latest ones
arcturus17
Damn, I just built a web app that uses Cloudinary for image management and storage… Is this widely known? I use an adblocker and never saw the issue in dev.
pratio
Not sure, I use pi-Hole and it haven't manually added it there. https://github.com/anudeepND/whitelist/issues/56. It seems that they've added it to the whitelist, maybe you know someone in your network that uses pi-hole and can verify.
pratio
But as you can see here, Cloudinary supports serving ads, So it'll be present in the private lists that are being used by a lot of ad-blockers. https://cloudinary.com/documentation/video_player_ads_moneti...
fnomnom
s3 is also used to deliver ads. so do you block *.amazonaws.com ?
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