this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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Hey, community :)

I run a website that showcases the best open-source companies. Recently, I've added a new feature that filters self-hosted tools and presents them in a searchable format. Although there are other options available, like Awesome-Selfhosted, I found it difficult to find what I needed there, so I decided to display the information in a more digestible format.

You can check out the list here: https://openalternative.co/self-hosted

Let me know if there’s anything else I should add to the list.

Thanks!

top 37 comments
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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

Why does it list Gitea instead of Forgejo?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

One thing I would like to see is a way to distinguish which apps do Real™ Open Source vs fakie open source. For example, I see Joplin on there saying "Your secure, open-source note-taking companion". I guess that's technically true at this point in time, but they also force contributors to sign a CLA so they have the option to pull the rug later on. (Something which does happen.)

They even say so explicitly:

This is necessary so that if we ever want to change the license again we are able to do so

https://joplinapp.org/news/20221221-agpl/#what-does-it-change-for-developers

And fine, if they want to do that it's up to them. I'd just like a quick way to tell the difference between open source 😒 and Open Source 😄.

simpsons

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Can you change the color of the ad badge? I'm fine with ads, but it blends in too well :/

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

In addition to other suggestions, the cards need to show what they're alternative to without clicking.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

It's really surprising how fast people forget about the shady shit rustdesk has done.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 31 minutes ago

Near as I understand it: years ago some dumb engineering decisions were made, acknowledged, and corrected. Is there some recent scandal I'm out of the loop on?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I don't see any Fediverse platforms on there, how would you feel about adding them? Seems like they'd fit.

https://openalternative.co/categories/social-media

Could add Lemmy, Mastodon, MBin, PieFed, PixelFed, Loops, PeerTube, NodeBB...

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

I'm tired of Cloudflare ... 😔

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago

Yeah I havent been able to load the cf verification on my android for like over a week now lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

I wish more software wasn’t “hosted” these days.

I miss app ass apps.

Don’t mind me. I’m just feeling old.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Hosted apps means you can use them on multiple devices. Otherwise, I have to wait until I get home, power up my laptop, wait for the OS to boot, wait for the app to load, then do the thing I wanted to do.

Any thoughts on how to solve the data sync problem without hosting? I guess I remember some apps doing a local network sync to get data to multiple devices. I kinda remember having problems with that not working all the time....

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 hour ago

Very cool. Would it be silly/out of scope to have cli and/or tui programs? EG cat, bat, grep, ripgrep, gitui, etc?

[–] [email protected] 45 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Love the list, but scrolling through, the one liners don't mean much for a lot of these.

The descriptions are just too short and vague to even understand what a lot of them actually do.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Noted! I have longer descriptions in the db, but didn't want to bloat the listings. Will try with a longer description soon.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

It's a tough balance, you don't want a whole page for each one. Maybe if there was a clear list of tags so it's easier to understand even what category they're talking about?

For example:
Penpot
Design freedom meets open-source collaboration

I really don't know what this product category even is. Is it for web layout? Is it a drawing program? Is it for CAD?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

Fair point. I'll try to add more context to the listings. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

personally I love it when websites solve this problem with hover hints, theres something satisfying about seeing a paragraph of text on hover that just answers all my questions. not sure how that'd work for people viewing on mobile though

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 hours ago

Maybe consider collapsible dropdowns or similar for the extra information

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 hours ago

A "more" button after the one liner would be very nice. Or make the one-liner a link that gives a longer description.

Thanks for the work. I've bookmarked it!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 hours ago

I think it would be important to include current version information on the cards. For example, Pocketbase is still very much in beta and they make breaking changes pretty frequently.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

Never heard of 99% in that list.

Also, Gitea should not be there. It is a corporate -owned open core project that was hostilely taken away from the community.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

While I don't disagree with your sentiment, it seems like this list is just "self hosted open source alternatives". Even if there are better options, Gitea still falls under that definition, no?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

It falls under self hosted, at least. If it is still truly open source is highly debatable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

Didn't know that. Do you have more info/source?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 hours ago

There – of course – won’t be a singular official source stating “Hey guys, we’re open core now”. You need to put this together bit-by-bit.

Here are some links for research

  • Official statement on the takeover
  • Gitea Enterprise/Gitea Cloud hiding features behind a cloud solution and a paywall which makes Gitea itself open-core
  • Open Letter to the new Gitea owners with a summary and a reply, signed by a lot of Gitea devs and FOSS scene people.
  • As @[email protected] mentioned: A fork under the name Forgejo was done due to new Gitea owners did not care much about the concerns. (Started as asoft-fork but with 10.0 it became a hard fork.)
  • Gitea owners made it mandaroy to remove copyright headers and set the corporation as copyright holder. Here, here, and here
[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 hours ago

Forgejo is the fork that sprung from this whole debacle. https://forgejo.org/2022-12-15-hello-forgejo/

[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Appreciate the effort, but without categories it's not going to sail too far.
Right now it's just a long list of everything that it's out there, awesome-selfhosted is much more usable for looking up what you need.

Also, did you join any kind of affiliate programs/partnerships for these "10% off" green boxes? If so, would be great to disclose it. Nothing bad with getting some cash, but community will just appreciate the honesty.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 hours ago

I stand corrected, thank you!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

There are some affiliate links on the website, but the discounted products are not affiliated. I just reached out to the owners asking for an exclusive discount for paid plans.

There are categories on the website, but not directly on the list. But here is "full-text" search, so you could technically search by category or an alternative. Try "analytics" or "google analytics" for example.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

I love this idea, because I often have questions like this as I transition away from proprietary software to open source alternatives

I think listing what software equivalents it might replace listed in the card.

I do see its listed when you click on the info card in the main list, but having it be visible before that might be helpful.

I know a lot of people won't like the little ad cards when you do click on a software to review its page, but I think the way you implementted it is good. Its not intrusive and clearly states its an ad.

Edit: removed bit about categories.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 hours ago

I do like the idea of adding the "this product replaces X, Y, or Z" in the info card without needing to click on it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

Can you add Nephele to the list? It’s not a full fledged replacement for cloud storage, but with something like OwlFiles on your phone, it’s close. And it’s very useful.

https://hub.docker.com/r/sciactive/nephele

Also, I wrote it. :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

There's a submission link on the top of the page

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

I tried and I got the following error:

Invalid \`prisma.tool.findFirst()\` invocation: Can't reach database server at \`5.161.113.232:5432\` Please make sure your database server is running at \`5.161.113.232:5432\`.
[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Ah yeah, fair enough.

@[email protected] you might want to look into disabling error reporting in production 👍

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 hours ago

Search seems broken. The following gives me a "Something went wrong" page

https://openalternative.co/?q=firebase