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), we are actually building the OSS platform that you can self-host and that is an actual OSS alternative to ... pipedream.
The Netdata Agent is open source and you can self host your whole setup if you want. If you don't like the work, or don't know how to put it up yourself, and want to run multiple nodes, setup parent-child relations for your whole infra you can do it with Netdata Cloud (closed source). But even still, it only collects metrics, there's no actions or other data besides metadata being collected. What exactly is bait-and-switch with this model?
Netdata doesn't have any paid service at the moment, event the Cloud service is free.
There are plans in the future for some paid plan but it won't remove features, it is more on having longer retention on metadata, role based access, support, etc.
As far as I'm aware it is actually free for both agent and cloud. What do they have now is more than enough to understand the root of the issue.
It is ok to pay in the future for SSO.
My concern is not money at that moment, but the foot print on production system as data will be stored and queried next to prod with recently introduced anomaly advisor on top.
There is no central storage of data, data are stored on each monitored system in a database called dbengine, that's all. Cool, right? They do have a data privacy page: https://learn.netdata.cloud/docs/cloud/data-privacy
There is nothing paid, everything is free, both the agent and the cloud app. Do whatever you like with it. There is a pricing policy that will follow sometime in the future but everything that is free today seems that will remain free forever.
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.
It would be great if such a site gave a SCORE for the open sourceness of the product in question. It has been becoming more and more common to have "open source" projects that are either not developed in the open, or not provide all the functionality needed without buying the "enterprise" version. Some projects don't provide installable binaries on some or all platforms either. Other metrics could be having an up to date repo, number of committers, number of recent bugs/issues not acknowledged in their repo etc.
I have noted and will add to roadmap. Score will be calculated differently for different categories of software. Like for Desktop apps and SAAS projects, metrics will be different. Will have to think through this.
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
> 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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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
(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/rpriv...)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
I thought Grafana was open-core. They're OSS product is in Github - 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.
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
There have been ... incidents in their development.
At one point they misrepresented themselves as collecting donations for bloggers who a) had no relation with Brave and b) didn't want donations or monetisation of their content.
At another point it seemed like they were intercepting ads on pages and replacing them with their own ads. Not sure exactly what the truth of that situation is.
Yeah, tokenisation, BAT etc. HN is extremely sceptical about cryptocurrency, IMHO with very good reason.
As mentioned by another user - under the covers they inserted their own referral codes into links to online vendors.
All in all it's a sequence of dodgy decisions that tell me they put money above honesty.
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.
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]
You can still donate your BATs to institutions and websites (or should I say "pay for not having ads", at least this is what is being marketed for). I mostly contribute to wikipedia, as it is always in need of new donations and I like the idea of not having trackers/ads on it.
Probably because it's a browser wrapped in a crypto wallet, and there is virtually no use case for cryptocurrencies that are not powered by scams or crime.
I'm not saying there couldn't be, but so far, the entire ecosystem is just burning gigawatts of energy to sell jpegs of monkeys.
Oh yeah, and it removes ads from web pages and then shows its own. I'm always surprised people aren't more offended by that.
i use brave and i have never used its crypto tooling. it's effectively an up-to-date chromium fork with a bunch of extra features and privacy-respecting defaults.
Also, because their build system is closed source; my personal perspective is that if I cannot build your project, it is not "open source"
I have taken some inspiration from AUR (https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/brave) and I think I got it to compile all the way through once, but that's not nearly the same as how easy it is to build -- and then run -- Firefox every day
People on HN can both like that some piece of software is OSS and dislike it for other reasons. For example, Chromium is also open source, and most criticisms of "Chrome" aren't exactly limited to the closed-source additions (like Widevine and enhanced grammar fixing) Google puts in after the fact, eg. Manifest v3 which will touch both Chromium and Chrome.
Interesting, I don't think I've noticed the same criticism for Brave. But many times when it has come up in discussions at work, people will say they don't want to use it and don't trust it because Brendan Eich is behind it. He donated money to Prop 8 in California many years ago (which at the time, was very popular. More than half the people in California supported it), and he was fired/cancelled for it (long before the term "cancel culture" was a thing). Unfortunately for Eich, the culture shifted radically during that time, and he became a target (see OkCupid[1]). IIRC it was like 7 or 8 or so years after Prop 8 that the news leaked, and like most Americans Eich had changed his mind on it. But it didn't/doesn't matter, he has been branded and is forever tainted.
Oh interesting, no I don't have a source for that. Just something I've read a bunch of times. Probably falls into the "if you repeat a lie enough times, it becomes true" (although I don't know that there was nefarious motives behind it, could be honest mistakes like mine)
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), we are actually building the OSS platform that you can self-host and that is an actual OSS alternative to ... pipedream.