Free open-source alternatives for entrepreneurs
As a non-coder and someone who is always looking for alternatives to popular products, I recently stumbled upon a Twitter thread listing 1 open-source alternative for popular products such as Slack, Intuit, Evernote, etc.
Sharing the content below for the community to benefit from along with the link to the original Twitter post.
Question - Do you think that a non-coder should use open-source products given tweaking them would be a problem for someone like me? Understand that these would not be "free", want to understand what other reasons should be considered.
Original post-
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I'll start with https://github.com/arachnys/cabot, a much better alternative to PagerDuty and similar monitoring/alerting SaaS.
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Invoicing SaaS are the worst. Break free with https://github.com/invoiceninja/invoiceninja #opensource
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CRMs are a plague and there's plenty of #opensource solutions that won't hold your business hostage. https://github.com/odoo/odoo and
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For BI, there's https://github.com/knime if you want the full suite and https://github.com/metabase/metabase if you are more pragmatic #opensource
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Continuing the thread with #opensource alternatives. If you are tired of NewRelic, there's plenty of options tailor-made for difference use-cases: https://openapm.io/landscape https://github.com/netdata/netdata
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Slack is the biggest trap for larger organizations. Luckily there is https://mattermost.org and https://about.riot.im, both #opensource. IRC is much better than any of those, but haters gonna hate!
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For those of you that cannot live without notes, https://joplinapp.org is #opensource and, let's be honest, much better than Evernote.
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If you are looking into breaking free from GMail, Yahoo and other services that make deals with the devil, https://postal.atech.media is a great #opensource way to do it. And it's much easier than setting up everything from scratch.
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If you need #opensource A/B testing, https://github.com/intuit/wasabi is awesome. None of that marketing nonsense which costs thousands.
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If you want to start managing feature toggles from a UI, you don't have to go bankrupt with LaunchDarkly. There's https://github.com/Unleash/unleash and https://github.com/markphelps/flipt, both #opensource alternatives and you can customize your caching layer.
I just want to point out that: open-source ≠ free
At first, I tried a lot of those open source solutions (InvoiceNinja, Cabot, Odoo, Mattermost) cause they were "free" but they really aren't. You have to manage those services yourself. You have to spend your own time running those things rather than doing what is actually important for your business. Not to mention, a lot of those open-source tools simply aren't as good as the SaaS ones. The cost of using open-source solutions is almost always higher in my experience.
There is one tool and one tool only that I self-host. GitLab. And that is only because self-hosted GitLab is better than SaaS Gitlab and it is also extremely easy to manage.
Also, please don't run your own email server... Especially if you are a non-coder...
This makes total sense. Really appreciate the advice.
I wanted to understand the IH community's thoughts on this as I have heard advice that a bootstrapped entrepreneur should look at open-source alternatives and rely on the community to make improvements.
Also, would you say that the above list of alternatives would make sense if a coder decides to use them to build something on top of them, or from a transparency standpoint like data privacy, or like GitLab they are just better? Any other reaosn that they should be used I am missing out on?
It really depends on the actual cost of the open source solution vs. the SaaS solution. In that cost evaluation, you have to remember that nothing is free and take into account all of the actual costs.
For open source:
For SaaS:
Those are by no means compressive lists. But that gives you an idea of you need to think about.
For example, when I evaluated GitLab vs. GitHub I found that:
It just made sense to go with GitLab.
Or for example, when I evaluated InvoiceNinja vs. a SaaS solution (e.g. QuickBooks):
I just couldn't justify self hosting InvoiceNinja. It didn't make sense vs. paying $15 for something better.
And then there are some things where you really should almost never self-host. Email is one of those. It is far too complex and not worth the cost in almost any situation. Sure, there is tooling to make the setup and management easier but you still have to deal with things like IP reputation. Just don't.
In the end it comes down to this question:
Which solution will allow me to advance my business goals faster and more efficiently.
Typically, the answer is pay someone else to manage the things that aren't core to your business.
Awesome! This is immensely helpful, Noah. I am definitely going to get back to this post whenever I am making such a decision.
Especially, the final takeaway shared by you is so so quotable - "Typically, the answer is pay someone else to manage the things that aren't core to your business." This definitely is golden advice to every entrepreneur.
I would love to help you in any way I possibly can :) Do let me know if you think I can do so in any manner!
Glad I could help! Maybe this would be be some good blog post material 😀
I think I actually borrowed the idea of that final takeaway from someone else. I'm not sure who, though...
Yes, it would definitely help in a blog post. Maybe here on IH itself. If you have not already spoken with them, the team is responsive and if they think the topic makes sense they usually have it live within 4 weeks or so.
Thanks for your research! Even if it may be useless for non-coders, still very interesting for those who code.
My pleasure. I find such threads on Twitter and the opinions mostly go invalidated in the noise that is usually there.
Saving money on your business tools is one of the dumbest thing you can make.
I am not saying that you should go with the most expensive alternative nor thst you should spend a lot of money.
If you have a low budget, focus just on the essential and for the essentials choose the best of the best (it obviously depends on your needs). When you are just starting, a great hosting, google analytics (free), facebook pixels (free), hotjar free plan, stripe (commission based) and an email marketing provider (even this one you can have it for free up to a couple of thousand subscribers) is more than enough.
I would have to agree with you here. My intent was not to save money but just to put the thought out in the community to gather thoughts on whether open-source even makes sense.
The alternatives suggested by you are all good for the use-case they serve for a non-coder and I have found similar suggestions on the http://makerpad.co platform too. There are many interesting projects that folks such as me can take inspirations from.