OpenAlternative
Discover Open Source Alternatives to Popular Software
OpenAlternative is a community driven list of open source alternatives to proprietary software and applications. The goal of the site is to be your first stop when researching for a new open source service to help you grow your business. It will help you find alternatives and reviews of the products you already use.
The project started as a weekend project to learn a new technology and try something new and fun from scratch. It gained a lot of traction early on (100k unique visitors in one week, #1 on Hacker News) so it was clear that there was a need for a site like this.
I’ve always been a fan of open source software and I’ve always wanted to contribute to the community in some way. I thought that creating a list of open source alternatives to proprietary software and applications would be a great way to give back to the community.
4 Comments
Great product!
Well done!
Thanks 🙏
Crazy to see this is still going strong two years later. 100k visitors in a week is the dream for a weekend project—definitely shows how much people want to ditch proprietary bloat.
I’m a solo builder working on a mobile-first code linter (PasteCheck). I built it for the same reason you started this—solving a specific frustration (in my case, debugging code on the fly without heavy desktop tools or AI messing up my formatting).
Even a couple of years on, the "weekend project to traction" story is great motivation for those of us still in the early stages of building out a micro SaaS. Congrats on the longevity.
This is brilliant!
Love how OpenAlternative went from a weekend project to a go-to resource for thousands. It's not just useful for devs — even marketers and bootstrapped founders benefit massively from OSS alternatives.
I'm actually building a Marketing Starter Kit for early-stage founders, a zero-fluff, hands-on templates and frameworks to get first users, build in public, and grow using marketing systems that work.
If you’re interested, I’d love to send over my 73-hour Go-To-Market workbook as a gift. Just sig n up here: https://wirehaired-protest-b61.notion.site/1e97648c55c880ddb946c598bdeda50f