How We Research Open Source Alternatives

Every page here is a claim: this project is a credible alternative to the paid app you use. We treat that claim as something that has to be earned. This page explains how.

What we do

For each project we confirm: the license is what it claims to be, real users have said what we quote (verbatim, at the original URL), at least one deploy path works as described, and the project is still actively maintained. Every claim carries a source URL and a verified_at date. If a field cannot be verified, it does not appear.

The method

Starting with GitHub

We pull structured data from GitHub for each candidate: license file (SPDX identifier and OSI status), star count, last release tag and date, archived flag, and repository topics. All point-in-time reads; we record when they were retrieved so readers can see how fresh the data is. Stars are a rough signal of community size, not a quality verdict.

License verification

We read the license file directly and record the SPDX identifier. We flag whether it is OSI-approved (clean open source) or carries restrictions (open-core, source-available, Commons Clause, or similar). We do not paper over non-standard licenses. If a project uses a license that limits commercial self-hosting, that appears in the "watch out" field.

Quote verification

Social proof quotes go through a manual step before they appear on the site. We locate the original comment (on Hacker News, Reddit, or the source indicated) and confirm: the author handle matches, the text matches verbatim, and the context is not reversed or misleading. This is why one candidate was dropped entirely: a page ready for ntfy (31,000 stars) had two Hacker News quotes that, on verification, did not accurately represent what the authors said. The page was dropped; we shipped 9 instead of 10 and reported the shortfall.

Deploy-path honesty

Deploy paths are verified against official documentation; selected paths are manually tested when the record says so. Three options are tracked per project:

• Hosted: a managed cloud option exists (may be paid)
• Docker: a one-command container path exists with a working compose file or pull command
• No-terminal (zero_terminal): a one-click install that requires no command line. An app installer, a Coolify template, or a similar path.

If a hosted path is paid, we say so. We do not list "free forever" plans that do not exist.

What gets rejected

A page is rejected if:

• Any quote cannot be confirmed verbatim at its source
• The license is unclear or materially different from what the project advertises
• A deploy path described in the README does not work when tested
• The repository has been archived or the last release is more than a year old

We do not reject projects for being small, for being harder to self-host than a SaaS, or for having a paid hosted tier alongside the open source core. Honest complexity is fine. Hidden complexity is not.

What we found across 55 reviewed products

These numbers come from the live catalog in src/data/products/. The catalog is the single source of truth; every figure here can be verified by reading the JSON files directly.

Licenses

• 43 of 55 products carry OSI-approved licenses. The other 11 are open-core: AFFiNE, AppFlowy, Baserow, Bitwarden, Cal.com, Chatwoot, Docmost, Meetily, Meilisearch, OpenReplay, Supabase. All flagged with purity: open-core.
• License family breakdown: MIT 16, AGPL-3.0 12, Apache-2.0 10, GPL-3.0 5, AGPL-3.0-only 2, AGPL-3.0 AND MIT 1, BSD-3-Clause 1, AGPL-3.0-or-later 1, GPL-3.0-or-later 1, GPL-2.0-or-later 1, MIT AND BUSL-1.1 1, Sustainable-Use-1.0 1, MPL-2.0 1, plus 2 with unresolved SPDX identifiers (flagged for review).
• AGPL is the most represented copyleft license (16 projects total). This matters for companies that might want to run these internally as a service. AGPL terms require sharing modifications.

Deploy paths

• 35 of 55 offer a hosted path (some are paid, e.g. Plausible Cloud, Ghost Pro, Healthchecks.io).
• 43 of 55 offer a Docker path with a working compose command.
• 24 of 55 offer a no-terminal install path: AliasVault, AppFlowy, Baserow, Bitwarden, Bruno, Buzz, Cal.com, Cap, Clovy, Coolify, Grist, Hermes Agent, Isso, Joplin, Kdenlive, KeePassXC, Meetily, Omi, Open Design, OpenOats, Palmier Pro, Screenity, ShareX, Zulip.

No product was given a deploy path that was not verified against its README or documentation.

Activity

• 52 of 55 projects shipped a release in the 90 days before our verification date. None of the 55 projects are archived.
• Stars range from 32 (LinkForty) to 228,866 (Hermes Agent). Combined, these 55 projects have 1,902,295 GitHub stars.

Social proof

• 136 quotes appear across 55 product pages (every page has at least one).
• All 136 have a verified_at date and a checked_by field. Every quote was confirmed verbatim against its source URL before the page went live.
• Sources are primarily Hacker News threads, with the author handle and original comment URL recorded for each.

What we do not do

Pay-to-play does not exist here. No project has paid or been asked to pay to appear. Funding options (GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, custom donation links) are shown as labeled buttons, separate from editorial.

Unreviewed projects stay hidden from search engines. Those without a completed review (the catalog holds 55 projects total) carry review_status: stub and noindex headers. A project becomes visible only by passing the review process, not by being popular or submitted by its maintainer.

We do not invent. Every field on a product page is sourced. "Best for" and "watch out" fields reference the README or official documentation.

Corrections

Data goes stale. Licenses change. Projects get abandoned or get bought. We run a monthly freshness check against GitHub for every published page (stars, release date, archived flag, SPDX identifier). When a field changes materially, the page gets flagged for human review before re-publishing.

If you find an error (a quote that does not match its source, a license that has changed, a deploy path that no longer works) email us at hello@thereisanopensourceforthat.com. We commit to reading and responding within 48 hours. If the correction is valid, we fix the page, update verified_at, and note the change on the page. We do not wait for a monthly cycle to fix a factual error.

You can also open a GitHub issue: github.com/gutomartino/thereisanopensourceforthat

Maintainers: if your project is listed and something is wrong, either channel works. We want to get it right.