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Open-source alternatives to everything (ONGOING)
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floss_alternatives.md

Opening software back up to the people, one install at a time!

Note to self: this seems like a cool place to collect more apps!

This gist serves as a place to find free & libre open-source alternatives to various proprietary softwares. I'll be organizing it such that anyone looking for a FLOSS alternative to some piece of software they use should be relatively easy to find.

Some people may feel that the alternatives I provide aren't "real" alternatives to the commercial software I am proposing they replace. This is accurate. However, I don't intend for this gist to serve the exclusive purpose of showing softwares that only currently work.

Instead, I'd like to make a list with comprehensive options for pieces of software that have the potential to replace other software. This means having a lively and dedicated development team, having a clear vision, and quite importantly, having an easy way to contribute. For the sake of thoroughness, I've repeated many proprietary examples and alternatives where I feel that they can serve multiple distinct purposes.

If you're looking to help support the F/LOSS ecosystem, I recommend investigating which software you feel is crucial to your daily life (be it professional or recreational), see if there's an alternative listed here (or multiple!) and giving it a go (I highly recommend using CTRL-F to find the exact mention of what it is you currently use). After you've found one that you personally enjoy, be it because it already works as a great drop-in replacement for what you already use, or because you think that - with the right funding - it could become such a product, try contributing however you can. This could be using it and creating feature requests and bug reports, contributing code if you have the requisite know-how, or simply setting up recurring donations. Whenever that last option is easily available, I'll include a link to where you can do that. Any help is appreciated! And naturally, as is typical of open-source projects, you can always contribute to any of the provided projects by making bug reports, feature requests, or code contributions.

And, of course, if you have suggestions for this list, be it more proprietary examples, F/LOSS ones, or corrections, please be sure to leave a comment!

For transparency, each of the entries listed here have been rated by the following criteria:

  • 🟢 This product is developed by a community with zero profit incentive, and it is funded by community donations. F/LOSS to its core.
  • 🔴 While the product listed itself is open-source, it is provided by a company that either provides SaaS products, or is backed by venture capital/investors, rather than accepting community donations for funding. THIS IS NOT A NEGATIVE ASSESSMENT OF THE PROJECT! Everyone's gotta eat, so a related pricing model may be the best course of action for some developers. This is only meant to illustrate that those creating the project are, to some degree, a profit-driven business. Considering, however, they likely spend most of their time on the open-source project listed here, you may do with that information what you will. I still included it in this list, after all.
  • 🟡 Take this with a grain of salt. This could be either that I didn't perceive this product as necessarily having any distinct advantage over the others, or the community/dev team seems dead, some of their code is technically only source-available, or otherwise. I'm very open to changing this rating if someone suggests the project is faring better than my initial impressions suggested.

TODO: I feel like this grading system is a bit flawed in certain ways (i.e. Joplin provides a cloud service that is totally open, but does technically cost money for hosting reasons) so I'll have to come back to this and replace it with a grading system that more accurately reflects the "openness" of the apps listed.

You can also click the circles to view the public source code repositories. In many cases, the read-only mirrors have been selected to make perusing the code easier.

Video Editing (examples: Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, VEGAS Pro)

Motion Graphics (examples: After Effects, Blackmagic Fusion, Autodesk Flame)

Digital Painting (examples: Clip Studio Paint, PhotoShop, Manga Studio, Procreate)

Photo Editing (examples: PhotoShop, Adobe Lightroom)

Group Messaging Applications (examples: Discord, Slack)

Home Automation and Remote Control (examples: Alexa, Google Home)

Messaging/SMS Applications (examples: iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger)

VPN Services, or Virtual Private Networks[17] (examples: NordVPN, ExpressVPN)

Music/Audio Development (examples: FL Studio, Ableton, Bitwig, Renoise)

Design Prototyping (examples: Figma)

  • Penpot 🟢[5] Support by improving the project!

File Sharing (examples: Airdrop)

Office Suites (examples: Microsoft Office, Google Workspace)

Text/Document Editors (examples: Microsoft Word, Google Docs)

Productivity & Task Management (examples: Notion, Trello, Asana)

Video Conferencing (examples: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams)

Email Clients (examples: Outlook, Apple Mail)

Email Providers[16] (examples: Outlook, GMail, Yahoo)

Internet Browsers (examples: Google Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Opera/Opera GX, Vivaldi[15])

Artificial Intelligence (AI)/LLMs (examples: ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Bard, Llama)

DJ Software/Music Mixing (examples: Traktor, Serato, VirtualDJ, Rekordbox)

E-Commerce Platforms/Tools (examples: Shopify, Shogun, BigCommerce)

Vector Animations (examples: SVGator, Adobe Illustrator)

Note-taking (examples: Evernote, Obsidian, Notion, Notability, OneNote)

Remote Desktop Access (examples: TeamViewer, Centrix)

Game Engines (examples: Unity, Unreal Engine)

3D Modeling and Animation (examples: Autodesk Maya, Womp)

Music Notation/Engraving (examples: Sibelius, Finale, Dorico)

2D Animation (examples: Adobe Animate, Toon Boom Harmony)

Computer-aided Drawing (examples: AutoCAD)

Diagram and Flowchart Creation/Digital Whiteboards (examples: Lucidchart)

Vector Graphics (examples: Adobe Illustrator)

Remote File Hosting/Cloud Hosting (examples: OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox)

Studying Tools/Flashcards (examples: Quizlet)

  • Anki 🟢 Support by improving the project![3]

Screen Recording/Streaming (examples: StreamLabs, Bandicam)

Website Builders (examples: Webflow, Squarespace, Weebly, Wix, Readymag, Cargo Collective)

Desktop Operating Systems (examples: MacOS, Windows 7/8/10/11)

Linux or FreeBSD. This is a rabbit hole, so I'll let you do your own digging. Word to the wise; the desktop environment will matter a lot more to the layman than anything else (you're looking for keywords like "Cinnamon," "KDE," "GNOME," "Xfce," "Mate," and a few others.)

Code Editing (examples: Sublime)

Online Video Sharing, Watching, etc (examples: YouTube, BitChute)

Social Media (examples: FaceBook/Meta, Twitter/X, Reddit)

Version Control (examples: GitHub)

Planetarium/Stargazing (examples: Google Sky, Digistar, SpaceEngine)

Vehicle Autopilot (examples: Tesla Autopilot, Cruise, Waymo)

Misc. Developer Tools

Programs I have yet to find viable open-source options for (I urge those capable of doing so to start a project!):

  • Graphing calculators (examples: Desmos, Matlab)
  • Dating apps (Tinder, Bumble, Boo, Hinge, eHarmony)

The following applications were deliberately left out due to a personal assessment that they are not viable projects. I am open to changing my assessments of these.

Key:

  • 💀 This project has seen little to no development in many months, perhaps years.
  • 😶‍🌫️ This project seems questionable in its development, business model, etc.
  • 💔 This project used to be open-source, but has, in some way, changed its license to break the open-source philosophy

Projects:

  • 💀 Laverna (design)
  • 😶‍🌫️ Rustdesk (remote desktop viewing)
  • 💀 Alovoa (dating)
  • 💀 Atom (code editing)
  • 💀 MyPaint (digital painting)
  • 😶‍🌫️ Standardnotes (note-taking)
  • 💔 Aseprite (digital drawing [pixelart])
  • 💀 Simplenotes (note-taking)
  • 💀 NoteKit (note-taking)

My own workflow, if you're curious! F/LOSS apps are bolded, proprietary ones are striken-through. F/LOSS is all about choice, and if you choose to keep using some propreitary apps, that's okay! I'm opposed to demonizing any and every product that's trying to meet a bottom line.

I use Firefox to browse the web and Discord to talk with friends, but I peruse the Revolt servers I'm in every now and then and give my opinions on how to improve usability. I like to make videos on the side, so I'll use LosslessCut for simple projects and KdenLive when I need some more power during editing, using OBS Studio for whenever I need to do some screen capture. I've been dabbling in digital art recently (mostly been a paper-and-pencil kinda guy, historically) and Krita's been a dream to use as a beginner in that field. When I'm doing programming stuff, be it academic or personal, my go-to editor is vim, though I'll be switching to neovim ifever I decide to change OS's, or just need to get a new machine. Speaking of OS, I'm currently running the Kubuntu Linux distribution, and it's been great. I love the stuff KDE does! To keep in chat with friends, I still mostly have to use iMessage, but I've been trying to migrate to Signal slowly, to moderate success. For classes where I decide to go digital note-taking as opposed to traditional, I use Joplin synced with Dropbox to take care of that. The dev's a super cool guy! I do all my mail and calendar work with Thunderbird, though my primary email provider is still GMail. When it comes to writing papers and such, I use OnlyOffice, though I have a recurring donation to The Document Foundation (the guys who make LibreOffice), as I much prefer their community-driven development model over OnlyOffice's. Finally, whenever I need to send files across multiple devices, LocalSend is my go-to option; I like to keep active in its repository!

[1] Seen by some as an abandoned project.

[2] Source-available, and charges a one-time fee. Spearheaded by Louis Rossman, a big proponent in right-to-repair, F/LOSS, etc.

[3] Anki is fully open-source, however they legitimize their operations by creating the product out of a registered business. Thus, donations have been decided to be too logistically complex to justify setting up. If you want to support Anki monetarily, you can do so by purchasing AnkiMobile Flashcards, which basically just serves as a way to donate $25 (DO NOT ACCIDENTALLY GET THE ADVERTISED ANKIPRO APP, this is NOT the app created by Anki developers to my knowledge.)

[4] Technically, vim does have a donations page, but the lead developer no longer needs it and funnels all money donated through this page to a charity helping children in Uganda. By no means a bad cause, I simply chose not to include it directly as it doesn't directly support the development of the project, which is the relevant criteria here.

[5] Penpot had a very succesfull funding campaign, but is now looking towards providing SaaS and self-hosted deployment pricing models. When this comes to pass, this will likely turn red.

[6] From my understanding, Zorin Connect only works to share files with a device running ZorinOS, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution.

[7] The server code for Telegram is closed-source, a decision made by developers based on what they feel is the unverifiability of server-side code in deployment, and as a way to minimize attack surface.

[8] Only available on PC operating systems running the KDE desktop environment.

[9] Formerly Fosscord.

[10] This is a JavaScript framework, rather than a fully-fledged e-commerce platform, at the current time of me writing this.

[11] Medusa seems to have a "pricing model," but as far as I can tell, this is a consulting practice that does not affect their end product. I've decided to label this project green because of this.

[12] I'm having trouble parsing the exact development model this project uses. They're seemingly owned by a company called NabuCasa, but as far as I can tell, this is a company that provides non-essential services as a way to provide direct funding to Home Assistant developers. Furthermore, the primary developer does have a GitHub Sponsors page which, from what I've seen, appears to difficult to legally justify when the funds are going to a for-profit product. Kinda up in the air with this one.

[13] You can find the actual product that runs the openpilot code here.

[14] I only listed this as yellow because Firefox does receive payment from Google to have Google Search be its default browser. The Mozilla Foundation is the user-first nonprofit that collects donations to run Firefox (which I highly recommend you donate to), but until this financial base becomes 100% feasible, they'll likely have to continue accepting money from Google. I saw it described as a "strange bedfellows situation," which is a pretty apt way to put it. They're fully free and open-source, but there's an argument to be made against it being free, libre, and open source.

[15] While the core of Vivaldi is open-source (based on Google's open-source Chromium browser), and much, perhaps all, of Vivaldi's source code is auditable as plaintext HTML/CSS/JS, there is no single public repo that can be conveniently and totally audited, and more importantly, Vivaldi's development model does not adhere to the more "philosophical" aspects of free, libre, and open source projects.

[16] Email has a weird place, as far as privacy goes. By its design, someone else almost always has access to your data. Even ProtonMail, which boasts privacy and security, can still technically read all their emails if they wanted (or were legally requested) to. The very architecture of how email services work doesn't lend itself well to privacy, so while the options listed may perhaps be a little better as far as de-googling, they aren't the gold standard by any means.

[17] Same as with email, while routing your traffic to a secondary IP address may be better than just going into the web raw, if that IP address isn't under your purview, someone else (i.e. a company) is still capable of viewing your data. Maybe not your ISP, but someone else nonetheless. If you want a VPN for geospoofing reasons and the security/privacy aspect isn't a concern, then this doesn't really matter. However, if your motivation for using a VPN is to "take your data back" from your ISP, using a corporate-backed VPN service is just kicking the rock down the road. In this case, I would recommend privately hosting your own VPN server with something like Linode/Akamai, or even a dedicated device. There are plenty of tutorials on how to this, such as this one, these ones, and plenty others.

[18] Still understanding this one, but I hear it's licensed under Apache 2.0 which is good enough to make the list.

[19] This is a newcomer to the vector animations game, and does require a working understanding of the TypeScript programming language to use.

[20] Only available on Linux through Flathub.

[21] This is specifically for drawing 2D pixel art sprites; it's a fork of the popular proprietary tool, Aseprite.

[22] This is specifically for drawing tiles for maps in RPG games, for example. I should probably make a separate section for this. Maybe I'll just turn this whole thing in a more easy-to-use website if I actually complete the TOP curriculum.

[23] Still in development, and currently only available on MacOS.

[24] Apparently this is only source-available, kind of like Grayjay.

[25] It looks like they had a donations page, but they can no longer accept donations for some reason.

[26] Hasn't seen any development in 3 years.

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