Ask HN: There is an open-source alternative to almost any SaaS, what do you use?

12 points · gitroom · 13 hours ago

Buffer, SproutSocial -> Postiz

Lokalise, Crowdin -> Tolgee

Shopify -> MedusaJS

Typeform -> Formbricks

Auth0 -> Hanko, Stack-auth

Retool -> ToolJet

Courier -> Novu

Launchdarkly -> Flipt, Unleash

Mixpanel -> Posthog

Bitly -> Dub

Notion -> Appflowy

Zoom -> Jitsi

Jira -> Plane

Airtable -> NocoDB

Vercel -> Coolify, Taubyte

Heroku -> Dokku

Firebase -> Pocketbase / Appwrite / Supabase

Shopify -> Prestashop

Slack -> Mattermost

Salesforce CRM -> ERPNext

Dropbox -> NextCloud

Mailchimp -> Mautic

Trello -> Wekan

Docusign -> Documenso

Calendly -> Cal

Datadog -> Prometheus

Google Analytics -> Plausible, Fathom

Zapier -> n8n

Algolia -> Trieve, Melisearch

Mint -> Maybe

Intercom -> Chatwoot

What am I missing?

8 comments

bjourne · 1 minutes ago

Great list, props for putting it together. I'm missing an Open Source replacement to Google Colab. Free access to powerful gpus is very useful.

rozenmd · 14 minutes ago

The open-source SaaSes in this list that I use could be proprietary and I'd still use them, fwiw.

Solving the problem I'm dealing with gets you a lot more points than me being able to fling you a PR, but maybe I'm an outlier here.

wdfx · 4 hours ago

> Mint -> Maybe

I don't know what these are, but how am I supposed to google these words and get the correct results?

I currently self-host these infra and apps:

  - technitium DNS
  - Traefik
  - Cerbot
  - Home assistant
  - samba file shares
  - Gerbera media server
  - Jellyfin
  - Gitlab
  - Grafana / influxdb (for telegraf server monitoring + esphome  sensors)
  - Photoprism
  - Syncthing
  - Taiga
  - Vaultwarden
  - offlineimap sync from gmail

I've been thinking about Nextcloud as well, but it seems a bit heavy-handed and wants control over my docker daemon, which I am not sure about.

Show replies

codingdave · 1 hours ago

Good SaaS products are about the whole ecosystem provided - support, upgrades, reliability, pricing, SLAs. Much more to it that just the feature set. So while it is great to explore alternatives, a big old list of "replace X with Y" is not nuanced enough to cover all the reasons people may have gone with X in the first place.

nicoloren · 6 hours ago

I still use a lot of Saas because it is not trivial to host and run an open source app.

For example, if I need Postiz to run I need a server and to configure and maintain a lot of services and dependancies:

NX (Monorepo) NextJS (React) NestJS Prisma (Default to PostgreSQL) Redis (BullMQ) Resend (email notifications) Postiz

I use mailchimp, which is not cheap. But if I want to run Mautic, I need a linux server, with an http server and a database running. It as also a cost in money and time.

I am a single man shop, so I don't want a software to take me extra time when something is broken (or to give 4 hours of my time to install and run a clone of mailchimp).