Open-source alternatives

There was a time when open-source was a fringe development approach and open-source startups were considered rebels against close-sourced giants.

While products that market themselves as open-source alternatives to X may still have an air of rebellion, open-source founders regularly view open-source as the only option to achieve their mission.

Baily Pumfleet told us:
“It was very clear from the start that [Calendso] will always be open-source, because we believe that scheduling should be accessible to everyone.”

John O’Nolan said:
“Since the idea behind Ghost was to build the best software for publishers and journalists, it made a lot of sense to structure as a non-profit SaaS company, making open-source software.

Among last week's launches was an open-source alternative to Retool, and along with it, we rounded up 7 of the biggest open-source launches from the last year.

ToolJet (like Retool)
App builder tool for building on top of the data using

Calendso (like Calendly)
Calendar and scheduling tool to integrate into your product

Jitsu (like Segment/Fivetran)
Event collection and data integration

Screenity (like Loom)
Screen recording and sharing

Chatwoot (like Zendesk/Intercom)
Omnichannel communication platform

Athens Research (like Roam Research)
Knowledge graph for notetaking, research, and documentation

Porter (like Heroku)
Kubernetes-powered PaaS that runs in your own cloud provider

Jam (like Clubhouse)
Clubhouse-like audio rooms as a service

For a weekly dose of open-source, check out Console, a new newsletter from Jackson Kelley, an engineer from the Amazon Alexa team. Console dives deep into a new open-source project and the developer behind it.

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