[HN Gopher] Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools
___________________________________________________________________
Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools
Author : deeptichopra
Score : 395 points
Date : 2021-07-22 04:31 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.btw.so)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.btw.so)
| antman wrote:
| Nice, is there a form we can submit others? Also, no code db:
| Seatable
| deeptichopra wrote:
| That's a great idea- will add.
|
| Will also review Seatable.
|
| For now if anyone has a recommendation, please let me know
| here. We'll review and add.
| pbreit wrote:
| An exhaustive list is totally useless. The question is the
| handful of options that are credibly viable.
| deeptichopra wrote:
| We've narrowed it down to just the top 2-3 options in each
| category. :)
| jld89 wrote:
| What about OpenBravo ?
| robjan wrote:
| Is this curated based on experience or some metric?
| zajkowskimarcin wrote:
| Great list, thanks for sharing and gathering! As people said,
| form to add suggestions would be great. E.g. we're using Umbraco
| CMS (https://umbraco.com/products/umbraco-cms/) for most of our
| content managed enterprise solutions and would be awesome to see
| it listed there. Many many more in my head as well, so might help
| curating it and growing it for the good of us all looking for OSS
| alternatives!
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Added Umbraco. Let me know if you have other suggestions!
| soumyadeb wrote:
| A correction. RudderStack is an open source project/product and
| is an alternative to Segment. The website lists other marketing
| analytics products as alternative to RudderStack. They are
| related but not exactly same.
|
| (Founder of RudderStack here)
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Yikes, my bad. Have listed RudderStack as open-source now. :)
| vsnf wrote:
| It would be helpful to list what you consider to be the primary
| commercial solutions in each category. A lot of these categories
| I am unfamilar with by name but would understand if I saw some
| concrete companies or products listed alongside them.
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Yep absolutely!
|
| We already have that. For eg: https://www.btw.so/open-source-
| alternatives/slack-alternativ...
| pinky07 wrote:
| You mentioned Odoo in CRM, but Odoo has apps in a lot of
| extra categories (that are not yet listed): - ERP:
| https://odoo.com (alternative to Ms. Dynamics, SAP) - Website
| Builder: https://www.odoo.com/app/website (alternative to
| Wix, SquareSpace) - POS: https://www.odoo.com/app/point-of-
| sale-shop (alternative to VendHQ, LightSpeed) - Kanban &
| Project: https://www.odoo.com/app/project - Human Resources /
| HR: https://www.odoo.com/app/employees (alternative to
| SuccessFactors, BambooHR) - Manufacturing - MES:
| https://www.odoo.com/app/manufacturing - Invoicing:
| https://www.odoo.com/app/invoicing (alternative to bill.com)
| throwaway744678 wrote:
| Odoo (core) is indeed open-source, but some of the apps
| (modules) you mentioned are part of the "Enterprise" which
| require you to buy a licence.
|
| Disclaimer: happy (paying) Odoo customer!
| pinky07 wrote:
| No, all the apps above are part of Odoo Community. (So,
| open source)
| vsnf wrote:
| Yeah, I noticed that actually. The search bar is pretty good
| at recognizing the principal competitors.
|
| But when I go to, say, https://www.btw.so/open-source-
| alternatives/api-documentatio..., no where on that page does
| the word "Swagger" appear. Same story for
| https://www.btw.so/open-source-alternatives/business-
| communi... and Slack.
|
| It seems like you already have the data, so it would just be
| a matter of finding the right UI for it.
|
| Edit:
|
| Now that I look real closely, I see in a tiny box on each
| alternative what the each thing competes with. I guess that
| works. Kind of obscure, though.
| parthvader wrote:
| Great list! A form to submit more alternatives should be useful!
| andreacavagna wrote:
| making it open-source and submit pull-requests will be awesome,
| and sort of making sense with the purpose of the website
| deeptichopra wrote:
| That's a great idea- will add. For now if you have a
| recommendation, let me know here!
| tompazourek wrote:
| FullCalendar is a GUI component, not really a proper alternative
| to something like Google Calendar. These are different things
| IMHO...
|
| But anyway, nice list, thanks for sharing.
| mhd wrote:
| I bet you could put "Libreoffice Calc" into most of those
| categories...
| jpswade wrote:
| Alternativeto.net
| typhonius wrote:
| You're missing Drupal, one of the largest open-source CMS' in the
| world.
| Terretta wrote:
| Also TextPattern, oldie-but-goodie:
|
| CMS: https://textpattern.com/about/
|
| Plugins: https://textpattern.org/
|
| This site's curation is ... eccentric. :-)
| dinedal wrote:
| It's weird that Node-RED is listed as closed source software? But
| it is open source? https://github.com/node-red
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out, fixed!
| majormjr wrote:
| It's also marked as not self hostable despite the comment
| above mentioning it running on Raspberry Pis.
| SylvieLorxu wrote:
| Why is Matomo not in the Analytics category but listed below
| "Check out alternatives to popular commercial products"? Matomo
| is Open Source too?
|
| (Also, "Open Source" is not the opposite of "commercial")
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Fixed this, thanks!
| kevinak wrote:
| An open-source alternative to Retool is Budibase -
| https://www.budibase.com/
|
| Edit: It was apparently already on there.
| foxbee wrote:
| well, the Github link is broken. For viewers, it should point
| to:
|
| https://github.com/Budibase/budibase
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out. Fixed!
| pratio wrote:
| You guys are using cloudinary to server images it seems which is
| blocked by most adblocker lists because it's to serve video ads a
| lot. Assets seemed to be served under
| https://res.cloudinary.com/adaface so I can't unblock just your
| one company.
|
| Great effort though, seems similar to github awesome lists. I use
| https://github.com/topics/awesome to always get the latest ones
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Damn, I just built a web app that uses Cloudinary for image
| management and storage... Is this widely known? I use an
| adblocker and never saw the issue in dev.
| pratio wrote:
| Not sure, I use pi-Hole and it haven't manually added it
| there. https://github.com/anudeepND/whitelist/issues/56. It
| seems that they've added it to the whitelist, maybe you know
| someone in your network that uses pi-hole and can verify.
| pratio wrote:
| But as you can see here, Cloudinary supports serving ads, So
| it'll be present in the private lists that are being used by
| a lot of ad-blockers. https://cloudinary.com/documentation/vi
| deo_player_ads_moneti...
| fnomnom wrote:
| s3 is also used to deliver ads. so do you block
| *.amazonaws.com ?
| pratio wrote:
| No, like i said, I hadn't explicitly blocked this one
| either, it was a part of the adblock list the I'm using.
| The example i gave also showed that they don't have a
| unique subdomain that i can unblock while
| adcompany.amazonaws.com can be done without blocking all
| sites
| Tajnymag wrote:
| Open Source Browser Alternative: Brave
|
| Really? No other browser comes to mind?
| pratio wrote:
| Haha yes, I didn't notice that firefox and chromium aren't
| mentioned at all
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Yep, sorry. Made more sense to remove the browser category,
| so I've done that now.
| koilke wrote:
| How about Bitwarden for password manager?
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Will review and add, thanks!
| dragosbulugean wrote:
| GitBook is not open source.
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Thanks for pointing out, fixed!
| manifoldgeo wrote:
| I'm surprised that CiviCRM [1] is not listed in the "Open Source
| CRM Alternatives" section. I think it should be.
|
| [1] https://civicrm.org/
| Wronnay wrote:
| "Open Source Alternatives to Kanboard"
|
| -> Kanboard is a open source software, so that title doesn't make
| sense
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Fixed!
| pea wrote:
| One that I've been massively enjoying as an alternative to the
| Amplitude/Mixpanel/Fullstory stack recently is PostHog. You can
| write your own plugins in JS, which is great for automating
| things other platforms, and it offers a bunch of cool features
| which the others charge for as premium addons (backup to
| warehouse, CRM integration etc.)
| miguelmichelson wrote:
| https://chaskiq.io - a feature complete alternative to Intercom (
| https://github.com/chaskiq/chaskiq )
| artemonster wrote:
| Everytime I look into B2B software space (I am a complete
| outsider, btw), I see that here and there always pop up some new
| company, offering something similar to competitors and what can
| be stiched together using open source (and almost free, not
| counting the support) tools. How these companies thrive? Why
| customers keep buying new stuff, when there are solutions already
| to most of the business neeeds out there (and even free ones!).
| Is this still the case of idiot-managers doing decisions like
| "nobody was fired for buying IBM" (and now SAP, salesforce,
| <yourcompany>) or am I not seeing something? Genuine qustions,
| really interested.
| Irishsteve wrote:
| Historically there has always been consultancies building
| 'bespoke' software for local companies. For example the CRM
| market usually had lots of local companies who built and
| maintained a CRM and would do add ons etc. for customers.
|
| Fast forward 20+ years later, that type of work is essentially
| the SAAS apps you see popping up. It's not a very capital
| intensive business to sustain so with a few thousand customers
| you could have a pretty healthy company and continue product
| development / grow your customer base.
|
| Why do people go for these new SAAS apps ? I've seen a few
| reasons
|
| 1) Pricing is somehow better 2) Integration and or support is
| more personal so the customer (usually a business stakeholder)
| prefers it. 3) Some specific feature exists that is important
| to the customer i.e ease of deletion for GDPR requests 4) CTO /
| CIO / Techie prefers it.
|
| Why I've seen people not go with the open source alternatives
| is the same oul reason. Focus. If you've less than 30 people at
| your org, unless one of those tools has a specific team
| covering that area - it will just split focus and end up in a
| suboptimal setup and create pain points in terms of support.
|
| Examples that come to mind, we used open source snowplow
| analytics because we had a data platform team that supported it
| and ran it full time. There was no cost with regards to the
| software, but certainly was with head-count to maintain, and
| evolve.
|
| We used external newsletter services to inform customers about
| updates etc. in the product. We went with an external paid
| service because this didn't tie directly into a specific team
| and for 100 - 500 euro a month we got what probably would have
| cost 0.3 - 1.0 full time head count to keep a minimal service
| up and running (Which meant -0.3 to -1.0 headcount working on
| important things for the company).
| input_sh wrote:
| Not enough resources? I work as a sysadmin in an org that
| highly prefers self-hosting (paid or non-paid, doesn't really
| matter). I spend a fairly considerable amount of time on
| updating services, updating plugins for our services, making
| sure backups work, integrating our SSO, testing updates on non-
| live environments etc etc.
|
| You can't just set it and forget it. When you approach a dozen
| or so self-hosted projects, you have to dedicate resources to
| keep everything running and up to date. Therefore, we
| consciously off-load some of the stuff to third parties --
| sometimes just for a couple of rough months, sometimes for far
| too long, sometimes permanently. It's far from being our only
| responsibility.
| kilroy123 wrote:
| Interesting, I've always worked at places that prefer to pay
| someone else for the trouble and use a ton of third-party
| tools for all the things.
|
| In the end, do you think the self-hosting route is worth all
| the trouble and costs?
| input_sh wrote:
| It's certainly cheaper to have a couple of sysadmins, but
| then again, it depends on how valuable is the stuff you're
| dealing with. Small web agency? Probably not. Supporting
| dozens of journalists (like my org)? Absolutely.
|
| There are also trade-offs. A few sysadmins can't host
| emails against hostile (sometimes state-sponsored) parties
| like Google can. We can't roll out a better messaging
| service than Signal. We could roll out our own VPN, but if
| the goal is getting lost in the noise, you want a popular
| VPN, not routing journalists' traffic through unique IPs.
|
| On the other hand, just Nextcloud and GitLab (two fairly
| common services) require about 10h/month if you don't want
| to be major versions behind or miss security patches in
| minor versions.
| walteweiss wrote:
| Would you mind to elaborate on the VPN thing? We do work
| with journalists as well and we see private Wire Guard
| configuration as a better option, as nobody knows that's
| a VPN a journalist connects to.
| handrous wrote:
| I've worked at a couple small companies that strongly prefer
| self-hosting services that aren't core to their business. I'm
| at one now, in fact (though it's not nearly as bad as the
| first one). My conclusion from these experiences is that it's
| _almost always_ a bad idea. It 's a waste of money if you
| have people dedicated to managing them, and if you distribute
| the tasks to people who'd otherwise be working on your
| product(s)--even if their contributions to that would also
| look like sysadmin/ops work or whatever--then you're engaging
| in pointless distraction.
|
| Some managers/owners seemingly don't mind spending $4,000+/m
| in payroll to chase $2,000/m savings in paid services,
| though, for whatever reason.
|
| I say, just pay the $$-$$$/month for each thing, and be done
| with it. If paying for the service isn't worth it, paying
| someone to manage the tool internally almost certainly isn't,
| either, so prefer attempting to do without it over that
| option.
|
| [EDIT] obviously, this can change with scale. If you're a
| huge company then putting an average of 1/4 of the hours for
| five sysadmins to managing a self-hosted chat tool can
| absolutely save you lots of money over paying for one--
| provided the reliability's at least as good. A small slip on
| that and you're back on the wrong side of things.
| pembrook wrote:
| I think a good way to get an understanding of this is to start
| a company yourself.
|
| You'll quickly learn why businesses make the decision to pay
| for software instead of cobbling together open source.
|
| Let's say you're a small, but growing company doing $2M ARR.
| You absolutely could run your email marketing using an open
| source tool hooked up to Amazon SES and save a thousand bucks a
| month over something like Mailchimp.
|
| But the problem is, it'll take you up to a week to get setup
| (thousands of dollars lost already) and then none of your
| employees will understand how to send emails with it (thousands
| of dollars wasted in training). Once they do understand how to
| use it, it will likely still be slower than a dummy-proof
| visual UI that has been battle tested on thousands of customers
| instead of an esoteric open source solution. If it wastes 8
| hours of employee time per month, that's another $1k a month
| lost.
|
| Then when something goes wrong, which it always does, it'll
| require expensive developer time (likely costing the company
| $1000-$1500/day per engineer all-in) instead of a simple
| support phone call.
|
| And when you realize the open source version is missing a
| feature you need, you have to build it yourself, of which any
| trivial engineering task inside the company will cost at least
| $5k in employee time. Not to mention the cost to maintain the
| feature when the open source team breaks it with an update.
|
| So, you're already in the hole and losing money compared to
| Mailchimp.
|
| This says nothing about the opportunity cost of engineering
| time that could have been spent serving your own customers,
| allowing you to generate more revenue.
|
| You can generate revenue to infinity, but can only cut costs to
| zero. For a growing company, time spent on cost saving over
| making new sales is likely time wasted.
| typhonius wrote:
| This is where the maxim of open source being 'free as in
| puppies not free as in beer/lunch' comes from.
|
| I started my career in open source and still strongly believe
| in FOSS tenets, but enterprises are looking more to de-risk
| their projects and platforms.
|
| Risk is reduced when you have a vendor you can hold
| accountable for issues in the product, hence making
| proprietary solutions (and sometimes open source but wrapped
| in enterprise support solutions) the only viable choice for a
| business.
| Icathian wrote:
| While I understand and generally agree with your points, I
| do find the idea of "holding a vendor accountable" to be
| more of a philosophy than something I've generally
| witnessed happen in real life. At some point that needs to
| stop being weighed on the scales when doing "build vs buy"
| math for any but the largest companies or most attentive
| vendors.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Not OP, but I think in this context "holding a vendor
| accountable" means "if the product sucks, you will stop
| paying them."
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Any luck holding Microsoft, Google or Apple accountable for
| issues in their operating systems?
| kube-system wrote:
| Yes, custom B2B support contracts that deviate from the
| terms of support that everyone else gets is not unusual.
|
| For example: a large organization might get a "Microsoft
| Custom Support Agreement" if they want to get security
| updates after the date that MS stops providing security
| updates.
|
| As with any negotiation, if you have leverage (i.e.
| dollars), you can negotiate.
| xtracto wrote:
| I am sure large companies have that lever: I know of a
| large multinational company (around 150,000 employees
| along all contintents) that moved from SuccessFactors to
| Workday. Those are huge contracts.
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Reasons for switching contracts can be numerous, and,
| from my experience, the level of support and quality of
| the actual application is rarely one of such reasons.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| "free as in puppies" is an excellent phrase
| xtracto wrote:
| Let me give you a counterpoint on this: non-developed
| countries (non 1st world countires?).
|
| A startup in say, Mexico or LatAm will look at the OpenSource
| version of say Business Intelligence applications (Metabase,
| Superset in the link), then look at the commercial versions
| of them (Tableau, Lookr). With the price needed to pay for
| the commercial versions, the startup can hire 2 or 3
| developers (at local rates) to do whatever improvements they
| need to the open source application.
|
| Something similar happened to me with Jumio about 5 years
| ago: I _wanted_ to use it. I spoke with their sales 2 or 3
| times in 4 years. THe problem is that, every "verification"
| was costing more than $1 USD... for less than that cost, my
| company could hire 3 people a month to do manual verification
| and more (considering the cost of hiring + cost to the
| company, including Mexico's hefty employer costs). It never
| made economic sense to do implement automation.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| > If it wastes 8 hours of employee time per month, that's
| another $1k a month lost... it'll require expensive developer
| time (likely costing the company $1000-$1500/day per engineer
| all-in)
|
| That's not universally true, of course. That money would buy
| you a _week_ of developer time in most of Europe, and even a
| _month_ of developer time in some developing economies.
| pembrook wrote:
| > _That money would buy you a week of developer time in
| most of Europe_
|
| That's only true if you live in Poland and also ignore the
| all-in cost of your employees. A good rule of thumb is to
| assume 2-3x salary for the all-in cost of having a
| workforce.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I run a business and employ several software developers.
| What you are saying has absolutely not been my
| experience.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In Germany average consulting rates, run around 100 euros
| per hour.
|
| https://www.freelancermap.com/blog/freelance-market-
| study-ge...
|
| Plus some management expenses, and it turns into around
| 1000 euros per delivery day for a FTE.
|
| Then we can go to the companies doing high level
| consulting and pull some notches still.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| Sure, there's ample opportunity for everyone in the
| industry to throw money into the sea.
|
| The comment that I was replying to specifically referred
| to _employee_ time per month. That 's naturally going to
| be different from some high-rate consultant, so this is
| totally an apples-to-oranges comparison.
|
| Furthermore, it's a large market and there are plenty of
| consultancies in Europe charging significantly less than
| that.
| Xylakant wrote:
| I've had a quick look into some of the tools on the list.
| We even use at least one, but we still pay for the hosted
| solution. Why?
|
| * We're a shop full of developers, but none of us have
| the required skill set to host and debug a python app.
|
| * We're fairly well booked. Any time I'd assign one of
| the folks to maintaining tool X, I'd have to take from
| time assigned to client work. Which means the internal
| cost is not what's interesting. What counts is "how much
| do I loose by not having them work in billable hours?"
|
| All of this means that the calculation is strongly tilted
| in favor of buy.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| For _you_ perhaps, in _your_ circumstances. Surely you
| weren 't thinking you could project your specific
| circumstance to software development companies more
| broadly?
| wongarsu wrote:
| In Germany, the average Software Dev salary is about
| 50kEUR/year. That's a total payroll cost of about
| 60kEUR/year after taxes, social security etc., so around
| 300EUR/workday. Add some money for office space,
| equipment, overhead, etc, and adjust by factor of two in
| either direction depending on location and role.
|
| Of course if you hire a freelancer, prices are very
| different and 1500EUR/day is very reasonable.
| rglullis wrote:
| Either I have been very, very lucky or you are basing
| yourself in outdated reports. In Berlin (one of lowest
| cost-of-living German cities) you will have trouble to
| find even junior developers working for 50kEUR/year.
| fnomnom wrote:
| if you look at the numbers raw it might be salary for a
| week but assuming your developer has stuff on his/her plate
| and this stuff actually will make you more money in the
| long run (why would they be employed by you otherwise?) its
| more than their raw salary and the cost of hardware and
| rent. opportunity cost.
| yakshaving_jgt wrote:
| I'm familiar with the concept of opportunity cost, but
| the question of whether to build or buy is highly
| context-dependant. As is so often the case in software
| development: it depends. Not all B2B tools are the same.
| Not all integration efforts are the same. Not all
| developer hours cost the same. Not every return on
| investment is the same.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Pitching in to confirm - currently i work as a full stack
| dev in Latvia with 5 years of experience and a Master's
| degree, my net salary is around 1500 euros per month.
|
| Most SaaS offerings without free tiers indeed are unlikely
| to be used.
|
| I even had to buy the JetBrains tools myself to be able to
| navigate 1M SLoC Java codebases easily, refactor with
| confidence, whilst not resorting to piracy like some of my
| countrymen do. Even if definitely worth it, i still had to
| look at the price tag for a while, seeing as it's
| essentially food for a month or two:
| https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/#personal?billing=yearly
|
| Developer salaries vary wildly over the world, though i
| guess some SaaS solutions also do location based pricing,
| which may or may not have historically worked.
| Radim wrote:
| I live on both sides of this divide, so maybe I can offer my 2
| cents:
|
| * Created & maintain Gensim and other open source, used by
| thousands of companies for free.
|
| * Created & sell an (unrelated) B2B product.
|
| Yes, I've had B2B prospects who thought they could "stitch my
| product together using open source".
|
| These people are invariably _either_ low budget & high-
| maintenance, _or_ unsophisticated = don 't realize how much
| work the "just stitching" part is. Plus how little the
| stitched-together-from-open-source part actually is of the
| whole.
|
| Good riddance of the former - go ahead and use open source, god
| speed. Your time is free, mine is not. The latter often come
| back after being burned & learning the ropes.
|
| Maybe it helps to think of it this way: savvy companies are
| _much more risk-averse than your typical open source hacker_.
| They price in risk into their decision making. So your
| assertion of "almost free" is the root of the issue: a
| business sees the lack of business scaffolding (stability,
| continuity, legal, management...) and thinks "Expensive! We'll
| have to do this ourselves! Headache! Liability! Extra cost!".
|
| Sure, "free code" helps, everybody likes free, but the code is
| not the only consideration.
| carschno wrote:
| This sounds so familiar. I have worked in several startups
| that were commercializing NLP-based solutions for different
| problems. The approach of management (although relatively
| educated in the field, but obviously not knowledgeable in
| everything) was essentially expecting from their research
| engineers:
|
| - look into state-of-the-art related to our problem - think
| very hard about how to apply the academic state-of-the-art to
| our problem - stitch a fully fletched software solution
| together
|
| The problem obviously emerged reliably in the last step,
| which was supposed to take negligible time and should be done
| by more junior team members (because they were not smart
| enough for step 2).
|
| The result was a bunch of prototypes running in production,
| and huge costs for keeping the whole thing somehow running.
| [deleted]
| dutchbrit wrote:
| Competition is always good and sometimes one solution just fits
| a use case better than the other. When it comes to free
| solutions, you still need someone to update it and how stable
| are these solutions. How often are they updated with essential
| or nice to have features? How is the support?
| jasode wrote:
| _> Is this still the case of idiot-managers doing decisions
| like "nobody was fired for buying IBM" (and now SAP,
| salesforce,_
|
| Enterprise software like SAP and Salesforce are gigantic
| comprehensive business process management tools for Fortune
| 1000 companies that can't be replicated by stitching together
| open source projects.
|
| Even tech companies with expert domain knowledge of software
| programming like Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, etc _all buy
| SAP licenses to use_. Google recently switched from Oracle
| Financials to SAP. None of those tech companies are strangers
| to the open source ecosystem and yet they pay millions every
| year in SAP licenses.
|
| Yes, a small business might be able to use an open source
| accounting package instead of paying $150 for Intuit
| QuickBooks. In contrast, no free software has the same scope
| and integration of SAP to save $millions.
|
| Analogous situation with GIMP vs Photoshop. Why do so many pay
| for Photoshop when GIMP is free? Because as great as GIMP is...
| it is still missing many features that Photoshop has had for
| years. CMYK color support, layer effects, latest algorithmic
| filters, action macros without requiring script programming,
| etc.
|
| This is the problem with most of these _" open source
| alternatives to $TOOLS$"_ type of lists: they usually don't
| tell you what critical features are missing that prevent them
| from being realistic substitutes.
| xvilka wrote:
| Gigantic part of products like SAP etc (maybe the main part)
| is their integration with local standards and legislation in
| every jurisdiction the company operates. Yes, writing code
| that can substitute their products is probably easy. Knowing
| what exactly to write is hard, especially for multinationals.
| gmueckl wrote:
| Another big part is the under the hood flexibility, at
| least in SAP. What you usually see as a user is a specific
| configuration of the package that has been adapted to your
| company's workflows. There is a lot of domain knowledge and
| implementation effort hidden within that configurability.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| This question may be easier to understand in the general case:
| why don't people do everything themselves?
|
| Why don't people paint their own houses? Why don't people fix
| their own cars? Why don't people sew their own clothes? Why
| don't people cook their own food?
|
| Of course a lot of people _do_ do these things themselves! Just
| like a lot of people do use free and /or open source software
| tools.
|
| But a lot of people don't do these things, at least not all of
| them, and probably not all the time. If you can think of the
| reasons you pay for things you might be able to do yourself,
| you can start to understand why a business does too. It usually
| comes down to opportunity cost and specialization--answering
| the question "how is _my_ limited time best spent?"
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| It's not so much about being open source or not, but rather how
| easy it is to set up, integrate and maintain. People know this
| so many companies offer their products as open source plus a
| nice hosted (usually marketed as "cloud") version for easy
| access. So your choice is between two clicks and paying a few
| bucks using company card vs. spending a few hours or in complex
| cases days dealing with setup, resolving dependencies, solving
| any problems that arise when you deal with any complex piece of
| software and so on. Moreover, you need to maintain it yourself,
| so again you have a choice of updating it with each new version
| to stay up to date, without any guarantee that there are no
| problems with each update, or withhold the updates - but then
| you risk either a security incident or delaying it so long that
| updating gets difficult. So for non-essential services it's a
| no-brainer, you just pay a bit and forget it. Especially if
| it's open source so in the worst case you can just migrate to a
| self-hosted solution as nobody holds your data (incl.
| configurations etc.) hostage.
|
| It's quite different with core and expensive proprietary
| services though. In this case you better think and calculate
| everything precisely as you may regret going with a proprietary
| solution in the long run and switching can be painful.
| rozenmd wrote:
| I built a website monitoring service (last I checked, 191
| alternatives on AlternativeTo).
|
| Customers really really really don't want to have to run their
| own solution. They want to be able to pay someone to make the
| pain go away.
|
| (https://onlineornot.com if you're curious)
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| I personally feel that uptime monitoring, status pages and
| similar solutions should always involve a third party. You
| can run your own service, but you would have to trust your
| service to be working properly. And in the exact cases where
| uptime monitoring is relevant, you may end up facing issues
| with your own monitoring service.
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Hello! In an effort to support the open source community, we've
| curated 200+ open source alternatives to tools that businesses
| require in day-to-day operations.
| rpxio wrote:
| It appears that your site uses Google Analytics instead of one
| of the open source analytics platforms you have on your list.
| Is there a reason for that?
| markcartertm wrote:
| Was surprised grafana is not listed?
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Grafana is here: https://www.btw.so/open-source-
| alternatives/observability-pl...
|
| Hard to miss them!
| Robotbeat wrote:
| I think freeCAD probably is a better fit for CAD software than
| Blender.
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Thanks for letting me know, adding freeCAD right away. :)
| edhelas wrote:
| Regarding the IM/Slack alternatives you can maybe consider adding
| Movim ( https://movim.eu/ ). Fully based on XMPP with plenty of
| features already packed in. It can easily be deployed on a simple
| web-server.
|
| PS: I'm the author and maintainer
| KronisLV wrote:
| Some additional ideas: - Kanban - Kanboard (
| https://github.com/kanboard/kanboard ) - Analytics - Matomo
| ( https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo ) - Content
| Management System - Grav ( https://github.com/getgrav/grav )
| - Knowledge Base - BookStack (
| https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack ) - Browser -
| Firefox ( https://github.com/mozilla ) - Image Manipulation
| ( https://github.com/GNOME/gimp ) - Observability Platform
| - Zabbix ( https://github.com/zabbix/zabbix ) - Password
| manager - KeePassX ( https://github.com/keepassx/keepassx )
| npteljes wrote:
| Bitwarden for password manager also. They specifically endorse
| enterprise usage.
|
| https://bitwarden.com/
| andrewzah wrote:
| For selfhosting bitwarden, I recommend vaultwarden [0]
| (previously known as bitwarden_rs).
|
| [0]: https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Great list, thanks so much. Will review these and add!
| dotCOMmie wrote:
| Looker / Tableau alternative - Redash ( https://redash.io/ )
| federation wrote:
| Set to be end of life in November after Databricks Acquired
| it. Try Superset / Preset https://preset.io/
| g19fanatic wrote:
| app.keeweb.info for a great pw manager off of keepass too.. Its
| my goto for every platform!
| xtracto wrote:
| Even though it is not as general as some of those, I think
| https://fineract.apache.org/ should be in the list: An Open
| Source Loan Servicing System.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| There's one of those speech bubbles down below which you could
| probably use to get in touch with the authors, not sure if they
| will read this comment section.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| N.B. KeePassX hasn't been maintained since 2016!
|
| Use https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc instead. (They
| are compatible)
| KronisLV wrote:
| Fair point! I actually still use KeePass on some machines
| that are stuck on Windows, as well as run the original
| KeePass on Linux ones as well thanks to Mono (IIRC).
| meepybub wrote:
| FYI, the github link on each product page does not work. Also, it
| would be a useful feature to see the license each product has
| without having to go to it's github and scroll down.
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out- fixed the Github link issue. It
| shows the license under the "Github Activity" section.
| rapnie wrote:
| It looks like this startup is going to monetize findability,
| ease-of-installation, and hosting of quality open-source
| alternatives.
|
| Would be very cool if either some of the revenue of their service
| would go to the projects they offer this way, or if they at least
| drew prominent attention to how we might offer that to the
| project ourselves.
|
| In other words, offer commercial services that are truly in
| support of (F)OSS and not just benefiting and exploiting it
| (tragedy of the commons, etc.)
| timkofu wrote:
| Possible to make the list a GitHub project that we can contribute
| to?
| dgb23 wrote:
| Under Content Management System there is OctoberCMS listed.
|
| Their LICENCE.md:
|
| https://github.com/octobercms/october/blob/develop/LICENSE.m...
|
| Not sure if this counts as open source. Around here there is a
| stricter notion of what open source means I think.
| deeptichopra wrote:
| Thanks! Removed October CMS, and added
| https://github.com/wintercms/winter
| skyfaller wrote:
| Some of these "open source" options are not really open source.
|
| - Outline uses the Business Source License 1.1, which eventually
| becomes open source (Apache 2) four years after each release.
| https://github.com/outline/outline/blob/main/LICENSE
|
| - Invoice Ninja uses Elastic License 2.0 (ELv2), which allows you
| to host it for yourself, but not for other people.
| https://github.com/invoiceninja/invoiceninja/blob/master/LIC...
|
| Source code available is not the same thing as open source.
| janober wrote:
| Also https://n8n.io is not OSI approved open-source, it is
| rather https://faircode.io licensed instead. Disclaimer: I am
| the founder
| xtracto wrote:
| Right, they should also note the "freemium" ones like Odoo,
| which has a botchered "Open Source" version vs the Enterprise
| version.
| curtis3389 wrote:
| I'm actually not sure if the 2 cases you cited actually violate
| the OSI's Open Source Definition:
| https://opensource.org/docs/osd
|
| Anyone care to clarify? I know that open source != free
| software, and you can read about that on wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source#Open_source_as_a_t...
| yellowapple wrote:
| IIRC the OSI has outright stated that the Elastic License
| ain't open source. Not sure about that first one, though.
| thunderbong wrote:
| No Kanboard under 'Project Management. Or Tiddlywiki. Actually,
| no wiki software at all.
|
| Also, is this really B2B? Are browsers B2B softwares?
| npteljes wrote:
| Would be nice if the icons showed the product name on hover.
|
| Also, no MS Office / Google Drive alternatives? ONLYOFFICE works
| great in this space, with MS Office format compatibility, online
| editors, file sharing, nice integrations with Nextcloud and a
| myriad of other cloud solutions.
|
| https://www.onlyoffice.com/
|
| For MFA, as for example a Yubikey alternative, Solokeys could
| work.
|
| https://solokeys.com/pages/enterprise-orders
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-22 23:02 UTC)