Ask HN: Which open source versions of SaaS products would you like to see?
There are many open sourced versions of SaaS products (like gitlab <-> github, plausible <-> google analytics). What is a SaaS solution that you would like to see an open source version for?
67 comments
Most of the answers are going to be products that do extensive lock in as a service. So its easy to replace quickbooks with dozens if not hundreds of old or current accounting software but only quickbooks has the integration with seemingly every financial service out there. Another example is Slack, when people ask for a replacement for Slack they don't mean "IRC in a GUI" but they mean chat with maybe a thousand integrations to every other service and product, so no matter how you configure IRC it'll never had a thousand one click integrations.
The next most popular answer will be defining user friendly and capable as being a bug for bug compatible identical clone with the current industry leader, despite the fact that the industry leader changes their app completely every two years as a moving target yet the users don't care at all, and the industry leader is rarely user friendly because they don't need to be once they have lock in. What they mean is the transfer will be visually seamless to end users and they somehow don't think that writing a clone would have any legal repercussions to the author and writing a clone would be significantly cheaper than just writing something original. So despite "MS Office" being a continuously moving target for 30 years there will never be a FOSS replacement for it, because it would be legal and labor impossible to make an exact bug for bug clone of todays current version and then maintain it tomorrow. Despite the fact that Google Workspace makes end users considerably more productive and its easier to use and easier to learn, its not bug for bug compatible with Excel so its worthless.
The next most popular answer after that will be UpdatesAsAService where last year's product is pretty much worthless today and you're paying for this years product to work. See TurboTax, and as much as no one wants to admit it publicly, almost all security software that only protects you tomorrow, if they even get to it that soon, from yesterday's threats.
The next most popular answer will be defining user friendly and capable as being a bug for bug compatible identical clone with the current industry leader, despite the fact that the industry leader changes their app completely every two years as a moving target yet the users don't care at all, and the industry leader is rarely user friendly because they don't need to be once they have lock in. What they mean is the transfer will be visually seamless to end users and they somehow don't think that writing a clone would have any legal repercussions to the author and writing a clone would be significantly cheaper than just writing something original. So despite "MS Office" being a continuously moving target for 30 years there will never be a FOSS replacement for it, because it would be legal and labor impossible to make an exact bug for bug clone of todays current version and then maintain it tomorrow. Despite the fact that Google Workspace makes end users considerably more productive and its easier to use and easier to learn, its not bug for bug compatible with Excel so its worthless.
The next most popular answer after that will be UpdatesAsAService where last year's product is pretty much worthless today and you're paying for this years product to work. See TurboTax, and as much as no one wants to admit it publicly, almost all security software that only protects you tomorrow, if they even get to it that soon, from yesterday's threats.
None of that office or bug tracking stuff is that interesting or important imho. There's plenty of alternatives that work well enough. The interesting stuff is the hardest. From Google services alone: language translation, voice transcription, maps/directions (open street map is only partway there and Osmand is almost unusable), and of course searching the entire web.
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osmand does a lot of things so it depends what you are trying to do with it really.
organic maps (which also uses openstreetmap) is a bit more straight forward and minimal and is what i usually recommend to most people
organic maps (which also uses openstreetmap) is a bit more straight forward and minimal and is what i usually recommend to most people
The main thing I want mapping for is navigating to place X in my car with voice prompts. Osmand is way too slow to notice that I've missed a turn or something like that. So it thinks I'm somewhere that I'm not, and persists in that belief until I'm off course for maybe some minutes. Google Maps is much better in that regard. But both of them really need a user control (pushbutton, maybe even a bluetooth pushbutton on the dashboard so you don't have to look at your phone) that says "mapping app, you are confused! I am not where you think I am. Update location to current GPS reading and recalculate route right now". Also, Osmand is ridiculously slow at route calculation. Idk how it can be so slow. Garmin automotive GPS of 10+ years ago were far faster at it despite having 1/100th the processing power of a modern phone.
The map data itself also isn't that great, but at least you can hunt around for the location you want while the car is parked or pulled over. The route recalculation issue is massively frustrating because it nabs you while you are actually driving, dodging other cars, etc.
I hadn't heard of Organic Maps. I'll look for it. Thanks.
The map data itself also isn't that great, but at least you can hunt around for the location you want while the car is parked or pulled over. The route recalculation issue is massively frustrating because it nabs you while you are actually driving, dodging other cars, etc.
I hadn't heard of Organic Maps. I'll look for it. Thanks.
Thanks. Osmand has indeed a very complicated GUI which would need a lot of careful redesign or to be split into 3 or 4 different apps for different purposes. Unfortunately Organic Maps doesn't import gpx and I have a substantial library of tracks in that format. Strange choice because I think that gpx is the de facto standard.
Trello.
Lots of half-baked clones but remarkably few quality foss implementations. WeKan is… a mess. Taiga is complex & the frontend is CoffeeScript (!!). FocalBoard looks about the best of them, but it’s still missing many features and they’ve explicitly rejected calls for OAuth and/ or SAML because they want as a paid feature.
Lots of half-baked clones but remarkably few quality foss implementations. WeKan is… a mess. Taiga is complex & the frontend is CoffeeScript (!!). FocalBoard looks about the best of them, but it’s still missing many features and they’ve explicitly rejected calls for OAuth and/ or SAML because they want as a paid feature.
I’ve also tried many products to replace Trello and finally settled with Taiga. It doesn’t look complex, and the UI is great too. The only missing bits I find are native mobile apps.
Any SaaS product that uses a rent seeking marketplace to compensate for missing essential product features. Think Atlassian, Shopify, QuickBooks etc.
I was very happy to discover Medusa (https://www.medusajs.com) on HN recently, a pretty solid Shopify alternative.
I was very happy to discover Medusa (https://www.medusajs.com) on HN recently, a pretty solid Shopify alternative.
Atlassian's problem isn't a lack of essential features, it's the flood of completely non-essential features that make it impossible to configure correctly without years of experience. It's essentially the opposite of the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well, each Atlassian app tries to do 150,000 things and does 149,998 of them extremely poorly.
A fully self-hosted alternative to GMail, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Keep and Google Drive (including the office suite apps), just as user-friendly and capable (in antispam, security, synchronization and so on).
Don't know why the other comment is dead, but Nextcloud/Owncloud might really be a solution to this.
I run a Nextcloud instance and it supplies me with:
I know that there are extensions/plugins for Nextcloud which provide something like Keep functionality and there's also some plugin to connect to some hosted Office suite stuff, but I didn't look into that, yet.
So: Give Nextcloud a try.
I run a Nextcloud instance and it supplies me with:
- Calendar through CalDav
- Photos through automatic uploading from my Smartphone
- Drive, obviously, through Desktop and mobile client
I know that there are extensions/plugins for Nextcloud which provide something like Keep functionality and there's also some plugin to connect to some hosted Office suite stuff, but I didn't look into that, yet.
So: Give Nextcloud a try.
Let me add: If you find yourself short in storage, you can also mount a Hetzner Storage box (or something like that) as an external storage to your Nextloud. That adds 1 TB of storage for 3,50 €/month or sth. like that.
Nextcloud should satisfy all your needs I think.
have you seen Zimbra [1][2]?
[1]: https://www.zimbra.com/business-email-collaboration/
[2]: https://github.com/zimbra
[1]: https://www.zimbra.com/business-email-collaboration/
[2]: https://github.com/zimbra
Ah! This is nice. Didn't realize Zimbra went open source. Zimbra was sold to Yahoo! quite a while back (2007). Zimbra used to open a whole lot of enterprise email services during its time.
Do it and you have a customer on me mate
OwnCloud or NextCloud?
Hands down a solution equivalent to Jira.
I see so many devops hacking on top of Jira, it would be so much helpful if there was an open source, totally customizable, solution to manage tickets (as complete as Jira).
What are some of the JIRA features that you see missing from open source implementations?
Dead simple ticket management (sprints and so on) linked to GH issues and PRs.
Gitea.io?
A FOSS alternative to WolframAlpha's Mathematica. Some great software, such as sagemath, numpy, but I'm not aware of many. Though a key feature they don't have is "single-stepping" over the equation solving process, which WolframAlpha does really well (though still not for all equations). That feature would be above all useful for learning high-school level math.
TurboTax and their ilk.
Tax software is fucking evil and by having a FOSS version of it we could remove a huge lobbyist by driving them out of business which will then simplify tax filing for everyone.
Tax software is fucking evil and by having a FOSS version of it we could remove a huge lobbyist by driving them out of business which will then simplify tax filing for everyone.
Every state, county, city, township has it's own tax structures that change every year, it seems. Federal is pretty easy.
It's the need for legal review by tax attorneys and CPAs that makes tax software really really hard to make.
It's the need for legal review by tax attorneys and CPAs that makes tax software really really hard to make.
This. It's farcical to believe that the hard part of getting around tens (hundreds?) of millions spent on lobbying for regulations, plus managing the constantly evolving tax code and all the legal and financial liability surrounding that, is writing the actual code. That's the easiest part by a factor of 20.
FOSS tax prep software exists, most of it is ok, some of it is pretty good, but it's really a legal and regulatory problem that is not going to be solved by developers.
FOSS tax prep software exists, most of it is ok, some of it is pretty good, but it's really a legal and regulatory problem that is not going to be solved by developers.
As someone working in this field at the moment, what you and the commenter you are replying to are saying is exactly part of the lobbying push by the likes of TurboTax and H&R Block. It’s complex, yes. But the data is publicly available and does not change all that frequently. And of course an effort like this should 100% be subsidized by the government anyways.
The Ory [0] stuff seems pretty cool. But I have no use for it as of yet.
0: https://ory.sh/
0: https://ory.sh/
I'm making a similar one here: https://github.com/authcompanion/authcompanion, if you wouldn't mind sharing your impressions of it.
Hey. I don't actually know jack about auth systems :P. But I'll check it out
PopSQL
Also, PDF readers on windows are very bad. Acrobat doesn't have dark mode and it feels heavy. Xodo crashes a lot. SumatraPDF is very light weight but lacks a lot of features and lacks dark mode too. If you read a lot at night, this would be very important to you. And I am not talking about the UI only, the PDF itself gets inverted. Xodo does that very well.
Also, PDF readers on windows are very bad. Acrobat doesn't have dark mode and it feels heavy. Xodo crashes a lot. SumatraPDF is very light weight but lacks a lot of features and lacks dark mode too. If you read a lot at night, this would be very important to you. And I am not talking about the UI only, the PDF itself gets inverted. Xodo does that very well.
We at TogetherDB have SQL bookmarks as well and will Open Source in Q2 this year!
Confluence.
I've been looking for alternatives ever since they did the stupid cloud shove, but I haven't found anything coming close enough and robust enough that I can give to everyone, from developers to sales and HR, without having to worry about teaching them another language.
I've been looking for alternatives ever since they did the stupid cloud shove, but I haven't found anything coming close enough and robust enough that I can give to everyone, from developers to sales and HR, without having to worry about teaching them another language.
[Shameless plug]
I started this a while ago and maybe it helps you:
https://github.com/documize/community
I started this a while ago and maybe it helps you:
https://github.com/documize/community
Nice, I didn't know you existed, it's great what you have done, but still not at the same level than confluence.
I'm myself too have been working for more than 2 years on an alternative to confluence and haven't reached the same level either, but closer and closer every day
I'm myself too have been working for more than 2 years on an alternative to confluence and haven't reached the same level either, but closer and closer every day
have you tried XWiki? https://www.xwiki.org/
A good small CRM. Odoo exists, but the free tier is too simple and the first paid tier is overkill. There is still room for something in the middle.
I'd love a solid open source version of calendly.
Cal.com, erstwhile Calenso, https://github.com/calcom/cal.com
The co-founders are nice people and I have a years worth of the premium version. Unfortunately, too buggy and people end up booking at the wrong hour, multiple-events gets reset when I change time-slots in another.
I haven't found something as simple as Calendly -- that just works. A commenter here once commented about a different alternative but that got bought out and shuttered. I'm still on the final look-out till end of this month (FEB), else going back to the Calendly subscription.
The co-founders are nice people and I have a years worth of the premium version. Unfortunately, too buggy and people end up booking at the wrong hour, multiple-events gets reset when I change time-slots in another.
I haven't found something as simple as Calendly -- that just works. A commenter here once commented about a different alternative but that got bought out and shuttered. I'm still on the final look-out till end of this month (FEB), else going back to the Calendly subscription.
An RMM like NinjaRMM or N-Central, and HUGE points if it written in Ruby On Rails or VueJS. I would dump everything and move to there immediately, start contributing and sponsor. I want to write one myself, but I don't have the time.
MeshCentral
https://github.com/Ylianst/MeshCentral “This is a full computer management web site. With MeshCentral, you can run your own web server and it to remotely manage and control computers on a local network or anywhere on the internet. Once you get the server started, will create a mesh (a group of computers) and then download and install a mesh agent on each computer you want to manage. A…”
https://github.com/Ylianst/MeshCentral “This is a full computer management web site. With MeshCentral, you can run your own web server and it to remotely manage and control computers on a local network or anywhere on the internet. Once you get the server started, will create a mesh (a group of computers) and then download and install a mesh agent on each computer you want to manage. A…”
TacticalRMM... MeshCetral plus a lot of Django
https://github.com/wh1te909/tacticalrmm
https://github.com/wh1te909/tacticalrmm
A combination of customer support chat (Intercom), customer relationship management / sales (Streak, NetHunt), and customer payments tracking.
So basically, the stack that is needed to handle B2B customers as a startup.
Currently these tools are very isolated, and where integrations exist, they are poor. We have to manage customers in 3 different systems that don't know about each other. When making sales progress on Intercom, it doesn't reflect as conversations in NetHunt.
Open-source would be excellent because Intercom is currently problematic with GDPR and high-security systems that don't like to embed third-party Javascript. The ability to self-host solves that. Most people will still use the hosted service you can offer if reasonably priced.
I hope that https://www.chatwoot.com will do this, but they are currently focused on only the Intercom part.
The services also don't necessarily have to be fully vertically integrated in 1 product as long as they interact well. For example, and add-on to Chatwoot that does the equivalent of Streak/Nethunt, something with good API integration, might also do the trick.
So basically, the stack that is needed to handle B2B customers as a startup.
Currently these tools are very isolated, and where integrations exist, they are poor. We have to manage customers in 3 different systems that don't know about each other. When making sales progress on Intercom, it doesn't reflect as conversations in NetHunt.
Open-source would be excellent because Intercom is currently problematic with GDPR and high-security systems that don't like to embed third-party Javascript. The ability to self-host solves that. Most people will still use the hosted service you can offer if reasonably priced.
I hope that https://www.chatwoot.com will do this, but they are currently focused on only the Intercom part.
The services also don't necessarily have to be fully vertically integrated in 1 product as long as they interact well. For example, and add-on to Chatwoot that does the equivalent of Streak/Nethunt, something with good API integration, might also do the trick.
I agree - it’s shocking to me how immature any open source CRM out there is. Chatwoot is fantastic but only solves half of the equation. Chatwoot + a lightweight CRM would be a killer product for small B2B startups.
No affiliation, but have you looked at https://papercups.io/ ? They are also OSS: https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups
I hadn't heard of Papercups until now. It looks quite relevant.
But it seems it's now in maintanence mode (I checked out their blog and posted): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30313260
But it seems it's now in maintanence mode (I checked out their blog and posted): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30313260
I wasn't aware of this, so thanks for the heads up.
The database part of Notion/a simplified Airtable/Google Sheets storing to plain text files or CSV.
Editing and manipulating CSV by hand is a pain. Something like a simplified sqlite viewer/editor?
Editing and manipulating CSV by hand is a pain. Something like a simplified sqlite viewer/editor?
This project literally bills itself as an OSS Airtable alternative, so maybe? I've only tinkered with it: https://www.nocodb.com/
Baserow might be interesting.
TurboTax.
I hate it, but filing in 4 different states plus dealing with a half dozen different brokerage 1099's that need to be wash sale calculated, it's either that or pay someone $500.
I hate it, but filing in 4 different states plus dealing with a half dozen different brokerage 1099's that need to be wash sale calculated, it's either that or pay someone $500.
Toggl Time tracker
Ynab
might be interesting for you! https://www.budgetwithbuckets.com/
Syncing with banks is neither free nor open source though and is a clusterfuck to maintain.
doesn't appear to be open-source.
Hubspot & Semrush.
Firebase
I thought Supabase was the Open Source Firebase alternative?