About Open Source Tools
Open Source Tools is a free, curated directory of open source software. We believe in tools you can own, run, and audit yourself - not rent.
We gather open source apps from across the web, organize them into clear categories, and map them to the proprietary products they can replace. For each tool we surface real signals - the license, the languages, and live GitHub activity - so you can judge what is genuinely maintained before you commit.
Doing this at scale is rare: only a handful of projects anywhere catalog open source software this broadly. That breadth - hundreds of categories and alternatives gathered in one place and kept current - is the value we set out to provide.
We are not a tracker. We do not collect personal data, profile you, or monitor what you do here. The site is supported solely by Google AdSense advertising - there is nothing else running in the background.
Whether you want a self-hosted analytics tool, an open source CRM, or a privacy-respecting password manager, Open Source Tools helps you find software that matches your values.
Who runs this
Open Source Tools is maintained by a small, independent team that runs a lot of this software ourselves. We started the directory because keeping track of good open source options across so many categories is genuinely hard, and the resources that try tend to go stale fast. No vendor pays us to be here, and we take no money from the projects we list. The site is funded entirely by advertising, which keeps the directory free and keeps us honest: there is no paid placement, no pay-to-rank, and no sponsored slots dressed up as recommendations. Where a tool lands is decided by the same criteria for everyone.
How tools get selected
A tool has to clear a few plain bars before it goes in. It must ship under an OSI-style open source license, so you can read, run, and modify the code yourself. It must solve a real, nameable job - the kind of thing you would search for by name - rather than being a demo or a thin wrapper. We judge whether a project is maintained from public repository signals: recent commit activity, tagged releases, and how issues and pull requests are triaged, not from how it markets itself. All else being equal, we lean toward tools you can self-host or run locally, since those give you the most control over your own data.
Every listing is reviewed by a person before it is published, and we refresh the catalog data periodically so activity signals and metadata stay current. If something looks wrong - an outdated description, a broken link, or a tool that has gone unmaintained - or there is a project we should add, tell us on the Contact page and we will take a look.