Ask HN: Which "open-source alternatives" have succeeded?

• hn-search

  1,696 530 2.9 TypeScript

  Hacker News Search

  

  https://hn.algolia.com/?q=open+source+alternative

  I have some personal hypotheses on why this is a common pattern, but I am mostly wondering whether any of these have really succeeded as projects / businesses. Are there any examples of these "open source alternative"-type products really taking off?

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• Outline

  197 26,050 9.9 TypeScript

  The fastest knowledge base for growing teams. Beautiful, realtime collaborative, feature packed, and markdown compatible.

  

  GitLab, Mattermost, RocketChat would be a few good examples of products that began as OSS alternatives to well-established players. I'm not sure if any of these ever pitched themselves explicitly that way on HN though

  Outline (https://www.getoutline.com) is successful on most metrics you'd judge a business and OSS project on.

• Dokuwiki

  20 4,053 9.6 PHP

  The DokuWiki Open Source Wiki Engine

  

  DokuWiki.

  This database-free FOSS wiki engine [1] with a focus on simplicity is 19 years old, still gets updated, has useful extensions for additional features, is a great choice for many uses, has adopters that use and love it, and has an estimated 50,000-250,000 installations [2].

  As someone said, "DokuWiki is and will remain king for many simple reasons" [3].

  [1] https://www.dokuwiki.org

• Bitwarden

  1,060 14,670 9.8 C#

  Bitwarden infrastructure/backend (API, database, Docker, etc). (by bitwarden)

  

• Canvas LMS

  33 5,403 10.0 Ruby

  The open LMS by Instructure, Inc.

  

  Canvas is an open-source learning management system used at universities: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms

• Jellyfin

  1,036 31,625 9.9 C#

  The Free Software Media System

  

  With how anti-consumer the recent Plex moves have been, Jellyfin [1] has gotten really popular among self-hosting community. It is arguably the best alternative to Plex in terms of features and the amount of freedom given to the user.

  [1] https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin

• darktable

  393 9,048 10.0 C

  darktable is an open source photography workflow application and raw developer

  

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com featured

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

• findroid

  31 2,130 9.5 Kotlin

  Third-party native Jellyfin Android app

• obs-studio

  2,365 57,110 9.9 C

  OBS Studio - Free and open source software for live streaming and screen recording

  

  OBS Studio - I found this to be a very valuable and successful application for video and audio editing, with some amazing companies sponsoring them. - https://obsproject.com/

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