Ask HN: There is an open-source alternative to almost any SaaS, what do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: There is an open-source alternative to almost any SaaS, what do you use?

22 pointsgitroom15 comments

Buffer, SproutSocial -> Postiz

Lokalise, Crowdin -> Tolgee

Shopify -> MedusaJS

Typeform -> Formbricks

Auth0 -> Hanko, Stack-auth

Retool -> ToolJet

Courier -> Novu

Launchdarkly -> Flipt, Unleash

Mixpanel -> Posthog

Bitly -> Dub

Notion -> Appflowy

Zoom -> Jitsi

Jira -> Plane

Airtable -> NocoDB

Vercel -> Coolify, Taubyte

Heroku -> Dokku

Firebase -> Pocketbase / Appwrite / Supabase

Shopify -> Prestashop

Slack -> Mattermost

Salesforce CRM -> ERPNext

Dropbox -> NextCloud

Mailchimp -> Mautic

Trello -> Wekan

Docusign -> Documenso

Calendly -> Cal

Datadog -> Prometheus

Google Analytics -> Plausible, Fathom

Zapier -> n8n

Algolia -> Trieve, Melisearch

Mint -> Maybe

Intercom -> Chatwoot

What am I missing?

View on HN

> Mint -> Maybe

I don't know what these are, but how am I supposed to google these words and get the correct results?

I currently self-host these infra and apps:

  - technitium DNS
  - Traefik
  - Cerbot
  - Home assistant
  - samba file shares
  - Gerbera media server
  - Jellyfin
  - Gitlab
  - Grafana / influxdb (for telegraf server monitoring + esphome  sensors)
  - Photoprism
  - Syncthing
  - Taiga
  - Vaultwarden
  - offlineimap sync from gmail

I've been thinking about Nextcloud as well, but it seems a bit heavy-handed and wants control over my docker daemon, which I am not sure about.

I'm like you but have somehow different set

- AdguardHome

- Traefik - Cloudflare tunnels

- Home Assistant

- onedev (Nice simple one user git host)

- Immich

- Vaultwarden

- Coder

- IT-tools

- Linkding

- Clibre/Calibre Web

- Bookstack

- Nextcloud

- Memos

- Stirling-PDF

- FireFox Sync (Yes you can do that! [1] )

- INVIDIOUS (I can't handle Youtube vanilla)

And I agree that nextcloud is somehow heavy but it is the easiest solution. I use it mainly to backup my research activity (slides, books ..etc) and mainly using webdav features to sync zotero documents.

[1] https://github.com/mozilla-services/syncstorage-rs

I googled "mint maybe app" and got information and articles about the two right away, so maybe you just need to train your Google fu a bit more ;). Either way though, Maybe.co, the Mint finance app alternative, is nowhere near ready for production, they are going through a rewrite right now.

What do you self host with? I've been using Coolify on Hetzner VPS but I've been looking into Dokploy recently, the UI is much faster.

I host on an old i5 dell optiplex and usb raid enclosure i keep in the cupboard under the stairs. It's mostly for making the storage available to my other devices. It's also a tailscale node.

Ah OK, how does the IP addressing work? Can you have users hit your residential IP and be fine with your ISP?

I'm the only user really, but yes, some services are available on a public DNS. Most of them are only on the local network though. Never had any issues with inbound traffic on my residential connection.

I still use a lot of Saas because it is not trivial to host and run an open source app.

For example, if I need Postiz to run I need a server and to configure and maintain a lot of services and dependancies:

NX (Monorepo) NextJS (React) NestJS Prisma (Default to PostgreSQL) Redis (BullMQ) Resend (email notifications) Postiz

I use mailchimp, which is not cheap. But if I want to run Mautic, I need a linux server, with an http server and a database running. It as also a cost in money and time.

I am a single man shop, so I don't want a software to take me extra time when something is broken (or to give 4 hours of my time to install and run a clone of mailchimp).

Good SaaS products are about the whole ecosystem provided - support, upgrades, reliability, pricing, SLAs. Much more to it that just the feature set. So while it is great to explore alternatives, a big old list of "replace X with Y" is not nuanced enough to cover all the reasons people may have gone with X in the first place.

The open-source SaaSes in this list that I use could be proprietary and I'd still use them, fwiw.

Solving the problem I'm dealing with gets you a lot more points than me being able to fling you a PR, but maybe I'm an outlier here.

I go back and forth between outsourcing and self-hosting.

Gave up NextCloud a few years ago and went all in on using Google services. Now I think I can return to using more apps running on infra I rent.

Great list, props for putting it together. I'm missing an Open Source replacement to Google Colab. Free access to powerful gpus is very useful.

"Alternative" is the key word here --- not to be confused with "replacement".

What SaaS really sells is ease of setup, use and maintenance.

And source code is no "replacement" --- unless you happen to have the necessary time and skills.

Photoshop (requires Adobe Creative Cloud) -> Photopea & Gimp

Salesforce Platform -> Openkoda

if only the basic features are open source and advance features (but necessary) need to be purchased ,then what is the point? it is better to just buy the better one since you will need to pay anyway. Don't let "open source" fool you, if there is a "pricing" page on their official page, run. If you're going to buy it, just buy from market leader.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com