Open Source alternatives you must try - Part 1

Introduction

Today we will see some of the awesome open-source software which is almost (and sometimes even better) than their counter services (which we usually use).

So without wasting much time, let’s get to the list.

Analytics

When I migrated my blog from Gatsby to Next.js, the first thing I did was research how can I cut out Google Analytics for analytics and use some other privacy-focused solutions. There were many solutions that I found so let’s check out some of them

Ackee

Ackee ↗️ is the first tool I came across and loved the idea of a self-hosting service for Analytics. The project is built using Node.js with GraphQL for API layer with MongoDB as datastore, it is developed by @electerious ↗️.

You can follow their easy-to-follow docs guide ↗️ to get up your self-hosted instance.

I tried this for quite some time (around a year) on my old site ↗️ to try out the platform along with Google Analytics and it worked flawlessly.

Umami.is

Umami ↗️ is something I wanted to before trying Ackee because it is actively maintained by @mikecao ↗️ with more frequent features and bug fixes, but it allows data store with SQL types only (MySQL and PostgreSQL) and since I had some extra credits on MongoDB Atlas, I first tried with Ackee.

Currently, this site (and my other side projects) uses Umami for Analytics and I love it. There are lots of amazing features and scope for improving the project and I am happy to see the OP still actively maintaining it, you can find the source code available here ↗️.

Plausible

Plausible ↗️ was another option that was heavily liked by many people when I was researching, their tagline goes as Simple and privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative, which was something people have been trying to find for a long time, a way to switch away from Google Analytics.

Something different about Plausible is that they do have an open-source solution ↗️ which anyone can self-host, but they also provide a hosted solution for people who just want to switch away from Google Analytics but don’t want to burden themselves with hosting and maintaining their instance.

Summary

To summarize and TL;DR for people who didn’t read the whole thing about the analytics section

No-Code tools

These are some no-code tools that are awesome and used by many people and actively maintained projects

NocoDB

NocoDB ↗️ is an open-source Airtable ↗️ alternative. I love their tagline NocoDB is an open-source #NoCode platform that turns any database into a smart spreadsheet

It used SQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL or MSSQL), you can check out their docs section to learn about installation guides ↗️, they support installation via 1-Click solutions with Heroku as well as installation via Docker (so basically any VPC you want like AWS, GCP, Digital Ocean etc)

n8n

n8n ↗️ is a workflow automation tool. It has more than 200 apps that can be used to automate your workflow.

n8n comes with both self-hosted ↗️ solution as well as their cloud solution similar to Plausible as seen above.

Currently, n8n supports SQL databases so it supports PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite. However, since they use TypeORM ↗️ internally so going forward they might also support more scalable SQL databases like CockroachDB ↗️

TL;DR

Today we saw some amazing open-source alternatives of products/services we can look into which are more privacy-focused and easy to use. There are a lot more options available and I plan to continue this series with more parts in the future, if you find any OSS that you love then let me know in the comments below.

P.S: The comment section itself is another open-source alternative that I use but we will read more about that in the next blog 😉