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.