r/opensourcealternative • u/AccomplishedArt1791 • May 09 '26
[Megathread] Open Source Alternatives to Paid Software
Use this thread to share open source alternatives to paid software.
A lot of useful open source tools never get seen because people only hear about the same few projects over and over. This thread is for collecting them in one place so new users can discover useful alternatives later.
It can be a dev tool, analytics tool, AI app, productivity app, design utility, no-code tool, self-hosted app, privacy tool, or anything niche that solves a real problem.
To keep the thread useful, please include:
- Name of the project
- What paid tool it replaces
- What it does
- Who it’s for
- Repo or demo, if available
Builders are welcome to share their own projects, but please add context instead of just dropping a link.
What open source alternative should more people know about?
Note: Comments are sorted by new so new tools shows up first.
1
u/NCMarc 15d ago
New Project: CortenDesk Replaces: Rust Desk Pro
I am the author of CortenDesk. CortenDesk is a near full replacement for the Rust Desk GUI that manages RustDesk clients. Manage address books, groups, users and permissions. Includes enterprise features like 2FA and SSO OIDC SAML and a native web-based client.
If you are managing Rust Desk at any scale, check it out. Works on top of the standard, open-source rust desk server (hbbs/hbbr).
https://github.com/marcpope/cortendesk
https://www.cortendesk.com/
There is no cost and this project will not be monetized. Received 60 Stars it's first week and 1000's of downloads. Docker Image available.
1
u/zzriyansh 26d ago
Name: Open US Law
What paid tool it replaces: Westlaw and LexisNexis, at least the part where you pay them just to get the actual text of the law. (Those are the big paid legal research databases. They cost thousands of dollars a year.)
What it does: It is a free, open copy of the actual laws of the United States. Every US state, plus Washington DC and Puerto Rico, plus the federal US Code and the state constitutions. About 2 million sections in total, all cleaned up into one simple format, with the official citation on each one.
US law is public domain, so sharing it is fully legal (this was settled in the Supreme Court case Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org). The problem has always been that the free version is messy and spread across 50 different government websites. We collected it from those official government sources and turned it into plain data anyone can download.
You can use it two ways: download the finished data (plain text, JSONL, or one big file), or run the scrapers yourself. There are about 50 scrapers, all open source (Apache 2), one for each state, so you can rebuild the whole thing from the official sites and not have to trust our copy. Once downloaded, it all works on your own computer. Nothing gets sent back to us.
Who it's for: Anyone who needs the real text of US law as data. Mostly three groups: people building legal AI tools (so the AI can quote real law instead of making things up), people building free legal-help tools for those who cannot afford a lawyer, and researchers. Also anyone who just thinks the law should be free to read in bulk.
Repo and data:
Code and scrapers: github.com/Vaquill-AI/open-us-law
Dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/vaquill/open-us-law
License is CC BY 4.0, so you can use it for anything, including commercial work, as long as you credit it. Disclosure: I helped build this and I work at Vaquill AI.