libresaas (pad.drutopia.org/libresaas)
**Occasional backups of https://pad.drutopia.org/p/libresaas **
Please also read https://dm.zimmer428.net/2018/11/libresaas-revisited/ by Kristian Rink (@kr428) who independently coined “LibreSaaS” for the exact same need and reasons, but better stated.
LibreSaaS
Ghost
“Ghost is a fully open source, adaptable platform for building and running a modern online publication. We power blogs, magazines and journalists”
RoundEarth
Drupal 8 + CiviCRM - distro and hosted SaaS.
- Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) and Content Management System (CMS) powered by your users and your content.
- E-mail Newsletters: Break the “export/import” cycle of other solutions. Power your email campaigns through your website without sacrificing simplicity and flexibility.
- Open Source: Built on industry-leading free software components, utilizing best-practices, and standard platforms keeps costs low and security high.
Wallabag
Fathom
“Give your website visitors back their privacy— Fathom Analytics provides simple, useful websites stats without tracking or storing personal data of your users.”
“Run Fathom on your own or have us do it— The same open source codebase, self-hosted or fully-managed on our cloud network.”
via https://twitter.com/geerlingguy/status/1091568444867252224
Standard Notes
There’s a free hosted version, but part of what you get for paying for the hosted version is access extensions: https://standardnotes.org/extended Have no fear, though all these extensions too are open source free software: https://github.com/sn-extensions
Standard Notes is 100% LibreSaaS.
ProboCI
It has a free trial for two months (with no need to enter a credit card).
https://github.com/ProboCI/probo
ShareTribe
Create your own online marketplace to let your users rent or sell goods, spaces or services online.
In the “5 Reasons to use sharetribe” they highlight on their homepage, two encapsulate key points of LibreSaaS perfectly:
* **No developers needed** We take care of the technology, with <a href="https://www.sharetribe.com/updates.html">frequent updates</a>.
* **No lock-in** The data and code are yours to keep.
Two more of the five capture another two common benefits of LibreSaaS:
* **Super quick setup** Create a marketplace in a matter of minutes.
* **Simple to customize** Build your own concept, with your own brand.
See screenshot: https://screenshots.firefox.com/sHYslhxG8KSVJyVY/www.sharetribe.com
From https://www.sharetribe.com/pricing.html:
What happens if I want to leave?
If you are not satisfied with Sharetribe, you are free to leave at any point.
We will export all your data for you along with instructions on how set up Sharetribe on your own server. We don't believe in lock-in.
Tendenci
Open Source Association Management (AMS): Engage your members and grow your organization with Tendenci, designed specifically for the needs of non-profits and associations.
CommitChange
All-in-one fundraising
Fully shares the libre software that powers it: https://houdiniproject.org/
Overleaf
An “online LaTeX and Rich Text collaborative writing and publishing tool that makes the whole process of writing, editing and publishing scientific documents much quicker and easier.” They promised in their FAQ on the relaunch of ShareLaTeX and Overleaf combined:
Will ShareLaTeX remain open source?
Yes. Both Overleaf and ShareLaTeX are committed to ensuring that all of the open ShareLaTeX code base will remain open source and will continue to be actively developed. Overleaf v2 is built on the same open source code as ShareLaTeX and will also be open source.
Write.as and WriteFreely.host
Are two ways to use the, as far as i can tell, fully libre WriteFreely software as a service while supporting the development of the software.
Per https://github.com/writeas/writefreely “We offer two kinds of hosting services that make WriteFreely deployment painless: Write.as for individuals, and WriteFreely.host for communities. Besides saving you time, as a customer you directly help fund WriteFreely development.”
You can “Start a personal blog on Write.as, our flagship instance.” or use WriteFreely.host “to start a close-knit community — to share knowledge, complement your Mastodon instance, or publish updates in your organization. We take care of the hosting, upgrades, backups, and maintenance so you can focus on writing.”
WriteFreely.host further notes: “WF.host is run by the very same people building WriteFreely. Besides funding our open source work, you get a hosting service from the people who know the product best.”
And it integrates with Ghost, some good mutual reinforcement in the LibreSaaS world!
Roomify
(Just came out with Drupal 8 edition in 2018 February/March)
Farmier / farmOS
http://farmier.com/ http://farmos.org/
Farmier is a farmOS hosting service. farmOS is an open source software application for farm mapping, planning, and record keeping (http://farmos.org).
Farmier was created by the lead developer of farmOS, to provide low-cost hosting of farmOS sites, so that farmers can start using farmOS quickly and painlessly - from any computer or device with an internet browser.
farmOS is still in beta, and therefore so is Farmier. Give it a try and see what you think. Try farmOS.
Built on Drupal 7.
Discourse
“Discourse is the 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. Use it as a mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and more!”
- “Managed forum hosting from $100/month”
- “Discourse is 100% free, open source forum software. Forever.”
https://www.discourse.org/about
(Being used by most everyone for community forums including Purism and the UK tech cooperatives.
Akaunting
From invoicing to expense tracking to accounting, Akaunting has all the tools you need to manage your money online, for free.
Shoov
Visual regression testing service.
website testing toolkit by gizra Shoov is your 24/7 QA team Simulating any number of device/OS/Browser combinations accessing your website 24/7 in multiple, programmable scenarios, Shoov visually detects issues as they rise and alerts your team.
Shoov works within your existing workflow, seamlessly integrating with GitHub and the testing libraries you use. It is completely Open Source - zero vendor lock in.
(very confusing and bad documentation / when register in browserstack it whants to download dmg – and I’m in linux –)
Drutopia
Civi-Go
Drupal/CiviCRM hosted service
Collabora
https://www.collabora.com/ https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_Online
Tutanota
Encrypted e-mail apps and hosting.
Open source and forever free.
Tutanota is licensed under GPL v3 - essential to any encryption service. Open source enables security experts to verify the code that protects your mails. We experience an amazing support from our community. You are the key in showing the world the importance of privacy.
Mautic
presumably at least in the GitLab.com category, need to investigate if it’s fully LibreSaaS
Forthcoming
Pursuance
https://pursuanceproject.org/ https://github.com/PursuanceProject
CoopCycle
software that enables customers to order and to be delivered by bicycle
CoopCycle aims to become a numerical common well. It belongs to its users (couriers, shop owners) and its contributors (developers). They administer it democratically. Our software is ruled by a licence by the Peer-to-peer Foundation. It limits its commercial use to worker-owned coops. For now on, we are providing the software for free, in order to give the impulse of coops creation. Our goal is to finance it thanks to a contribution, which gives rights to use the software and to administer it.
OERu’s Next Generation Digital Learning Environment
See https://tech.oeru.org/2018-update-oeru-technology-stack
Currently focused on making it easy for other people to spin up.
They’re also using https://kanboard.org/ as a service, but may be grandfathered into that, as https://kanboard.net/ redirects to the .org and there aren’t any SaaS signup links as of 2019 May 8.
Honerable mention - libre software services that… don’t charge!
https://gettogether.community/
LibreSaaS Pledge
https://pad.drutopia.org/p/libresaas-pledge
LibreSaaS Adjacent
Mattermost
Even though Mattermost has the perfect origin story for LibreSaaS—born of the desire to never again face lock in as they had from a proprietary messaging and collaboration application—they don’t offer a hosted service themselves
Their story is still a good read: https://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-source-slack-alternative/
And they can be installed through Cloudron which essentially makes it easy to turn a number of FLOSS projects into LibreSaaS.
Not Quite LibreSaaS
- https://matomo.org/ is mostly LibreSaaS but seems to increasingly holding back features from the Libre “Community Edition”
- GitLab - the free version of GitLab.com (for private projects; public projects can access proprietary features) is equivalent to the Libre “community edition”, but the paid versions of GitLab are held back from this.
- Helpy.io - https://helpy.io/ - open source version of the software lacks many of the features of the SaaS version.
- Odoo - same.
- Plan.io is built on Redmine, but it seems like not quite all of its enhancements are shared back: https://plan.io/redmine-and-open-source/ - still, a pretty solid option.
Accounting software
There’s not much in LibreSaaS accounting software.
https://ledgersmb.org/ has a few companies hosting it as SaaS.
https://www.odoo.com/ has an accounting module but i found it clunky (a year ago) and i’m not sure there are SaaS versions of the fully-libre community edition of Odoo.
Software Freedom Conservancy started work on non-profit organization oriented accounting software, but that effort is stalled as far as i know: http://npoacct.sfconservancy.org/
We’ve been using GnuCash - https://gnucash.org - we set the file to be saved uncompressed and commit it to Git, but you could just as easily stick it on NextCloud … which we should probably do as https://mayfirst.org started providing that some time after we started using GnuCash. Only one person can edit at a time but it has a lock file to enforce that, and GnuCash just made it work better when it’s opened in different timezones.
And yes, i said Odoo is clunky with GnuCash as my point of comparison. I like the desktop experience of GnuCash over the proprietary SaaS providers— just faster, even if it looks like the nearly 20-years-old interface it is. Although Quick Books Online did a major update just as we left it, and actually improved the experience from the little i saw. The other main proprietary SaaS accounting software is xero.com which was still nicer than QBO last i compared them (some years ago). GnuCash can be hooked up with automatic synching from bank accounts allegedly but we’ve never gone through the trouble; we just export an OFX file and import it manually. Certainly proprietary accounting SaaS has the edge in online banking and other online services integration, until we have a true LibreSaas option— embracing the SaaS as much as the Libre.