LibreSaaS
(This is jut a copy of the etherpad at https://pad.drutopia.org/p/libresaas which will form the initial content of LibreSaas.org)
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
Read The Docs
Read the Docs simplifies software documentation by automating building, versioning, and hosting of your docs for you.
It’s free to use on their site, and free to download and run yourself in its entirety, but they also have payment options. Perhaps the ideal LibreSaaS, which other LibreSaaS software can use for their documentation!
Ghost
“Ghost is a fully open source, adaptable platform for building and running a modern online publication. We power blogs, magazines and journalists”
Taiga
Your Agile, Free and Open Source Project Management Tool
Monica CRM
Open source personal CRM.
Monica helps you organize the social interactions with your loved ones.
Organize. Follow-up. Strengthen your relationships.
Built for people. With people.
Monica is open source. That means the code is publicly available, scrutinized by thousands. Dozens of people have already contributed to the project. That level of transparency ensures both the security of the application, and your peace of mind concerning what we do with your data (nothing, in fact).
Plausible.io
A new answer to the question so frequently asked: “Analytics (Google? - is there a more ethical approach to this?)”
https://plausible.io/ - free/libre open source software but not free/gratis in cost— it’s not currently optimized for self-hosting but the people building it after pushing off that part have already engaged helpfully with people who do want to run it themselves. I’d contribute to paying for this and also think it’s probably worth asking for free/reduced rate.
Sandbox.io
Pretty sure…
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.
[RoundEarth is discontinuing service]
Wallabag
Fathom - NO MORE
usefathom.com
“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
Sad update: “As you can see from the above [chart of ‘community edition’ vs paid versions], we’ve made sure our paid offering does so much more for our customers than people who install the open-source version. And, our next version (2.0) will only be available to our paid customers.”
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.
Carrot
Team updates and communication without the noisy chatter. Carrot is a personalized news feed that keeps your team in sync with fewer interruptions. Ideal for remote teams and asynchronous updates.
The service: Carrot.io
The software: Open Company
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!
PubPub
PubPub’s goal is to provide a high-quality, open-source, institution-owned, hosted alternative to commercial publishing software. We’re committed to giving anyone the ability to start a community and publish without limitations for free. For groups who need advanced features (or who just want to support our mission), we offer paid options designed to scale to meet the needs of any organization.
https://www.pubpub.org/pricing
ZulipChat
True LibreSaaS; no features withheld from the community edition: https://zulipchat.com/plans/
Community support: Install your own Zulip server
- Easy self-service installation
- Free and open source forever under Apache 2.0 license
- LDAP/Active directory integration
- All Standard/Enterprise features included
Free and open source forever
Enterprise: For mission-critical installations
- Easy self-service installation
- Support response SLAs
- High availability assistance
- Input into the Zulip roadmap
- Funds the Zulip open source project
Roomify
(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.
Flarum
Forums made simple.
CryptPad.fr
Cryptpad is particularly interesting as a LibreSaaS example because the freemium pricing model provides all the functionality for free but then has a premium tier where you pay for things that definitely cost money per unit, as it were: more storage space, faster support: https://cryptpad.fr/features.html
And they make it easy to host an instance yourself, and split any revenue 50/50 with the developers.
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.
Sentry
Even though it does not brag about it at all on the hosted version site, Sentry is [reported] fully open source.
https://github.com/getsentry/sentry
Mautic
presumably at least in the GitLab.com category, need to investigate if it’s fully LibreSaaS
WordPress
https://wordpress.org/ pretty famously has https://wordpress.com/ — although it doesn’t make a point of its LibreSaaS advantages, with both WordPress itself and Automatic’s JetPack being open source
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.
SourceHut
100% free and open source software
Composable Unix-style mini-services that let you use only what you need
All features work without JavaScript
Absolutely no tracking or advertising
sr.ht is the hosted instance of sourcehut and provides paid services to its users. On sr.ht, all plans have access to the same features. You should pick the plan which best matches your financial needs and best represents the level of investment you have in sourcehut. If you require financial aid to use sourcehut, please send an email explaining your circumstances and we’ll do our best to accommodate your needs.
From https://sourcehut.org/pricing/
PageKite
Make your programs hosted on your local computer accessible on the web.
Pagekite - The fast, reliable localhost tunneling solution
Fast, reliable, secure: make your localhost part of the Web. Since 2010, PageKite has led the way in making local servers public. With relays on four continents, it works with any computer, any web server and any Internet connection. It’s also 100% Open Source.
Matrix
“An open network for secure, decentralized communication.”
The creators of Matrix offer hosting at https://www.modular.im/services/matrix-hosting
Worth also noting Matrix’s emphasis on protocols over code.
SavaPage
all the functions of a regular Print Management System, and more. Including Pay-Per-Print, Secure Follow-Me Printing, Auditing, PDF Creation, LDAP (Active Directory) Integration, NFC Authentication, On-line Payments (Credit Cards, Bank Accounts, Bitcoin), Point-of-Sale Payments, Prepaid Print Cards, etc . . . Please consult the User Manual Online or as PDF for a comprehensive introduction.
SavaPage is OSI Certified Open Source Software, copyright Datraverse B.V. and licensed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) version 3, or any later version. It is based on Open Standards and a Community Driven Development Model. User organizations join the community by subscribing to the software.
Not actually software as a service in the sense of it being hosted on “someone else’s computer”, you download and run it yourself, but it pushes the subscription model heavily.
From the SavaPage Wiki:
Although SavaPage is Free Software, it is not a “free” product. Free software is a matter of liberty, not price, and SavaPage fits into this picture by being a Libre solution supported by Software Subscription.
Honorable mention - libre software services that… don’t charge!
FramaSoft — many many apps, some of which they develop.
https://gettogether.community/
LibreSpeed - Free and Open Source Speedtest (for your internet connection). No Flash, No Java, No Websocket
LibreSaaS Pledge
https://pad.drutopia.org/p/libresaas-pledge
Paid hosts for libre software
This category is different from the LibreSaaS we lift up, LibreSaaS as we define it, because this is hosting by organizations separate from those who develop the software, and therefore is not providing a business model for software development. Nevertheless, hosts that specialize in providing a platform for libre software We will not include hosts judged to have parasitical relationships with free software projects (such as Amazon Web Services contributing nothing to Redis).
And then there’s the meta paid hosts. Cloudron, for money, helps you run your own self-hosted platform of libre software. https://cloudron.io/
Cloudron can be used to run things you can’t find providing hosting themselves, even though they are written as perfect LibreSaaS, such as CodiMD, an online markdown editor and viewer which is a Libre fork of the trending-proprietary HackMD.
LibreSaaS Adjacent
NextCloud
NextCloud is excellent—but as far as i can tell ‘only’ sells support, and never does the hosting itself. I feel i must include it but need to figure out the taxonomization for this different revenue model, which is closer to RedHat’s classic model (RedHat definitely started adding some direct SaaS; i need to research there too).
NextCloud considers the reasons for self-hosting to outweigh the benefits of any easy on-ramp of SaaS. They’re pretty explicit on their At Home page (which would be the most likely to have a SaaS option), where they link to a blog post about the public cloud which praises the virtue of self-hosting. (But NextCloud, it’s not other people’s computers if we own and control them collectively!)
Many of their customers (and non-paying implementers!) are offering NextCloud as a service, so really it is LibreSaaS, or available as LibreSaaS, but just one step removed— but the clarity of paying-for-the-service-funds-development is i guess the link i’m most hoping to find.
May First Movement Technology, formerly May First / People Link or MFPL, is a non-profit cooperative which includes NextCloud as one of the benefits of membership.
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.
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://www.ethosce.com/ this Learning Management System (LMS) might be low-key LibreSaaS, or close? https://www.drupal.org/project/course
- https://matomo.org/ is mostly LibreSaaS but seems to increasingly holding back features from the Libre “Community Edition”
- Either my impression was wrong or they’ve reoriented to ensuring the core itself is one, Free, edition. However, some features that come included in the hosted service are only available as proprietary plugins from the makers of Matomo: (A/B Testing - Experiments, Heatmap & Session Recording, Media Analytics, and Form Analytics. In any case, Matomo’s way better than Fathom, which is dropping support for the open source version entirely.
- 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.
Canvas Learning Management System
Libre software - https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/wiki - available as a service - https://www.instructure.com/canvas/ - with uptime stats. The company also has online communities of people using the software as teachers, students, etc. that seem to be applicable to both self-hosting and SaaS users.
There are however some modules and functionality that are not part of the open source community edition.
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.
See also
Many of these will also be LibreSaaS: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted