Open source alternatives to developer SaaS (2026)

The open source alternative to a SaaS product used to mean a worse version you ran yourself to save money. In a lot of categories that is no longer true: the open source option is the better product, with a hosted plan if you do not want to run it, and the licence is the only thing you have to read carefully. Here is the current list, organised by what you are replacing.

Analytics: PostHog and Plausible

PostHog replaces Amplitude and Mixpanel, and then keeps going: product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments, surveys and a data warehouse in one codebase. The hosted version has a free tier that covers most early-stage products; self-hosting is possible but PostHog itself says it is for the committed, because the stack under it is substantial.

Plausible Analytics replaces Google Analytics for the people who only ever used the first page of it. One lightweight script, no cookies, a single dashboard that answers "who came, from where, and what did they look at". AGPL, with a cheap hosted plan and a self-hosted edition that runs comfortably on a small server.

Backend: Supabase

Supabase is the open source Firebase: a Postgres database with auth, storage, realtime subscriptions and edge functions around it, exposed through client libraries that feel like Firebase's. The difference that matters is the database. It is plain Postgres, so your data is queryable with normal tools and portable to any other Postgres when you leave. Self-hosting is documented and works, but most teams use the hosted version and keep the option as insurance.

Links and short URLs: Dub

Dub replaces Bitly for teams that want branded short links, analytics on them, and an API to create them from their own product. AGPL, hosted with a free tier, self-hostable with a bit of setup for the database and the link redirect layer.

Background jobs: Trigger.dev

Trigger.dev replaces the workflow and job services you would otherwise buy: write long-running tasks in TypeScript, with retries, scheduling and observability, and run them in the cloud or self-host. It is the open source answer to "I need something to run for ten minutes and not die with the request".

Content: Payload

Payload replaces Contentful, Strapi's hosted plans and most headless CMS subscriptions. It is a TypeScript CMS that lives inside your Next.js app, with a generated admin UI, a database adapter for Postgres or Mongo and no per-seat pricing because there are no seats. MIT licensed, which is rare in this category.

Whiteboards and diagrams: Excalidraw and tldraw

Excalidraw replaces Figjam and Whimsical for the diagrams engineers actually draw. The hand-drawn style is the point: nobody mistakes a sketch for a spec. MIT licensed, with a hosted version and a component you can embed in your own tool.

tldraw is the infinite canvas as a library, used to build whiteboards into other products. If you need a canvas inside your app rather than a separate whiteboard, start here, and read the licence: it is source-available with a watermark on the free tier rather than open source in the OSI sense.

Error tracking: Sentry

Sentry is the one everyone already uses, and it is self-hostable, which matters when the error payloads contain things that cannot leave your network. The licence moved from BSD to the Functional Source License, which is source-available with a delayed conversion to open source. It changes nothing for using it and something for building a competitor on it.

Also worth knowing

Cal.com replaces Calendly (AGPL, hosted and self-hosted). n8n replaces Zapier for automation, under a sustainable-use licence that is not open source but is free to self-host. Penpot replaces Figma for teams that need design files they own. None of these are listed on TeaserTrack yet; if you build one of their competitors, submit it.

What self-hosting really costs

Every project above has a hosted plan, and the honest advice is to start there. Self-hosting trades a subscription for a server, backups you have tested, upgrades you schedule and a person who owns it. For a team of three with no operations experience, the hosted tier is usually cheaper than the hours. For a company with a platform team and a data residency requirement, self-hosting is the whole reason the open source option exists.

The one thing to do regardless: read the licence before you depend on the tool. MIT, Apache and MPL ask almost nothing. AGPL asks that you publish changes if you host a modified version for others. Source-available licences each have their own terms, and "open source" on the landing page does not always mean what it meant five years ago.

The open source developer tools collection keeps the full list, most upvoted first, and the open source category shows new projects as they are listed, usually well before anyone writes a comparison post about them.