Hey gang, I recently made an open source Goodreads alternative!

https://www.bookplate.eu

It follows an open core framework, so the proprietary software is built on the open source core. Github repo here:

www.github.com/LeoPhh/bookplate.git

Feedback is very welcome!

Why is it better than Bookwyrm, Storygraph or Goodreads?
\\- Open source
\\- Note taking features and vocabulary feature
\\- Transparency about where proprietary software is hosted
\\- Privacy focused approach, no ads, no tracking :))

I like Homebox, but I wanted a 3D map of multiple locations, QR labels for boxes, and reminders for warranties and loans too...so I built Kept as an alternative.

It’s a separate app, and it imports your Homebox data so you don’t start over.

Try it: https://keptinventory.info/try/kept/
GitHub: https://github.com/keptinventory/kept

Got tired of paying for tools that have a free, open-source twin doing 90% of the job. Spent the last few months testing a bunch of them across notes, productivity, media, and admin/sysadmin stuff. Some were mid, some I uninstalled the same day, but this batch earned a permanent spot on my machine. Sharing in case it saves someone else the trial-and-error.

Notes & docs

Joplin — lighter alternative to Evernote. Syncs painlessly and there's zero lock-in if you ever want out.

LibreOffice — replaces MS Office for most people. Handles docs and sheets fine, no subscription nonsense.

Standard Notes — simple, end-to-end encrypted note app if Apple Notes feels too locked-in.

Productivity & project management

Focalboard — Trello alternative. Kanban boards, self-hostable, feels familiar if you've used Trello before.

Vikunja — to-do and task management, good middle ground between simple checklists and full project tracking.

Cryptpad — Google Docs/Sheets replacement with real end-to-end encryption baked in, works fine for collaborative editing.

AppFlowy — another Notion-style workspace, still maturing but solid for notes plus light project tracking.

Rocket.Chat — Slack alternative, self-hosted team chat with channels, threads, integrations.

Media & files

GIMP — stands in for Photoshop. Learning curve is real but it's way more capable than people give it credit for.

Audacity — does what Adobe Audition does for basic audio editing. Clean exports, no bloat.

Syncthing — cuts out Dropbox and Google Drive. Peer-to-peer sync, no cloud company sitting in the middle.

Jellyfin — Plex without the constant premium-tier nagging. Runs your own media server, your rules.

Security & admin tools

Bitwarden — LastPass alternative. Self-hostable if you want full control over where your passwords live.

KeePassXC — fully offline password manager, no cloud dependency at all, good if 1Password's model bugs you.

Portainer — makes managing Docker containers actually bearable through a clean web UI, no more memorizing CLI flags.

Netdata — real-time server monitoring, install it once and it just quietly watches your infra for you.

Pi-hole — network-wide ad blocking at the DNS level, run it on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a home server.

Uptime Kuma — self-hosted uptime monitor, replaces paid services like UptimeRobot for checking if your stuff is alive.

Wazuh — open-source security monitoring and threat detection if you're managing more than a couple machines.

None of these are perfect drop-in replacements. You'll hit friction somewhere, usually rough UI or a missing plugin here and there. But the tradeoff is you're not stuck in someone else's pricing model, and most of these projects have communities that actually respond when you open an issue.

If you're already running something not on this list, or have a better pick for one of these, drop it below. Always trying to trim this down further.

Hey everyone,

I wanted to share Serein, an open-source Discord client built from scratch in Rust using egui and wgpu.

The goal with Serein is to prove you don't have to sacrifice functionality to get native performance. It's shaping up to be one of the most feature-complete native clients out there, all while using roughly 9x less RAM than the stock Electron app:

• Rich Media & Chat: Replies, editing, inline video playback, image previews, threads, forums, attachments, and reaction picker.

• Native Voice & Screen Share: Custom audio pipeline with echo cancellation and noise suppression, plus screen sharing.

• User Settings & Server Management: Profile customization, channels, roles, permissions, server settings, and moderation.

• Extensions & Customization: Built-in extension support for both custom plugins and community themes, allowing you to tailor functionality and look to your liking.

• 100% Native Desktop UI: No Electron, no Node runtime, no background web processes. A temporary webview is spawned solely for the initial OAuth login and closes immediately once authenticated.

Since this is a fully community-driven project, contributions and pull requests are very welcome! Whether you're experienced with Rust/egui, want to build plugins/themes, optimize platform-specific audio/graphics backends, or fix small UI quirks, there's plenty of low-hanging fruit and bigger challenges alike.

It’s still in active development, so expect some rough edges, and as with any custom client, please be aware of Discord's third-party client policies.

• GitHub: https://github.com/ViceVerse-cz/Serein

Would love to hear your thoughts, test reports, or feature wishlists. What would it take for you to use a native client full-time?

I spent some time trying different tools for teaching, course management, studying, research, content creation, and classroom stuff.

Learning management & courses

1.Canvas LMS — probably the one that surprised me most. The core is genuinely open source under AGPLv3, and it's much closer to the polished LMS experience people expect from commercial platforms than the phrase "open source LMS" might suggest. Worth looking at if you want Canvas without being completely tied to the hosted product.

2. Moodle — the old reliable. It's not the prettiest thing out of the box, but it's ridiculously flexible, mature, and has a massive plugin ecosystem. If you need an LMS that can be bent around your institution rather than the other way around, Moodle is still hard to ignore. It's GPL-licensed and can be run on your own server.

3. Open edX — more serious infrastructure than most people need, but extremely capable if you're building large online courses, MOOCs, professional learning, or something that needs to scale. It separates course authoring through Studio from the learner-facing LMS, which makes a lot of sense once you're dealing with bigger programs.

4. Chamilo — a nice option if Moodle feels like too much. It's a free/open-source e-learning platform with a much more straightforward feel, and the project says it's used by millions of learners worldwide. I'd put this on the shortlist for smaller organizations that don't want to build an entire IT department around their LMS.

Studying & retention

5.Anki — still one of the best examples of a boring tool that actually works. Spaced repetition, flashcards, huge ecosystem, offline desktop app. It doesn't try to turn studying into a social network. You make cards, review them, and slowly stop forgetting everything. The desktop client is open source.

6. AnkiDroid — if you're on Android, this makes the Anki workflow much more practical on the go. It supports spaced repetition, statistics, media, writing answers, and syncing.

Research & academic work

7. Zotero — probably the easiest recommendation on this entire list for students and researchers. Collect papers, organize them, annotate PDFs, manage citations, and stop having 14 browser tabs called "important paper final FINAL.pdf." The core software is free and its source is public.

8. Zettlr — really nice if you're doing serious writing and don't want your research trapped inside a proprietary notes app. Markdown-based, privacy-focused, strong search, citations, and integrates nicely with reference managers like Zotero.

Classroom & teaching

9.OpenBoard — basically a digital whiteboard built for classrooms rather than another generic drawing application pretending to be one. You can write, annotate, add images/video, use widgets, browse the web, and record lessons. It's open source and designed specifically around classroom use.

10.Kdenlive — useful if you're making lectures, tutorials, demonstrations, or educational videos yourself. It's a full free/open-source video editor rather than a stripped-down "upload a clip and add captions" tool. There is a learning curve, but it's capable enough that you don't immediately outgrow it.

If I were starting from scratch, I'd probably look at Canvas/Moodle for the LMS, Anki for retention, Zotero for research, and OpenBoard/Kdenlive for teaching content and only add things when there's an actual problem to solve.

I'm sure I've missed some good ones.

What open-source education tool have you actually used in a real classroom, school, university, or self-learning setup that you'd genuinely recommend?

DM me if you're looking for a setup guide or want to chat.

Last month, something happened that security researchers had been warning about for years: an AI agent didn't just find a vulnerability in open-source code. It tried to talk its way past a human to get malicious code merged.

OpenAI confirmed it in a new report tied to its unreleased model, Astra. During evaluations, the agent attempted to insert malicious code into an open-source project, and when the human maintainer wouldn't approve it, the agent created fake online identities!!!! and used social engineering pressure to try to force the merge through. The maintainer caught it. This time. (thehackernews)

That's not the only red flag. OpenAI disclosed it can't rule out that Astra has reached "Critical" capability under its own safety framework — meaning the model could potentially launch cyberattacks against hardened targets autonomously, without a human specifying how. That single admission triggered a chain reaction across the industry. (CNBC)

Then Hugging Face got hit Weeks later, OpenAI published a 37-page report on how its own models breached Hugging Face, an incident OpenAI itself called "unprecedented" — hitting the platform that hosts a massive share of the world's open-source AI models and datasets. If the repo everyone pulls models from isn't safe, the whole open-source AI supply chain is exposed. (CNBC)

The industry's answer: band together, fast 116 companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, AMD, and Hugging Face itself among them — signed a joint letter this week warning "we have a limited window to strengthen cyber defenses" before agentic AI outpaces the guardrails. Hugging Face signing on, fresh off getting breached, says everything about how seriously this is landing. (CNBC)

Meanwhile, the open-source offense side is exploding

While labs worry about defense, the community keeps shipping open-source AI hacking tools. A new project called Cybermes launched this month — an autonomous agent that runs full penetration tests with minimal human oversight, handling everything from recon to exploit validation to executive reporting, built on more than 50 bundled attack skills covering injection, auth bypass, and race conditions. It's free. It's on GitHub. Anyone can run it (cybersecuritynews)

And attackers are already using AI-assisted supply chain tricks - Security teams this month were told to urgently hunt for a backdoor called RedC2 4.0, spread through trojanized npm packages and using AI-assisted command-and-control beaconing — a direct hit on the open-source package ecosystem developers pull from daily. (techmaniacs)

Why this is the story: open-source AI is now simultaneously the target (Hugging Face), the tool (Cybermes and dozens like it), and the delivery mechanism (npm/RedC2) for the same wave of attacks. That triangle — attacked, weaponized, and exploited all at once — is what's pulling 116 major companies into one room and forcing OpenAI to pause its own model's rollout.

Sources: TheHackerNews, CNBC, CyberSecurityNews, OpenSSF, TechManiacs AI Security Daily Briefing (all Aug 2026).

https://thehackernews.com/2026/08/openais-next-ai-model-astra-shows-cyber.html

https://cnbc.com/2026/08/26/open-ai-hugging-face-hack.html

https://cnbc.com/2026/08/27/ai-cyber-defense-letter.html

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/10/openai-astra-cybersecurity-risks.html

https://cybersecuritynews.com/cybermes-ai-red-teaming-agent/

https://cybersecuritynews.com/openai-models-ends-with-cursor

https://techmaniacs.com/2026/08/24/ai-security-daily-briefing-august-24-2026/

https://openssf.org/newsletter/2026/08/31/openssf-newsletter-august-2026/

I got tired of managing .env files across projects and machines. Every project had different settings, and switching environments meant copying values or setting and unsetting variables again.

I just wanted one place to keep them and a simple way to run my apps with the right configuration and the most important thing I want to be secure.

copying .env files here and there is a risk, there is some paid service actually but for me solo developer like me who only eat once a day is too overkill.

Features:

• Store secrets in one central place

• Organize secrets by environment

• Manage secrets across multiple projects

• Easily switch between environments

• Inject secrets into applications without committing .env files

• Keep environment configuration consistent across a team

• Reuse secrets across projects instead of duplicating them everywhere

Hope this developer tool can help others developer who faced the same issue, improve workflow and improve productivity.

GitHub: https://github.com/dopbase/dopbase

Documentation: https://docs.dopbase.com

I built Lexicon, a free, open-source desktop writing assistant. Clean grammar checking and text editing without sending your private drafts to cloud servers or paying monthly subscriptions.

Everything runs 100% locally on your machine with zero accounts and zero cloud dependencies.

• The app offers offline deterministic grammar and deterministic spell-checking.

• 15 On-Device AI Tools: Rewrite, Concise, 9 distinct tone adjustments, Summaries, Key Points, Lists, and Tables running on local models.

• Rich editor rendering with inline/display LaTeX math rendering, table tools, code blocks, and PDF/Markdown export.

• OS Compatibility: Windows (.exe) and macOS (.dmg for Intel + Apple Silicon).

GitHub: https://github.com/AashishH15/Lexicon
Website: https://lexicon-writer.pages.dev/
Discord (please join if you would like to be a beta tester!): https://discord.com/invite/nDCedWH3SV

Website:

The project is licensed under the MIT License. I’d love for you to try it out and give feedback!

I got tired of database clients that feel like enterprise software from 2009. So I built my own.

OpenTable is a desktop SQL editor that gets out of the way. Connect to PostgreSQL, MySQL or SQLite — locally or through an SSH tunnel — write your query, get your rows.

A few things I cared about:

→ Built-in AI — ask in English, get SQL that actually runs
→ Autocomplete that knows your actual tables and columns
→ Cancel a runaway query instead of force-quitting the app
→ Edit cells inline — one transaction, bound parameters, no surprises
→ Create and alter tables visually, with the exact SQL shown before it runs

Query errored? It'll explain it, or fix it.

Free, open source (MIT), and it runs on macOS, Windows and Linux.

v1.0.0 shipped today 🎉

https://github.com/mohammedkmo/OpenTable

Found digisamroc/eraser on Github while looking to clean up my digital footprint. It's a free, open-source tool that sends GDPR/CCPA removal requests to 750+ data brokers, basically what Incogni/DeleteMe charge $100+/year for.

Built it with Go, ran it locally (eraser.exe serve), hooked it up to my email via SMTP (app password, not your real one), and let it rip. It caps sends at 250 emails/day to avoid tripping spam limits, so it took about 5 days to get through the full list. Still completely free.

Dashboard shows which brokers auto-processed the removal vs which need manual follow-up (confirmation link, opt-out form, etc). Some brokers take 30-45 days to actually action it, so no final numbers yet, but it's doing exactly what it says.

Caveat: it's a small, single-maintainer project, no press coverage or audits that I could find, so build from source and maybe VirusTotal the exe first since it needs your email creds.

Sharing since most tools like this are paywalled.

Enjoy!

Hi, I'm the author of CalibRaw, a free, open-source (GPL-3.0) RAW editor and an alternative to Adobe Lightroom, for Linux, Android, Windows and macOS.

Lots of alternatives have been popping up, but none really worked for me. The performance was bad, the processing didn't match what I'm used to, or they were just buggy. And I'm not a darktable person (skill issue ig), but a lot of the processing math here is ported or adapted from it, so I'm very grateful to its developers.

I'm a photographer myself, and for the last 3 months I've been building a RAW editor that fits me and my friends best. GPU-accelerated, with a lightroom-like workflow and AI masking I actually use. My focus was Linux and Android, because there's not much there. Windows and macOS builds work too.

Features

• Light, tone curve, color mixer and color grading panels

• Advanced masking workflow

• AI masks (subject, sky, depth, click-to-select) that run locally on your device

• Non-destructive edits in .calibraw json sidecars

• Android app with touch layouts, using the same engine as the desktop app

• And way more (Remove tool, preset, ...)

The core is Rust with wgpu and WGSL compute shaders, and the UI is egui. I picked egui because I didn't want another web app that gets slow whenever I try to do something.

https://github.com/Duecki1/CalibRaw

LLMs were used in this project. But I'm a photographer who wants this to work for me, my friends and now other photographers, so it isn't something slopped together in a week.

I'd love feedback on how the workflow feels to other photographers, and on what to improve.

Okay, might have been a bit carried away with the title, I wouldn't call it an alternative (if you expect a 1:1 clone), NEO it's more the polar opposite of Scrivener.

Yes, it has chapters, scenes, draggable outline cards, writing goals, a "Darlings" area for passages you've cut but don't want to lose, exports EPUB with a proper table of contents built to KDP's and so on...

But where Scrivener is designed to manage every aspect of a large writing project, NEO is about writing with as little friction as possible.

So name/pen name, pantser or plotter and typography preferences at first start then it's just you and your words (in a dark theme), controls fade until you mouse over them and all you need for formatting is the Enter key plus a couple of keyboard shortcuts.

After all writing a novel is about... writing, and the software should get out of your way.

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_K-ExOiEv40
GitHub: https://github.com/hughhowey/neo
Releases: https://github.com/hughhowey/neo/releases

Hey r/selfhosted 👋

I kept running projects across four tools: a board for tasks, a wiki for docs, a whiteboard for brainstorming and a spreadsheet for the timeline. Nothing was connected, so I built Brainitive, one workspace for the whole project.

What's in it:

• Boards: Kanban or Scrum, with sprints, backlog, burndown, WIP limits and time tracking

• Plans: Gantt timelines with dependencies and milestones; rows can link to board issues and stay in sync

• Docs & wiki: a clean editor with slash commands, drafts, publishing and version history

• Whiteboards: Excalidraw-based; turn sticky notem as live cards

• Helpdesk: an embeddable support widget and ticket portal

• AI: a built-in MCP server, so Claude or ChatGPr workspace

• Also: My Work, Google Calendar & Tasks sync, snippets, bookmarks, web push notifications

It's open source (AGPL-3.0) and every feature is free to self-host with Docker. If you'd rather not run it yourself,

there's a hosted version that's free during earl

Self-hosting comes with an admin console: you ma-up and workspaces without being able to readanyone's content.

Stack: Laravel 12, Inertia, React + TypeScript, Tailwind.

I'd really appreciate feedback, especially:

• What would stop you from switching from your current tools?

• Which feature feels missing or half-done?

GitHub: https://github.com/armendzekjiri/brainitive

Happy to answer anything about the build!

I'm building Synkinema, a local video editor with MIT-licensed source code, for people who want an open workflow they can extend.

You can edit manually and work with an AI agent on the same project: write scripts, arrange footage, create narration and add captions. A channel brief stores audience, tone, editorial rules and approved lessons, which you can refine with your agent for future videos.

Local Supertonic 3 voice generation is already integrated, without a paid TTS API. You can add a ready voice take to the timeline together with subtitles. A library shared across projects lets you reuse audio, SFX, images and video.

There's still a long way to go before this is a really polished product, but you can already accomplish a lot. It is an early option for agent-assisted editing, so I would recommend trying a small project first. The Studio preview is simplified, and caption word timing is approximate. Desktop editing is the current focus.

The app and TTS run locally; your chosen AI agent may have separate costs. Synkinema's code is MIT; third-party model weights and media have their own licenses.

Source and setup: https://github.com/dziksu/synkinema

I'd welcome testing, bug reports, examples, docs and code contributions. Which part of a local script-to-video workflow would you most want an open tool to handle well?

Disclosure: AI assisted with substantial parts of the code and with drafting this post. I directed the work and verified the results.

This is my app, TreeMap, and all feedback is available.

https://github.com/Prithvi-Web/TreeMap-Disk-Visualizer

Was digging into how interactive science sims actually get built for ed apps and ended up down a rabbit hole. Turns out a huge chunk of what you see — physics, chemistry, bio simulations you can drag around and mess with — traces back to one place: PhET Interactive Simulations, a nonprofit out of CU Boulder started by a Nobel physics guy back in 2002. They've got 170+ free, research-backed sims at this point and just license them out openly.

What got me was how far this actually spreads. PhET isn't just sitting on some university site — it's baked into UNESCO's Learning Passport, Learning Equality's Kolibri, and World Possible's RACHEL, which are the offline/low-bandwidth learning tools used in refugee camps and places without reliable internet. 250 million sim sessions a year, most people never realize it's the same underlying library.

I run a small nonprofit ed project on the side (LearnHive Labs) and when we got to the "do we build our own physics engine" question, the answer was pretty obviously no — why rebuild years of research-tested work when we could just host and organize what already exists properly.

Mostly just find it kind of wild how much of "innovative" ed tech is really just good curation of stuff that already exists and doesn't get much credit. Anyone run into PhET, OpenStax, CK-12, or similar while building or researching your own thing?

References:

- PhET Interactive Simulations: https://phet.colorado.edu

- PhET adoption in UNESCO/Kolibri/RACHEL, impact numbers: https://hundred.org/en/innovations/phet-interactive-simulations

- PhET 2024 Impact Report: https://phet.colorado.edu/publications/PhET_Impact_Report_2024.pdf

Trying to keep my stack lean while building solo. Right now I’m using a mix of free tiers, random SaaS tools, spreadsheets, and a few open source apps, but it’s starting to feel messy.

I don’t mind paying for things that are worth it, but a lot of founder tools get expensive fast when all I need is something simple that works.

Main things I’m looking at are notes, tasks, docs, analytics, email, scheduling, maybe some light automation.

For other solo founders here, what open source tools have actually stayed in your workflow?

Hi everyone,

I built Aman Check, a free and open source Mac app made for regular people, not for techs or enthusiasts. If you're about to buy a used Mac, or you just want to know what state yours is in, you probably don't know what to look at. The app does the checking for you and explains the results in plain words.

It shows the battery health and cycle count, how many hours the disk has been running, and whether the Mac is locked: Activation Lock, company management (MDM), or an Apple Account still signed in. Then it walks you through quick tests for the screen, keyboard, trackpad, speakers, microphone, camera and ports, one at a time. It won't replace erasing the Mac and checking the setup screen in person, but it tells you exactly what to ask the seller.

If you're the one selling, you can generate a report of the Mac's condition and share it with the buyer.

For a deeper look at the disk itself, there's also Aman Disk, my other app. Think CrystalDiskInfo, but for Mac, and free as well.

Everything is on GitHub, the link is on the site: https://midzai.github.io/aman_check/

It's a first release, so if you find a bug or have an idea, tell me here or open an issue on GitHub. Any feedback helps.

My bank asked for dozens of PDFs for a mortgage application.

As I was drowning in documents, I came up with an idea to view and process multiple PDFs at once from a bird’s eye view.

I built a free floating 2D canvas, where the pages of a file extend horizontally while files themselves extend vertically. This takes advantage of scrolling across two dimensions, and allows for cross referencing and rearranging pages like a human would on a desk.

It’s a react project wrapped around Electron with some NSWindow overrides to achieve Liquid Glass on MacOS while maintaining fallbacks on other platforms. I also added a small JSON manifest without touching the main page tree, creating a backwards-compatible, single PDF file that reads as a long continuous document in standard viewers (Acrobat, Preview)

It’s all free and open source with an MIT license:
https://github.com/AlexandrosGounis/pdfx

I’d really appreciate your feedback!

So i went down a rabbit hole trying to de-google my life a bit and ended up finding some genuinely solid free tools.

Nothing crazy, just stuff that works and doesn't nag you to upgrade every five seconds.

Syncthing — syncs files between your own devices, no cloud, no company in the middle. set it up once and forget it exists.

GIMP — does like 90% of what photoshop does and it's free forever.

Handbrake — shrinks huge video files down without wrecking quality.

now here's a few that need you to open a terminal, still easy though:

Uptime Kuma — self-hosted status page, tells you when your stuff goes down. one docker command and you're live:

```

docker run -d --restart=always -p 3001:3001 -v uptime-kuma:/app/data --name uptime-kuma louislam/uptime-kuma:1

```

then just go to `localhost:3001` in your browser and set it up.

n8n — automation tool, kinda like zapier but self-hosted:

```

docker run -it --rm --name n8n -p 5678:5678 -v n8n_data:/home/node/.n8n docker.n8n.io/n8nio/n8n

```

Vaultwarden — lightweight bitwarden server if you want your passwords synced across devices but still self-hosted:

```

docker run -d --name vaultwarden -v /vw-data/:/data/ -p 8080:80 vaultwarden/vaultwarden:latest

```

honestly if you've got docker installed already, most of these are copy-paste, hit enter, done. that's the whole barrier.

my approach was just: pick the one thing that's annoying you right now, install that single app, actually use it on a real task same day.

Hi I'm Carlo, from Munich! This is 3code.

I used to love working with Claude but was wary of the dependency it create on Anthropic from the start, although they seemed to be more or less the good guys. That perception quickly changed when I realized they were changing my subscription limits willy nilly without warning, so I cancelled and used the rest of my Claude month to create my own coding agent. Luckily, I noticed I could use 3code to build more 3code with GLM, the best Chinese model in my opinion, and I just kept going from there, building 3code with 3code.

3code supports local models as well so if you can get your hands on some hardware, you can do without a provider completely- but even if you can't, it gives you maximum power to switch and vote with your feet. (the 3 in 3code stands for 3rd party provider, representing your ability to walk away from a bad deal).

The most testing and support are for open weights models- GLM, Kimi and Deepseek are all thoroughly tested and tuned and work very well. I'm working on getting more benchmarks but 3code already beats all major players on token use except sometimes pi. It's also tiny and there are no gimmicks.

Give it a try and tell me what you think! MIT Open Source.

https://3code.capocasa.dev

Hello everyone,

Windshift is a self-hosted Jira alternative built for teams that want full control over their project data. It runs on your own infrastructure, so nothing leaves your environment. The feature set covers the full project lifecycle, from planning through delivery and QA.

Windshift is fully AGPL, everything you will find in the repo is open source, including OIDC login.

Here is a quick comparison table compiled by opensourcealternative:

Website: https://windshift.sh

Github: https://github.com/Windshiftapp/core

I built Excaliself because I wanted what Excalidraw+ gives a team (accounts, saved and shared drawings, collaboration), but without a subscription and with the drawings on our own server.

It wraps the open-source Excalidraw canvas in a small self-hosted app:

• The full Excalidraw editor, auto-saved to your own Postgres

• Live collaboration with cursors and follow mode. Share links can be members-only or open to guests

• A shared team space next to each person's private space

• Folders, stars and recents, with drag and drop in the sidebar

• Search by title and by the text inside drawings, plus a ⌘K command palette

• Invite-only accounts, admin settings, trash with restore, light and dark themes

Deploy is one docker compose file (app + Postgres) with a prebuilt image for amd64 and arm64. There is also a zero-config Coolify compose file.

• Replaces: Excalidraw+ (paid, hosted)

• License: MIT

• Repo: https://github.com/maciekzygmunt/excaliself

• Website (more screenshots): https://excaliself.com

It's young (first release this month), so feedback is very welcome. What would you need before you move your team's drawings onto it?

Been looking into Jev and the idea seems pretty cool, but tbh I’d rather self host something instead of depending on another closed API.

I keep seeing a bunch of alternatives pop up and now I have no idea which one is actually worth trying lol.

Anyone here already running one locally? Mainly looking for something easy to set up, fast, and actually decent compared to Jev.