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The Directory

Categories.

49 use-case categories, 166 tools, zero paid placements. Ranked by Arete score — see the manifesto for how we score.

Business & finance

CRM for small business4 listed

CRMs are where the ad-tax runs hottest — incumbents spend as much acquiring you as serving you, then charge pe…

ERP & business management2 listed

Full business suites — accounting, inventory, HR, CRM — without per-module rent. Both listings here are open s…

Invoicing & time tracking2 listed

Send invoices and track billable hours without paying a monthly toll per client. Self-hostable tools that keep…

Bookkeeping & budgeting2 listed

Double-entry bookkeeping and envelope budgeting you run yourself. Your ledger is the last thing that should li…

Customer support & helpdesk2 listed

Shared inboxes, ticketing, and live chat priced by your labor, not per resolved conversation. Alternatives to …

Forms & surveys2 listed

Collect responses without the respondent being tracked. Generous free tiers from bootstrapped teams, or fully …

Scheduling & booking2 listed

Booking links and group polls without per-seat subscriptions. The open scheduling stack replaces Calendly and …

Marketing & growth

Website analytics6 listed

The strongest category in the directory: cookie-free, GDPR-clean analytics that don't sell your visitors to ad…

SEO & web performance3 listed

Rank tracking, performance auditing, and link management without $99+/mo dashboards. Self-hosted tools that do…

Newsletters & email marketing2 listed

Send email to people who asked for it, at cost. Listmonk runs millions of subscribers on a $5 VPS; the incumbe…

Content & publishing

Blogging & CMS3 listed

Publishing platforms that take 0% of your subscription revenue and don't hold your audience hostage. Own the r…

Forums & community1 listed

Community software you host, so the community actually belongs to its members — not to a platform's engagement…

Notes & personal knowledge6 listed

Local-first and self-hosted note systems built on plain text and open formats. Twenty years of notes should ne…

Team wikis & documentation4 listed

Shared knowledge bases without per-reader pricing. Confluence alternatives that stay fast and searchable on mo…

Writing & grammar tools2 listed

Grammar checking and typesetting that runs where your words are, instead of uploading every sentence to a clou…

Documents, PDF & office3 listed

Document management, PDF tooling, and a full office suite — all local, all free, no subscription treadmill.

Reading, RSS & e-books4 listed

Feed readers, read-it-later, and e-book management. The open web still works; these tools prove it.

Design & whiteboarding2 listed

Diagramming and product design on open standards. Penpot files are SVG; Excalidraw boards are JSON — no export…

Collaboration & productivity

Team chat & messaging4 listed

Slack alternatives where the message history is yours and the price doesn't scale with headcount. Federated op…

Video meetings1 listed

Video calls without accounts, time limits, or attention mining.

Email hosting4 listed

Paid email from providers whose customer is you, not advertisers. Every listing has survived 10+ years on subs…

File sync & storage3 listed

Sync and share files from hardware you control. From a full Google-Workspace replacement to serverless peer-to…

Project & task management5 listed

Kanban, Gantt, and task tracking without per-seat pricing — the category where the ad-tax poster child (monday…

Bookmarks & web archiving5 listed

Save, tag, and permanently archive the web pages that matter to you — immune to link rot and acquisition shutd…

Automation & workflows2 listed

Connect your tools and automate the busywork, self-hosted. Zapier charges per task executed; these run unlimit…

Data & AI

BI & internal tools3 listed

Dashboards, no-code databases, and question-asking over your data — without per-viewer licensing. Airtable and…

Databases4 listed

The most value-dense software ever written lives here. SQLite is ~750KB, public domain, and runs on every phon…

Local & private AI3 listed

Run language models and translation on your own hardware. Your prompts never leave the building — the only AI …

Infrastructure & ops

Monitoring, uptime & alerts7 listed

Know when things break without paying per host, per metric, per alert. From one-container uptime checks to the…

Self-hosting platforms & PaaS5 listed

The tools that make everything else in this directory one command away: open PaaS layers that turn a $5 VPS in…

Web servers & reverse proxies2 listed

Serve and route traffic with automatic HTTPS and a config file you can read in one sitting.

Git hosting & CI5 listed

Code forges and CI you own or that a non-profit runs. Your repository history shouldn't be a hostage to one ve…

Mail servers2 listed

Run your own mail. The hardest self-hosting category — but the only way email is fully yours. Deploy difficult…

Backup & object storage5 listed

Encrypted, deduplicated, verifiable backups — the least glamorous, highest-value software you'll ever run. Plu…

VPN & networking3 listed

Modern WireGuard-based networking, from kernel protocol to zero-config mesh, plus the one commercial VPN that …

Security & privacy

Passwords & identity4 listed

Password management and single sign-on you host yourself. Vaultwarden runs a Bitwarden-compatible E2EE server …

Private search2 listed

Search engines whose incentive is you: one self-hosted metasearch, one paid index where you're the customer in…

Security & encryption tools3 listed

File encryption, secret management, and vulnerability scanning — small, auditable tools that do one security j…

Home & network privacy3 listed

Local-first smart home control and network-wide ad blocking. Your house shouldn't report to anyone's cloud.

Media & home

Media servers3 listed

Stream your own music, movies, and audiobooks — no subscriptions, no phone-home, no features moving behind a p…

Photo management2 listed

Google-Photos-class backup, search, and ML on your own disk. Your family archive shouldn't train someone else'…

Household management2 listed

Recipes, groceries, and chores — self-hosted. Small tools, real daily value.

Developer tools

CLI file & search tools7 listed

The modern Unix toolbox: single static binaries, mostly Rust, that embarrass their POSIX ancestors on speed. P…

CLI data & HTTP tools4 listed

Slice JSON, query YAML, and talk HTTP from the terminal. Composable single-purpose tools in the Unix tradition…

Terminal & shell6 listed

Multiplexers, monitors, and shell upgrades that make the terminal a place you want to live.

Code editors2 listed

Modal editors measured in milliseconds and megabytes, not gigabytes of Electron.

Git tooling4 listed

Better diffs, terminal UIs, and forge CLIs that make version control faster than the web ever will be.

Build tools & runtimes6 listed

Package managers, linters, and bundlers that are 10-100x faster than what they replace — with published benchm…

Benchmarking & testing3 listed

Measure before you claim. The same tools ValueIndex will use for its own v2 automated verification.

Think something belongs here? Submit a candidate — it has to displace an incumbent.