Open-source alternatives to popular B2B tools

I built a website monitoring service (last I checked, 191 alternatives on AlternativeTo).

Customers really really really don't want to have to run their own solution. They want to be able to pay someone to make the pain go away.

(https://onlineornot.com if you're curious)

Historically there has always been consultancies building 'bespoke' software for local companies. For example the CRM market usually had lots of local companies who built and maintained a CRM and would do add ons etc. for customers.

Fast forward 20+ years later, that type of work is essentially the SAAS apps you see popping up. It's not a very capital intensive business to sustain so with a few thousand customers you could have a pretty healthy company and continue product development / grow your customer base.

Why do people go for these new SAAS apps ? I've seen a few reasons

1) Pricing is somehow better 2) Integration and or support is more personal so the customer (usually a business stakeholder) prefers it. 3) Some specific feature exists that is important to the customer i.e ease of deletion for GDPR requests 4) CTO / CIO / Techie prefers it.

Why I've seen people not go with the open source alternatives is the same oul reason. Focus. If you've less than 30 people at your org, unless one of those tools has a specific team covering that area - it will just split focus and end up in a suboptimal setup and create pain points in terms of support.

Examples that come to mind, we used open source snowplow analytics because we had a data platform team that supported it and ran it full time. There was no cost with regards to the software, but certainly was with head-count to maintain, and evolve.

We used external newsletter services to inform customers about updates etc. in the product. We went with an external paid service because this didn't tie directly into a specific team and for 100 - 500 euro a month we got what probably would have cost 0.3 - 1.0 full time head count to keep a minimal service up and running (Which meant -0.3 to -1.0 headcount working on important things for the company).

That's a great idea- will add.

Will also review Seatable.

For now if anyone has a recommendation, please let me know here. We'll review and add.

We've narrowed it down to just the top 2-3 options in each category. :)

It's not so much about being open source or not, but rather how easy it is to set up, integrate and maintain. People know this so many companies offer their products as open source plus a nice hosted (usually marketed as "cloud") version for easy access. So your choice is between two clicks and paying a few bucks using company card vs. spending a few hours or in complex cases days dealing with setup, resolving dependencies, solving any problems that arise when you deal with any complex piece of software and so on. Moreover, you need to maintain it yourself, so again you have a choice of updating it with each new version to stay up to date, without any guarantee that there are no problems with each update, or withhold the updates - but then you risk either a security incident or delaying it so long that updating gets difficult. So for non-essential services it's a no-brainer, you just pay a bit and forget it. Especially if it's open source so in the worst case you can just migrate to a self-hosted solution as nobody holds your data (incl. configurations etc.) hostage.

It's quite different with core and expensive proprietary services though. In this case you better think and calculate everything precisely as you may regret going with a proprietary solution in the long run and switching can be painful.