Macrostack/macrostack-open-alternatives

Macrostack Open Alternatives

387 verified open-source and self-hostable alternatives to 85 proprietary products, across 78 categories and the five layers of the AI and cloud stack.

Maintained at macrostack.net. Data version 2026-09-05.

What makes this different from a listicle

Every licence is read from the project's own LICENSE file rather than from a marketing page. That sounds like a small distinction and it is not: vendors routinely describe source-available and business-source licences as "open source", and a dataset that repeats the marketing is worse than no dataset.

Each row also carries what a person actually needs in order to decide:

• self_hostable — can you run it yourself at all
• local_first — does it work with no network
• pricing — the shape of the cost, not a number that rots
• sovereignty_score — a transparent 0–100 score for how much control you keep
• stack_layer — where it sits, L1 chips through L5 applications

Of 387 entries, 295 are open source and 311 are self-hostable.

Columns

Column	Meaning
alternative	The open or self-hostable option
replaces	The proprietary product it is an alternative to
vendor_replaced	Who sells that product
category, category_slug	The decision category
stack_layer, stack_layer_name	L1 chips → L5 applications
license	SPDX identifier, read from the project's own LICENSE
open_source	True only for an OSI-approved licence
self_hostable	Can be run on your own infrastructure
local_first	Works without a network connection
sovereignty_score	0–100, how much control you retain
recommended	Our pick in that category
pricing	free · freemium · paid · usage
kind	software · service · hardware
website, repo, docs	Canonical links
last_verified	When a human last checked the row
source_page	The page on macrostack.net this row is rendered on

Use it

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("Macrostack/macrostack-open-alternatives", split="train")

# Self-hostable options that are genuinely open source
open_selfhost = ds.filter(lambda r: r["open_source"] and r["self_hostable"])
print(len(open_selfhost))

Straight from the source, always current:

curl -sL https://www.macrostack.net/data/macrostack-alternatives.csv

Licence and attribution

CC-BY-4.0. You may use this commercially. Attribution is a condition of the licence, and it must include a link:

Data from Macrostack — CC-BY-4.0

Method and limits

The full method is at https://www.macrostack.net/methodology.

Worth stating plainly:

• sovereignty_score is our judgement, not a measurement. The inputs are documented; the weighting is a considered opinion and you may disagree with it.
• recommended is a single pick per category and never reflects a commercial relationship. Several top-ranked entries here have no affiliate programme at all, which is the point.
• pricing is a shape, not a price. Real prices change faster than any dataset can track, so we record the model instead.
• Coverage is deliberately narrow. Infrastructure, developer tooling, AI and business software. Not consumer apps, not games.

Corrections are welcome — every row links to the page it came from.