Meet these open source alternatives to Meetup.com 🤦‍♀️🙅‍♀️
Tags: devrel, events
Published: 2019-10-16 13:42:15

---
title: Meet these open source alternatives to Meetup.com 🤦‍♀️🙅‍♀️
cover_image: https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ta1ewlmn4n1rx47zjqzt.png
published: true
description: Sad about Meetup.com? Don't be! Replace it with something free, more flexible, and less owned by WeWork.
tags: devrel, events
---

Meetup just announced they'll start [charging group members](https://www.meetup.com/lp/paymentchanges) $2 per RSVP. Lol yeah that's not going to fly. Organizations who host free events for their communities, which includes a huge number of developer meetups, are not just going to start charging members money out of nowhere.

If you want the full story, Quincy Larson from [FreeCodeCamp](https://twitter.com/FreeCodeCamp) does a great job of telling it here: [WeWork is Desperately Squeezing Cash Out of Meetup.com by Taxing 225,000 Communities](https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-wework-meetup-debacle-and-a-new-chapter/).

But there is more to gain than lose here. Meetup organizers represent an awesome community in their own right. Organizers have been stepping up in a big way, announcing plans to build replacements or shedding light on viable alternatives. Here's a few I've come across so far.

## Chapter

FreeCodeCamp is going to build [Chapter](https://github.com/freecodecamp/chapter), which is a way to "let every organization host their own Meetup.com in a box." Chapter is open source and already has over 600 stars on GitHub despite being a day old. ⭐📈

{% github freecodecamp/chapter %}

Chapter even has a data model already! 🤓

![Alt Text](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/n6pfnb2tjtxjip98zihs.png)


## meetingplace.io

Egghead.io instructor [Chris Achard](https://twitter.com/chrisachard) is building a Meetup.com replacement called [meetingplace.io](meetingplace.io).

{% tweet 1184120199898976259 %}

Chris seems very open to input about how this should look, so if you've spent sleepless nights dreaming of what a great event-hosting experience should look like (I know I have!) then this is your chance to make those dreams a reality.

## Active projects

This GitHub repo by [coderbyheart](https://github.com/coderbyheart) contains a solid table of open source meetup alternatives, including a field for maturity.

{% github coderbyheart/open-source-meetup-alternatives %}

Some notables on the list:

- Mobilizon [crowdfunded €58k](https://joinmobilizon.org/en/) and has released a beta written in Elixir
- [on_ruby](https://github.com/phoet/on_ruby) is fairly mature and powers usergroups like the [Ruby User Group Berlin](https://www.rug-b.de/)
- [Agorakit](https://agorakit.org/) is written in PHP and supports multiple groups, calendars, notifications, and shared files

For more options, including some that are SaaS, check out this [great article by Nicolas Goutay](https://phacks.dev/meetup-com-alternatives).

## Last resorts

You could always use [Eventbrite](https://eventbrite.com/). Their [share priced dropped 39% yesterday](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/eventbrite-nyse-eb-share-price-123200981.html) but it could easily recover if they would just replace this impossible-to-use 90's-era rich text editor with something better 😛

![Alt Text](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/61pqwisjmauos5uqmo99.png)

## Update: community suggestions 👯‍♀️

Here on dev and [on twitter](https://twitter.com/dzello/status/1184466755877511170) I got some additional suggestions of alternatives to include. Here they are:

- [gettogether.community](https://gettogether.community/)
- [Kommunity](https://kommunity.com/)
- [Tito](https://ti.to/)
- [Colloq](https://colloq.io/)
- [Timepad](https://timepad.ru/)
- [Community-Z](https://community-z.com/)

## Final word to the wise

Don't make unpredictable and unreasonable pricing changes if a non-trivial portion of your users are developers, designers, and product builders. They might just get motivated enough to build you out of their stack. 😘

{% tweet 1184019082313641985 %}