Open Source & Free Tools for Web Workers

LinkStack is a customizable link-sharing platform marketed as a self-hosted, open-source Linktree alternative.

Features:

• Customization LinkStack is highly customizable with themes to fit specific needs.

• Ease of setup It is designed to be user-friendly and easy to set up compared to similar web applications, with a code-free setup.

• Open Source LinkStack is free to use, modify, and distribute. Its source code is available on GitHub.

• Multiple Users The web app allows multiple users to register and create their own profiles.

• Analytics It offers real-time tracking of user behavior and sales data.

• Built-in SMTP Server LinkStack provides a free-to-use mail server for email verification and password reset capabilities.

• Data Control Users have the option to export data from one instance to another, maintaining control over their links and online presence.

• Hosting Options Users can choose from free community instances, premium hosted instances, or self-hosting using a web server or Docker.

• No database It operates without a database.

LinkStack aims to provide a free and privacy-focused solution for managing and sharing links online, giving users control over their data. It can be hosted using Docker or most web server platforms. If you need assistance, there is documentation, and a Discord server is available for support.

Docmost is an open-source collaborative wiki and documentation software designed for creating, collaborating on, and sharing knowledge.

Features:

• Real-time collaborative editor It has a rich-text editor that allows users to simultaneously edit pages in real-time, with support for diagrams, tables, math (LaTex), and embeds.

• Diagrams It has built-in editor support for Mermaid, Draw.io, and Excalidraw diagramming tools.

• Permissions system You can control who can view, edit, and manage content, ensuring information is secure and accessible to the right people.

• Spaces Content can be organized into distinct spaces dedicated to different teams, projects, or departments.

• Groups You can create and manage user groups to grant unified permissions.

• Comment system It allows for engaging in discussions directly on pages with the integrated inline commenting feature.

• Page History You can view the history of changes made to each page and revert to previous versions.

• Search The search is powered by Postgres full-text search system.

• Nested pages Docmost supports nesting of pages to any level, and pages can be reordered via drag-and-drop.

• Attachments It supports attaching images and files to pages by selecting or pasting from the clipboard, and supports both S3 and local storage drivers.

JOYCO Marquee is a marquee component that leverages the Web Animations API to create smooth animations.

Features:

• Smooth Animations: Uses the Web Animations API for performance.

• Precise Control: Offers programmatic control over animation playback, which allows dynamic adjustments to speed and direction.

• Runtime Flexibility: Allows modification of animation parameters on the fly.

• React Component: Provides a <Marquee> component for use in React applications.

• Custom Hook: Includes a useMarquee hook for more control and sharing configurations.

• Customizable: Offers props for speed, speedFactor, direction, and class names.

• Automatic Workflows: Comes with GitHub Actions workflows for releases and publishing.

• Version Management: Uses Changesets to manage versions and publish releases.

• Framework Compatibility: While it has a React implementation, it is not strictly bound to React and can be implemented in other frameworks.

Readest is an ebook reader designed to offer a comprehensive and customizable reading experience across multiple devices.

Features:

• Parallel Reading: This function allows you to read two documents side-by-side, which is useful for comparing texts, learning languages, or multitasking. The views can be synchronized for seamless reading.

• Customization: Readest allows you to adjust fonts, layouts, and theme colors to create a personalized reading environment. You can choose from a variety of themes and colors to suit your preferences.

• Reading Essentials: Readest provides tools such as highlighting, bookmarking, note-taking, and full-text search.

• Smart Tools: Built-in dictionary, translation (DeepL), and Wikipedia integration facilitate effortless understanding, especially for multilingual readers.

• Cross-Platform Sync: Readest allows you to read across all platforms with syncing between devices.

• Read Aloud: With AI-powered text-to-speech (TTS) functionality, Readest can read books aloud.

Readest aims to break barriers to understanding and refine the reading experience for curious and passionate readers. The application encourages users to join its newsletter to receive early access to updates, features, and releases, and to provide feedback to improve Readest.

Bestatic is a free and open-source static-site engine that transforms text files into websites and blogs. It's designed for ease of use, offering graphical installation without dependency concerns.

Features:

• Blog-awareness: It includes customizable list pages for blog posts, reverse chronological order of posts, tags, custom taxonomies, comments, URL customizations, multiple author support, and RSS feeds.

• Feature-richness: Bestatic supports LaTeX, syntax highlighting, powerful search, auto-reloading server, and configurable navigation.

• Flexibility: Configuration is done via YAML files or CLI options, and theming uses Jinja2 templating, allowing for different layouts across pages.

• Scalability: It builds static files, eliminating the need for database management, server maintenance, and constant security updates.

• Simplicity: Bestatic focuses on user-friendliness through graphical installation, OS compatibility, quickstart guides, and in-depth documentation.

To get started, you install Bestatic, obtain a theme, write content in Markdown, customize using Jinja2 if desired, and then run Bestatic to generate the website or blog, which can then be deployed on git-based platforms or a private server.

Lektor is a static content management system (CMS) that allows you to build complex websites from flat files.

Features:

• Static HTML Generation: Lektor builds 100% static HTML, which can be deployed to any host, including S3 and GitHub Pages.

• Cross-Platform Compatibility: It runs on Linux, OSX, and Windows.

• Flat-File Database: All source data is stored in a configurable flat-file tree database that can be freely queried. The source data can be tracked in a version control system or cloud storage like Dropbox.

• Customizable Admin Interface: Lektor has a flexible admin interface that allows users to edit pages without modifying the source files directly.

• Dependency Tracking: The build process only rebuilds pages that have been changed.

• Image Tools: It can create thumbnails and provide access to EXIF data.

• Plugin System: Lektor supports plugins for customizing various functionalities.

• Python API: The build system is written in Python and offers an API for extending and integrating with other applications.

• Multilingual Support: It supports the creation of localized websites.

• Open Source: Lektor is an open-source project licensed under the three-clause BSD license and is written in Python and Node.js.

Lektor allows project files to be neatly laid out in the filesystem and enables tracking via cloud storage or version control. Changes become immediately visible as Lektor rebuilds on demand, and a preview is embedded in the admin interface.

Datenstrom Yellow is designed for people who make small websites.

Here’s a summary of its main features:

• Easy to Use: It allows website editing directly in a web browser after logging in, offering immediate feedback on changes, which makes updating websites straightforward.

• File and Folder Based: Websites can be edited using a text editor, making it suitable for creating web pages, wikis, and blogs. This setup is particularly convenient for developers, designers, and translators.

• Simple Installation: Installation involves downloading a single file, unzipping it, and copying the contents to a web server.

• Extensible: It includes essential features and supports extensions for additional functionalities, languages, and themes.

• Open Source: Datenstrom Yellow is open source.

• No database, no admin panel

The Kirby Staticache Plugin enhances the performance of Kirby installations by providing static site generation capabilities.

Features:

• Static Site Performance: It delivers the performance benefits of a static site generator without requiring complex setups or deployment steps.

• Versatile Hosting: Kirby sites can run on various servers, including cheap shared hosting and VPS, while utilizing static cache for speed.

• Custom Ignore Rules: Allows mixing static and dynamic content by configuring ignore rules, enabling specific pages to remain dynamic while others are statically cached.

• Automatic Cache Flushing: The static cache is automatically cleared whenever content is updated in the Panel.

• Cache Configuration: Staticache can be activated as a cache driver for pages. Ignore rules can be configured to keep specific pages dynamic.

• Custom Cache Comment: Adds an HTML comment to cached HTML files, which can be customized or disabled.

• Custom Root: The cache root can be overridden for custom web server setups. Disabling the root URL prefix is possible for single-domain sites.

• Web Server Integration: Requires web server configuration (Apache, Caddy, nginx) to prioritize static cache files over dynamic PHP results. A PHP loader can be used if server configuration access is unavailable, though it is slower than direct web server integration.

• Header Support: The plugin can be configured to store HTTP status codes and headers if the web server supports reading headers from static files.

• Limitations: A statically cached page will prevent any Kirby logic from executing, so pages with logic in controllers, page models, templates, snippets, or plugins that result in different page responses depending on the request are not compatible with Staticache.

Marp is a Markdown Presentation Ecosystem that allows you to create beautiful slide decks from Markdown documents. Here are its key features:

• Markdown-based: It uses CommonMark, so if you know Markdown, you can create slide decks. A horizontal ruler (---) splits the pages.

• Directives and extended syntax: It supports directives and extended syntax like image syntax, math typesetting, and auto-scaling.

• Theming: It has three built-in themes: default, gaia, and uncover. You can also tweak styles with Markdown or create your own CSS theme.

• Export Formats: Marp can convert Markdown into HTML, PDF, and PowerPoint files.

• Marp Family: The Marp ecosystem has tools such as Marp for VS Code and Marp CLI.

• Pluggable architecture: The Marpit framework lets developers extend features via plugins.

• Open source: All tools and libraries are MIT-licensed.

Marp tools include:

• Marp for VS Code: An extension to edit and preview slide Markdown and custom theming within VS Code.

• Marp CLI: A command line tool to convert Markdown, watch changes, launch server for on-demand conversion, and customize the core engine.

• Marp Core: The core of the Marp converter, based on the Marpit framework.

• Marpit framework: A framework that transforms Markdown and CSS themes to HTML/CSS slide decks.

MapLibre GL JS is an open-source library that allows you to publish maps on websites or webview-based applications. It renders maps quickly using GPU-accelerated vector tiles. Key features include:

• Interactive vector tile maps in the browser.

• It is a fork of mapbox-gl-js from before their switch to a non-OSS license in December 2020.

• Flexibility: Initial versions were intended as a replacement for Mapbox’s OSS version with added functionality, but it has evolved since.

• Customization: It can be integrated with React and Angular.

• Open Source: It is licensed under the 3-Clause BSD license.

• Community-led: MapLibre GL JS welcomes contributions and leaders to avoid fragmentation of free software alternatives to mapbox-gl-js.

Jazz is a framework designed for building local-first apps, which is an architecture used by companies like Figma and Linear.

Features:

• Local-First Architecture: Data is stored locally and then synced to the server.

• Real-time sync: Provides instant updates and real-time synchronization across devices.

• Offline-first: Allows apps to work offline with seamless data syncing when back online.

• Collaborative Values: Uses Collaborative Values to define the app's schema.

• User and Permission Management: Includes built-in users and permissions. Every piece of data is assigned a role-based permission on creation: reader, writer, or admin.

• Security: Offers end-to-end encryption using public-key cryptography, ensuring the syncing server never sees data in plaintext.

• File Uploads: Simplifies file uploads using BinaryCoStream CoValue.

• Authentication: Supports various authentication methods like Passkeys, Clerk, and others.

• Scalability: Jazz Cloud provides real-time sync and storage infrastructure that scales to millions of users.

• Database: No need to deploy a database, SQL schemas, or relations.

• UI: Build entire apps using only client-side code.

• Integrations: Works with various stacks like React, React Native, Vue, Svelte, and Node.js.

• Additional Features: Includes features like cursors, carets, two-way sync to databases, video presence, and collaborative text editing.

Jazz aims to simplify app development by providing a single abstraction for managing mutable local state with instant syncing, user permissions, and more. It takes care of the groundwork needed for every app, allowing developers to focus on building unique features.

Hyper 8 is a static site generator for video publishing. Here's a summary of its key features:

• Video Site Creation: It allows the creation of video sites ranging from single videos to playlists and entire video archives.

• User Interface: It offers a graphical user interface for building and publishing sites, but also supports text editor and terminal-based workflows.

• No Maintenance: The generated sites require no database, programming, or maintenance.

• Compatibility: It is compatible with virtually every web host.

• Adaptability: It adapts to various use cases, such as presenting a single video, a single playlist, or a collection of videos and playlists.

• Theming: It offers adaptive theming with dark or light color schemes.

• Localization: Both the graphical user interface and the generated sites are localizable.

• Resource-Conscious: It offers tools and design choices supporting conscious handling of resource-intensive media.

• Free and Non-Profit: It is developed for public benefit and licensed as free software under AGPLv3+.

Glaxnimate is an open-source vector animation and motion design desktop application with the following key features:

• Customizable Interface: Offers dark and light UI themes, icon themes, and dockable views.

• Smooth Animations: Supports vector graphics and tweening animations.

• Cross-Platform: Available for GNU/Linux, Windows, and Mac.

• Animations for the web: Can create Lottie animations, Animated GIFs, WebP, and Animated SVGs.

• Easily Extensible: Allows the use of Python to manipulate animations and create plugins.

Color Schemer is a tool designed to help users create color schemes and enhance their design workflow. Here's a summary of its key features:

• Color Scheme Generation: It offers over 30 generation algorithms to help users create color schemes.

• Color Scheme Gallery: It has a gallery to grow your imagination.

• Gradient Gallery: It has a gallery to elevate your designs.

• Color Theory Course: It provides a course to feed your inner designer.

• Platform Availability: It is available for Mac and soon for PC, with a free trial.

• Updates: Users can subscribe to weekly color scheme digests, new course content announcements, company and product updates, and a one-time alert for the Windows launch.

iro.js is a "modular, design-conscious color picker widget for JavaScript" with the following key features:

• Color Format Support: It supports hex, RGB, HSV, HSL formats, and even kelvin temperatures.

• Multiple Colors: You can add multiple colors to a single color picker to select color harmonies and themes.

• Pre-built UI Components: It allows you to create color pickers using pre-built UI components.

• No External Dependencies: iro.js operates from a single script without requiring extra CSS, images, or third-party libraries.

• LED Control: It provides a UI suitable for controlling RGB lighting in smart home applications.

• Free to Use: It is licensed under MPL 2.0, making it free for commercial and personal use.

• Easy Installation: It can be installed via NPM or used directly from the jsDelivr CDN.

• Customizable: The color picker can be customized with various options, such as size and initial color.

• Event Handling: It allows you to run code when specific events occur, like when the selected color changes.