OpenAltFinder

Methodology

OpenAltFinder evalutes open-source projects using a constant set of criteria designed to help the user discover projects that are active, adopted, open, self-hostable and maintained over time.

Our methodology focuses on signals that can be evaluated consistently across projects. The resulting score is intended as a discovery and comparison tool, not a definitive measure of the project's quality.

What OpenAltFinder evalutes

Project activity

Project activity meassures if a project is actively developed and maintained.

We look at the following signals:

  • The date of the most recent commit
  • The date of the most recent release

Activity is evaluated over a period of time rather than based solely on the total commits. This helps distinguish actively maintained projects from projects that accumulate significant activity in short periods of time.

Adoption

Adoption meassures how widely a project is being used or followed by the open-source community.

Depending on the platform and project, we consider the following signals:

  • GitHub stars
  • Forks
  • Followers
  • Contributors
  • Other publicicly available indicators

Adoption is not treated as a direct meassure of software quality. A highly adopted project is not necassary better than a smaller project, and projects with a smaller community may still be excellant alternatives.

Open-source status

We evaluate how openly a project is licensed and distributed, we prefer projects that use well-established open-source licenses with minimal restrictions and that are suitable for commercial use.

In particular, we distinguish between:

  • Permissive licences, such as MIT, Apache-2.0, and BSD licences.
  • Copyleft licenses, which impose additional obligations on derivatives works.
  • Souce-available licenes, which may make source code publicly availabl but do not meet the same definition of open source.
  • Unlicensed or unclear projects, where the legal permissions granted to users cannot be established confidently.

Projects are not automatically excluded because they use a copyleft license. However, licensing characteristics can affect their OpenAltFinder score.

Self-hosting

We evaluate whether users can run the software themselves rather than being required to use a hosted service controlled by the vendor.

A project receives a stronger evaluation when it can be deployed independently using publicly available source code and documentation.

We consider factors such as:

  • Whether the complete application can be self-hosted.
  • Whether important functionality requires proprietary hosted services.
  • Whether users can retain control of their data.
  • Whether the project provides documentation or deployment instructions.
  • Whether third-party services are optional or mandatory.

Self-hosting does not necessarily mean that deployment is simple. A project may be fully self-hostable while still requiring significant infrastructure or operational expertise.

Recency

We evaluate how recently a project has been maintained and released.

We consider two separate signals:

  • Last commit date; when the project's source code was most recently changed.
  • Last release date; when a new version was most recently published.

These signals provide different information, a project may have recent commits but no recent release, while another may have a recent release despite relatively infrequent commits.

Recency is evaluated as a gradual signal rather than a simple active/inactive classification. Older activity reduces the score progressively, while recently maintained projects receive a stronger score.

A project that has not been updated recently is not necessarily abandoned; some mature projects require little ongoing development. Recency should therefore be interpreted alongside the other dimensions.