Open source applications with their source code is freely and readily available, for copyright holders by which to modify and or distribute to anyone and for any purpose. Most companies which offer open source software are able to establish an industry standard and, thus, gain a competitive advantage and furthermore establishes developer loyalty as developers feel empowered through having a sense of ownership of the end product.

Many such Open Source applications and tools are a great alternative for web developers on a frugal budget. Several of these Open Source tools encompass comparable features in comparison to other expensive applications, and are also free. This makes it possible for developers in obtaining the necessary tools and applications they require in order to complete daily tasks without having to spend anything out of pocket. In this article you will find 20 of the best open source tools for developers.

1. Ember Chart



Ember Charts is an open source and free charting library that is built with D3.js and Ember.js. It includes time series, bar, pie, and scatter charts which are easy to extend and modify. The out-of-the-box behavior these chart components represents our thoughts on best practices in chart interactivity and presentation.

2. Brimir



Brimir is a free and open source support ticket app that is built with Ruby on Rails and makes use of the Foundation front-end framework. Brimir allows you to send and receive support emails through a friendly web interface. Received emails are converted to tickets. There is support for attachments; tickets can have different statuses and also priorities to categorize them easier. Brimir is released under the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3. It’s built using other open source frameworks and tools, such as Ruby on Rails and Zurb Foundation.

3. Sir Trevor



Sir Trevor is an open source website content editor which does not presuppose anything about how things will be rendered. It only uses JSON and Markdown and does not store anything in HTML. The editor uses blocks for content and multiple block types exist by default: text, image, quote, list, video and more. Also, new block types can be created with ease. Sir Trevor is totally client-side, has options for customization and provides callbacks on every action.

4. Raw



Raw is a free and open source web application for visualizing data flexibly and as easy as possible. It actually defines itself as “the missing link between spreadsheet applications and vector graphics editors”. The application works by loading a dataset by copy-posting or drag ‘n’ dropping and allows us to customize the view/hierarchy.

Raw is based on the popular D3.js and supports lots of different chart types like bubble, treemap, circle packing and more.

5. Bolt



Bolt is a tool for Content Management, which strives to be as simple and straightforward as possible. It is quick to set up, easy to configure, uses elegant templates, and above all: It’s a joy to use. Bolt is created using modern open source libraries, and is best suited to build sites in HTML5 with modern markup.

Bolt is written in PHP, and uses either SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL as a database. It’s built upon the Silex framework together with a number of Symfony components and other libraries. Bolt is released under the open source MIT-license.

6. PredictionIO



PredictionIO is an open source machine learning server for software developers to create predictive features, such as personalization, recommendation and content discovery.

With PredictionIO, you can add the following features to your apps instantly: predict user behaviors offer personalized video, news, deals, ads and job openings, help users to discover interesting events, documents, apps and restaurants, provide impressive match-making services and more. PredictionIO is built on top of solid open source technology. They support Hadoop, Mahout, Cascading and Scalding natively.

7. Scrollback



Scrollback is an open source web application for adding a modern chat for websites. It is built with Nodejs and can be either used with the free hosted version or by downloading and self-hosting it. The app creates a single room chat interface where the community can communicate with each other.

8. StackEdit



StackEdit is a free and open source Markdown editor that is based on PageDown (the library used by Stack Overflow). The editor is capable of creating and managing multiple documents and they are stored in local storage. Also, it can import to/export from Google Drive or Dropbox and save documents as HTML.

9. Docker



Docker is an open-source engine which automates the deployment of applications as highly portable, self-sufficient containers. Docker containers are both hardware-agnostic and platform-agnostic. This means that they can run anywhere, from your laptop to the largest EC2 compute instance and everything in between – and they don’t require that you use a particular language, framework or packaging system. That makes them great building blocks for deploying and scaling web apps, databases and backend services without depending on a particular stack or provider.

10. Monsta FTP



Monsta FTP is an open source PHP/Ajax cloudware that puts FTP file management right in your browser, anywhere, any time. You can drag & drop files into your browser and watch them upload, like magic. It supports on-screen file editing. There is multi-language support as well.

11. Kint



Kint, an open source resource, is a zero-setup replacement that offers a better debugging experience. It smartly detects the type of data being dumped displays tailored alternatives to otherwise hardly readable data. The name of the variable, file, its line and the function wrapping it are all presented.

12. Sixpack



Sixpack is an open source A/B testing tool which has a unique feature: being language-agnostic. It doesn’t limit you running an entire test in a single language but you can start with one and end up with another (like JS + PHP code can be used for the same test). There are libraries for PHP, JavaScript, Ruby + Python and it comes with a beautiful, interface to view the results.

13. ExtraCSS



extractCSS is a free and web-based application that is capable of extracting style-related information from HTML. These include ids, classes + inline styles and the output can be customized too (indent and brackets usage). The tool is very useful when we quickly create an HTML file with inline styles and want to generate the stylesheet of it. extractCSS is also open source and it is built with only client-side code.

14. DebugBar



DebugBar is a free and open source app that can integrate into any PHP project and collect + present profiling data. It has no dependencies, supports Ajax requests and includes generic data collectors and collectors for well known libraries.

15. Chance



Chance is a random generator helper for JavaScript. It is a minimalist generator of random numbers, characters, strings, names, addresses, dice, and pretty much anything else, in order to help reduce some monotony particularly while writing automated tests.

16. CaseBox



CaseBox is an open source and PHP/MySQL-powered web application forstoring + managing records, tasks and files. It has a desktop-like interface where we can create an unlimited-level of directories and store stuff in the structure preferred. Tasks with deadlines can be created, assigned to users and the progress can be tracked easily.

17. Ack



Ack is a tool like grep, optimized for programmers. It is designed for programmers with large heterogeneous trees of source code, ack is written purely in portable Perl 5 and takes advantage of the power of Perl’s regular expressions. It’s fast because it only searches the stuff it makes sense to search. You can searches entire trees by default while ignoring Subversion, Git and other VCS directories and other files that aren’t your source code.

18. Pico



Pico is a stupidly simple & blazing fast, flat file CMS. Picos makes creating and maintaining a website as simple as editing text files. Pico is a “flat file” CMS, meaning no database woe’s, no MySQL queries, nothing. It is seriously lightweight and doesn’t use a database, making it super fast.

19. Prepros



Prepros is an open source application for Windows OS that can do that automatically for Less, Sass, Scss, Stylus, Jade, Coffeescript, Haml and Markdown. It auto-compiles the source and injects the CSS (also HTML and JS) to the browser so that no refresh is needed. There are options for the compiling process like the output format or its style (compressed, nested..). Prepros also has a built-in + static HTTP server for testing any ajax requests.

20. Pinry



Pinry, an open source web application, eases building Pinterest-like (dynamic-column-grid-layout) websites. It allows users to register to the app and pin, tag and share media (images, videos and webpages) quickly. And, a bookmarklet exists for saving the content without leaving the pages being browsed. The application is built with Python (Django) and it is a good starting for creating a community around pinning contents or a bookmarking site for personal use.

Bonus

PHP & MySQL Login Script



PHP & MySQL Login Script is an open source PHP login script. It’s clean, crisp, fast, free, safe, object oriented, high performant and reduced to the max. Including the best password encryption available in PHP (bcrypt with blowfish, using the official (!) PHP password hashing functions).