The shelf
A curated shelf of free and open-source software for marketing work — search, analytics, publishing, design, automation and craft. Every entry can be self-hosted or run locally, and none of them needs a paid API to be useful.
The criteria
These are tools I would actually put in front of a small team. Not everything open source, and not everything popular. The test is whether it does a real job without taking the data hostage.
01
Open source, self-hostable, or genuinely usable on a free tier. No demo that expires the moment the work begins.
02
Your data, configuration and history stay on infrastructure you control. Export is a feature, not a favour.
03
Recent releases, responsive maintainers and a visible licence. A tool that has been abandoned is a future migration.
04
Each tool earns its place by doing something specific. The list is a shelf, not a stack you are meant to install all at once.
Featured
Three entries begin here, all built by Vinamra Singh: an open-source SEO suite, a local-first channel dashboard, and an NVC companion for clearer, kinder conversations.
Search & SEO · Featured
A self-hosted alternative to the expensive SEO suites: 99 tools covering site audits, rank tracking, keyword research, AI search visibility, content briefs, backlinks, local SEO and white-label reports. It runs without paid APIs, and includes an agent that applies fixes rather than only listing them.
Measurement · Original tool
A client-side marketing dashboard for the people who have to make the call. Seven channels collapse into one C-level read on revenue, spend, CAC and MER; operators can open any channel for its funnel, campaigns and platform detail. It also carries plain-English next steps, a 54-term glossary, threaded notes with initials and timestamps, and a task board with a timeline. No account and no tracking.
Communication · Original tool
A local-first companion for Nonviolent Communication. Learn observation, feeling, need and request with clear examples; reflect on a conversation and generate an NVC-aligned draft response; and follow a step-by-step practice path with progress saved only in your browser. Designed to be calm, private and accessible.
01 · Search
Crawl it, audit it, track it. The technical and discoverability side of search, without a monthly seat licence.
Self-hosted rank tracking for the keywords you actually care about. Watches Google, Bing and other engines, charts movement over time, and keeps the history on your own server.
A desktop SEO crawler in the Screaming Frog tradition. Surfaces broken links, redirects, duplicate titles, thin pages and technical issues, then exports the evidence.
A compact, self-hosted audit tool. Point it at a site and get a structured read on crawlability, metadata, links and performance — useful when a full suite is more than the job needs.
A command-line auditor with 332 rules across 20 categories. Built to run in a terminal or inside a workflow, so an audit becomes a repeatable check rather than an annual event.
02 · Measurement
Measure what happened without handing the audience to an ad network. These options are privacy-first by default.
Privacy-first, cookie-free analytics with a clean single-page dashboard. Self-host it on modest hardware, or pay for the hosted version if you would rather not run the server.
Lightweight web and product analytics: traffic, campaigns, funnels and retention without a consent banner. A calm alternative to the usual analytics sprawl.
The long-standing open-source analytics platform, with the depth of a proper measurement suite: goals, segments, heatmaps, session recordings and full data ownership. More capable, and more involved, than the lighter options.
03 · Publishing
Own the list and the archive. The relationship with the reader is the asset; the platform should not be.
A fast, single-binary newsletter and mailing-list manager. Import subscribers, build campaigns, segment lists and read the statistics — all from your own infrastructure.
An independent publishing platform with memberships, subscriptions and newsletters built in. A sensible home for a publication when you want the audience relationship to be yours.
04 · Distribution
Plan and publish from a calendar you control, instead of renting a scheduler per seat.
An agentic social scheduler for planning and publishing across channels from one calendar. Self-host it to keep the accounts, analytics and audience data under your control.
Self-hosted social scheduling without seat limits. Queue posts, manage multiple accounts and keep the content calendar on your own server.
05 · Craft
Make the work look considered. Local, browser-based and self-hostable alternatives to the usual subscription tools.
A virtual whiteboard for sketching diagrams that look hand-drawn. The fastest way to explain a funnel, a journey or an architecture without opening a design tool.
An open-source design and prototyping platform built for collaboration. Useful when you want a shared design file without adding another per-seat subscription.
A self-hosted PDF workbench: merge, split, compress, convert, OCR and sign. The unglamorous utility that saves an afternoon every month. The core is MIT; a few proprietary modules sit alongside it.
A free, local AI image upscaler for Mac, Windows and Linux. Enlarges and sharpens marketing imagery without uploading it to someone else’s service.
SVGO is the command-line optimiser; SVGOMG is the browser interface. Together they strip the dead weight from SVG files without changing how they look.
06 · Operations
Connect the stack and remove the copy-paste. Read the licences in this group carefully: several are open core or fair-code rather than conventionally open source.
A visual workflow builder that connects apps, APIs and AI models with a mix of nodes and code. Powerful enough for real operations; the licence is fair-code, not OSI open source, so read it before commercial use.
An open-source CRM designed to be customised. A credible alternative to Salesforce for small teams that want the customer record to stay in-house. Some enterprise files sit under a commercial licence.
An open-source automation builder with a gentler learning curve than most. The core is MIT; some enterprise features are licensed separately.
Link attribution and short-link management with conversion tracking. Useful for knowing which campaign, channel or partner actually sent the click. The core is AGPL; enterprise features are separate.
An open-source survey and feedback platform. Run product research, NPS and exit surveys without shipping the responses to a third party. AGPL core with MIT client packages.
A visual chatbot builder for lead capture, qualification and support. Self-hostable, with a functional-source licence rather than a conventional open-source one.
07 · Standards
Check the writing, the markup and the accessibility before someone else does. These are the tools that keep the craft honest.
Google’s automated audit for performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO. Run it in Chrome or in CI; treat the score as a starting point, not a verdict.
Grammar and style checking in more than 25 languages, available as an extension, desktop app or self-hosted server. The open-source core is LGPL; some language modules are premium.
The accessibility engine behind many audit tools. Add it to automated tests to catch missing labels, contrast failures and structural mistakes before they ship.
A prose linter that enforces a house style across Markdown, HTML and documentation. Write the rules once, then let the machine catch the drift.
Command-line accessibility testing that fits into a build pipeline. Point it at a URL or a sitemap and get a repeatable report against WCAG standards.
Before you install
Free software is rarely free of cost. It trades a subscription for server time, upgrades, backups and judgement. That is often a good trade — but make it deliberately.
Every entry was checked in November 2026. Star counts are indicative, licences can change, and inclusion is not an endorsement. There are no affiliate links on this page.
“Open source” is not one thing. MIT and Apache licences are permissive. AGPL and GPL carry obligations if you modify and distribute the software. Fair-code and functional-source licences may restrict commercial use. Check before you build a business on it.
A busy repository is not automatically good, but an abandoned one is a future migration. Look at the last release, how open issues are handled, whether there is a security policy, and whether the project has more than one maintainer.
Self-hosting means a server, a domain, TLS, backups, upgrades and someone to call when it breaks. For a two-person team, the hosted version is sometimes the honest bargain. For a team with technical capacity, ownership is usually worth it.
Pick the problem first, then the tool. Installing an entire stack is a way of avoiding the work. One crawler, one analytics package and one scheduler is usually enough to run a serious marketing operation.
Go deeper
If you are not sure which of these earns a place in your stack — or what to do once it is installed — that is a strategy question, not a software question. I can help you answer it.