Overview of open-source alternative for popular applications.
youtube-local: Browser-based client for watching Youtube anonymously and with greater page performance
yt-local: Browser-based client for watching Youtube anonymously without forcing javascript (Fork of youtube-local)
pipe-viewer: A lightweight application (fork of straw-viewer) for searching and playing videos from YouTube.
Alltube: Web GUI for youtube-dl
ytmdl: A simple app to get songs from YouTube in mp3 format with artist name, album name etc from sources like iTunes, LastFM, Deezer, Gaana etc.
Youtube-dl: Command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and other video sites
OpenVideoDownloader aka jely2002/youtube-dl-gui: A cross-platform GUI for youtube-dl made in Electron and node.js
yt-dlp: A youtube-dl fork with additional features and fixes
Vividl: Modern Windows GUI for youtube-dl
Tartube: A GUI front-end for youtube-dl, partly based on youtube-dl-gui and written in Python 3 / Gtk 3
FreeTube: Open source YouTube desktop player for privacy on Windows, Mac and Linux
Youtube-viewer: Lightweight YouTube client for Linux
minitube: Lightweight youtube client with a kid-friendly interface. Can make playlists from search keywords
ytcc: Command line tool to keep track of your favorite playlists on YouTube and many other places. Can import youtube subscriptions from Google Takeout and provide them as an RSS feed for your favorite reader
NewPipe: A libre lightweight streaming front-end for Android
NewPipe with SponsorBlock & Return YouTube Dislike: A fork of NewPipe with SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike functionality.
LibreTube: Android frontend for YouTube, based on Piped
oleksis/youtube-dl-gui: Cross-platform front-end GUI of the popular youtube-dl written in wxPython
VueTube: A simple and open source video streaming client aimed to recreate ALL the features from their respective apps. Built on Vue
Hyperion: A modern alternate YouTube front-end for Android/
SkyTube: An open-source YouTube app for Android
uYouPlus: uYouPlus (uYou+) is an alternative YouTube app for Apple’s iOS and iPadOS
SmartTubeNext: SmartTubeNext is an advanced YouTube app for Android TVs and TV boxes, free and open source. It is not a live TV client and does not support “YouTube TV”
yattee: Alternative YouTube frontend for iOS, tvOS and macOS built with Invidious and Piped, supports sponsorblock
ytcast: Cast YouTube videos to your smart TV from the command line. This program does roughly the same thing as the “Play on TV” button that appears on the player bar when you visit youtube.com with Chrome or when you use the YouTube smartphone app
ytmdesktop: Cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) desktop app for YouTube Music. Has a (proprietary?) remote control app for Android
th-ch/youtube-music: YouTube Music desktop app based on Electron bundled with custom plugins (including built-in ad blocker and downloader)
Beatbump: An alternative frontend for YouTube Music created using Svelte/SvelteKit, powered by Cloudflare Workers
Brianify: A simple Youtube to mp3 downloader
AudioTube: Client for YouTube Music. Plasma-mobile project with an interface designed for Linux phones
BlackHole: Android music player app for YouTube Music and Spotify made with Flutter
ViMusic: An Android application for streaming music from YouTube Music
InnerTune: A material design YouTube Music client for Android
Shitter: Android, alternative front-end for Twitter, built with Java
Harpy: Android, alternative front-end for Twitter, built with Flutter/Dart
Twidere X: Android, alternative front-end for Twitter, built mostly with Kotlin, in early stage
Tweet-app: Desktop Twitter client only for tweeting. Timeline never shows up
Fritter: A free, open-source Twitter client for Android
Dabr: a PHP web interface to the Twitter API for mobile devices.
RedditClient: Alternative front-end for Reddit, built with Angular
Eddrit: Alternative front-end for Reddit, inspired by Nitter, built with Python & Starlette
Top of Reddit: Top Reddit posts every day
[Proxy]Rimgu: Self-hosted alternative frontend/ proxy for Imgur
[Proxy] Omgur is a free and open-source alternative Imgur front-end focused on privacy. Inspired by the Invidious, Nitter, and Teddit projects.
psst: Fast and multi-platform Spotify client with native GUI
Spotiqueue: Minimalistic queue-oriented macOS-native client for Spotify, with Guile Scheme scriptability
spot: Gtk/Rust native Spotify client for the GNOME desktop. Only works with premium accounts
spotube: A lightweight and free Spotify crossplatform-client which handles playback manually, streams music using Youtube & no Spotify premium account is needed
SpotX: Modified Spotify Client for Windows (Windows Only) - Blocking ads and updates for the desktop version of Spotify, disabling podcasts and more
kotify: Requires Spotify Account - Multiplatform desktop client for Spotify focused on library organization for power users. Relies on official Spotify client for playback
librespot: Requires Spotify Premium Account - librespot is an open source client library for Spotify. It enables applications to use Spotify’s service to control and play music via various backends, and to act as a Spotify Connect receiver. It is an alternative to the official and now deprecated closed-source libspotify. Additionally, it will provide extra features which are not available in the official library
oggify: Download Spotify tracks to Ogg Vorbis (with a Spotify premium account), based on librespot
Spytify: A Spotify recorder for Windows which records Spotify audio without recording or playing ads, ensuring no loss in sound quality.
Spicetify: Command-line tool to customize the official Spotify client. Supports Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Spotube: a Flutter based lightweight spotify client. It utilizes the power of Spotify & Youtube’s public API & creates a hazardless, performant & resource friendly User Experience
xManager: An android application where you can manage and install all versions of the spotify app.
Twire: Alternative and open source Twitch client for Android
Xtra: Twitch player and browser for Android
S0undTV: An alternative app to watch the Twitch streaming service for Android TV devices
gtkcord4: A lightweight Discord client written in Golang which uses GTK3 for the user interface
Abaddon: An alternative Discord client made with C++/gtkmm
Accord: A discord client for modern macs
Swiftcord: Native Discord client for macOS built in Swift
Discordo: A lightweight, secure, and feature-rich Discord terminal client built with Go
ChimeraCord: A functional but elegant unofficial Discord client for freeBSD, that aims for feature-parity with the official Discord client.
ArmCord: ArmCord is a custom client designed to enhance your Discord experience while keeping everything lightweight.
datcord: An open-source discord client using Firefox
purpe-discord: A libpurple/Pidgin plugin for Discord
Fosscord: A free open source selfhostable discord compatible chat, voice and video platform
litecord: An open source, clean-room design reimplementation of Discord’s HTTP API and Gateway in Python 3
ungoogled-chromium: Google Chromium, sans integration with Google.
Bromite: a Chromium fork with support for ad blocking and enhanced privacy.
SearXNG: SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from various search services and databases. Users are neither tracked nor profiled (SearXNG is a fork of searx)
Aurora Store: An Open Source alternative for Google Play Store
Aegis: A free, secure and open source app for Android to manage your 2-step verification tokens.
Authenticator Pro: Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) client for Android + Wear OS
StreetComplete: Easy to use OpenStreetMap editor for Android.
OsmAnd: A map and navigation application with access to the free, worldwide, and high-quality OpenStreetMap (OSM) database.
Thunderbird: A free open-source cross-platform email client.
Mailspring: A beautiful, fast and fully open source mail client for Mac, Windows and Linux.
FairEmail: Fully featured, open source, privacy friendly email app for Android
K-9 Mail: an open-source email client for Android
OpenBoard: 100% FOSS keyboard based on AOSP, with no dependency on Google binaries, that respects your privacy.
FlorisBoard: A free and open-source keyboard for Android 7.0+ devices. It aims at being modern, user-friendly and customizable while fully respecting your privacy. Currently in early-beta state.
Simple Keyboard: This keyboard is created for those who only need a keyboard and nothing more. No emoji, GIFs, Swipe typing, Spell checker. <1MB size.
Hyperspace: cross-platform Mastodon client for the fediverse written in TypeScript and React. (Archived - Nov 9, 2022)
Sengi: cross-platform multi-account Mastodon & Pleroma desktop client
TheDesk: cross-platform Mastodon & Misskey desktop client
Tootle: simple GTK-based Linux Mastodon client. (Archived - Nov 9, 2022)
Whalebird: An Electron-based Mastodon, Pleroma and Misskey client for Windows, Mac and Linux
Tokodon: A Mastodon client for Plasma and Plasma Mobile
Tusky: lightweight Android Mastodon client
SubwayTooter: A Mastodon client app for Android phone/tablet.
Fedilab: multi-account Android Mastodon client. (Archived)
Metatext: A free, open-source iOS Mastodon client. (Archived - Dec 1, 2022)
Telegram-FOSS: Unofficial, FOSS-friendly fork of the original Telegram client for Android
Forkgram: A fork of the official Telegram for Android application.
Nekogram: An open-source third-party Telegram client with not many but useful mods.
NekoX: A free and open source third-party Telegram client, based on Telegram-FOSS with features added (including from Nekogram).
Nagram: A third-party Telegram client based on NekoX with some modifications.
Nullgram: A free and open source third-party Telegram client, based on Telegram, NekoX and Nekogram.
Owlgram: An unofficial messaging app that uses Telegram’s API.
Signal-JW: A Signal fork with extra options added.
KeepassXC: A modern, cross-platform, secure, and open-source password manager. Requires no internet connection.
vaultwarden: Password manager. Unofficial Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust, formerly known as bitwarden_rs
#### Mobile
Neo Launcher: A fork of AOSP’s launcher for power-users.
Lawnchair: A free, open-source home app for Android. It ports Pixel Launcher features and introduces rich options for customization.
KISS Launcher: Blazingly fast launcher focused on search.
RPiPlay: An open-source AirPlay mirroring server for the Raspberry Pi. Supports iOS 9 and up.
air-pi-play: Turn a Raspberry Pi into an Airplay server using RPiPlay to enable screen mirroring on tvs, monitors and projectors.
NoPaste: NoPaste is an open-source website similar to Pastebin where you can store any piece of code, and generate links for easy sharing
PrivateBin: Zero knowledge encrypted paste-bin. A minimalist, open source online pastebin where the server has zero knowledge of pasted data. Data is encrypted/decrypted in the browser using 256 bits AES
HNTopLinks: Top Links on Hacker News
snapdrop: Similar to Apple’s Airdrop but in your browser. A Progressive Web App for local file sharing
hedgedoc: Collaborative markdown editor. A platform to write and share markdown
etherpad-lite: Collaborative rich text editor. A modern really-real-time collaborative document editor
gitea: Lightweight git server. Git with a cup of tea, painless self-hosted git service
ArchiveBox: Open source self-hosted web archiving. Takes URLs/browser history/bookmarks/Pocket/Pinboard/etc., saves HTML, JS, PDFs, media, and more
libredirect: A web extension that redirects popular sites to alternative privacy-friendly frontends and backends. Actively maintained fork of Privacy Redirect that supports Youtube, Youtube Music, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Imgur, Reddit, Searx, Google Translate, Google Maps, Wikipedia, and Medium
Farside: Farside provides links that automatically redirect to working instances of privacy-oriented alternative frontends, such as Nitter, Libreddit, etc. This allows for users to have more reliable access to the available public instances for a particular service, while also helping to distribute traffic more evenly across all instances and avoid performance bottlenecks and rate-limiting.
Matrix.org’s Synapse: End-to-end-encrypted messaging. Matrix reference homeserver. See also matrix.org.
Pluja’s Awesome Privacy: A curated list of services and alternatives that respect your privacy because privacy matters.
This is a fork of alternative-front-ends. In my opinion, the scope of the original repo has already diverted from just being a catalog of alternative front-ends. This list tries to incorporate not just alternative front-ends but also an alternative open-source application.
This overview originally included three alternative front-ends: Invidious (for YouTube), Bibliogram (for Instagram) and Nitter (for Twitter). Therefore it was named
alternative front-ends. As more projects have been added to the repository, the listed projects partially left the scope of alternative front-ends.
For example,
youtube-dlis not a front-end, but can be generally described as an open source project that interacts with the internet platform Youtube.
Therefore the name
alternative front-endsdoes not capture the full scope of the listed projects anymore. Maybe this repository will be renamed in the future to better reflect the larger scope. A possible name might beopen-source-alternativesor something similar.