Software you can stop renting

A rented subscription is worth leaving when a mature open-source system does the same job and someone will operate it. It is not worth leaving when the product is a filing service, a card network, a managed security retainer, or a public-cloud feature that is not software you can install. The pages below are that split. Licences named on them are the ones published by the project, read before the page was written, not a directory's summary.

This is the list we use before quoting a migration. It is not a promise that every row is a weekend cutover.

What can a company stop renting in customer and sales systems?

The record of the customer, the ticket, and the campaign can move. The WhatsApp network cannot.

• CRM covers Salesforce, HubSpot, Dynamics 365, Pipedrive and Zoho, against SuiteCRM, EspoCRM and ERPNext.
• Helpdesk covers Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, ServiceNow and Gorgias, against Zammad, FreeScout and osTicket.
• Live chat covers Intercom, Drift, Crisp and LiveChat, against Chatwoot. WhatsApp Business stays Meta's.
• Marketing automation covers HubSpot, Marketo, Klaviyo, Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, against Mautic and Listmonk.

What can a company stop renting in operations and finance?

The ledger and the purchase order can be owned. The card network and the tax filing cannot.

• ERP covers SAP, NetSuite, Dynamics 365 and Sage, against ERPNext, Odoo Community and Dolibarr, with the limit stated.
• Accounting covers QuickBooks, Xero and FreshBooks, against GnuCash and ERPNext.
• Invoicing and payments splits the invoice, which can be owned, from Stripe, Square and PayPal, which are not a repository.
• Procurement says plainly that Coupa and Ariba have no mature open-source twin, and that the purchase order can still live in ERPNext.

What can a company stop renting in people systems?

The employee record can be owned. The payroll filing should stay with a filer.

• HR systems covers Workday, BambooHR, Rippling, ADP and UKG, against OrangeHRM and ERPNext.
• Payroll is the page that says no. ADP, Gusto, Paychex and Deel file with the government. A package does not.
• Applicant tracking says Greenhouse and Lever have no straight open-source swap, and the applicant record can still be kept.
• Performance management says Lattice and Culture Amp have no mature open-source replacement we will deploy.

What can a company stop renting in collaboration tools?

Files, wikis and boards move more cleanly than mail and meetings.

• Team chat covers Slack and Teams, against Mattermost Team Edition and Element, including the SSO limit.
• Email covers Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, against mailcow, and says when not to run mail.
• Documents covers Notion and Confluence, against Nextcloud, OnlyOffice and BookStack.
• Project management covers Jira, Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Trello and Linear, against OpenProject, Plane, Leantime and Taiga.
• File storage covers Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Box, against Nextcloud.

What can a company stop renting in technology and analytics?

The forge, the runner, the dashboard and the login can be owned. The public cloud's managed services cannot be installed from a tarball.

• Version control covers GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, against Gitea and Forgejo.
• CI covers GitHub Actions, GitLab CI and CircleCI, against Woodpecker.
• Cloud infrastructure covers AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, against Proxmox as a hypervisor, not as a replacement for the managed services.
• Monitoring covers Datadog, New Relic and Splunk, against Prometheus and Grafana, and says Wazuh is not CrowdStrike.
• Identity and passwords covers Okta, 1Password, Entra ID and LastPass, against Keycloak, Authentik and Vaultwarden.
• Business intelligence covers Tableau, Power BI and Looker, against Apache Superset.
• Product analytics covers Mixpanel, Amplitude and Google Analytics, against Matomo, Umami, Plausible and a MIT PostHog compose.
• Customer data says Segment has no open-source twin we will deploy, and the warehouse can still be owned.

Which other categories are only partly replaceable?

Stores, sites, design files, meetings and signatures can be hosted by the client. Detection-and-response retainers and compliance binders cannot.

• Ecommerce covers Shopify and BigCommerce, against WooCommerce, Medusa and Saleor.
• CMS covers Contentful and Webflow, against WordPress.
• Design covers Figma, against Penpot and Inkscape, and leaves Adobe print production alone.
• Video conferencing covers Zoom, against Jitsi and BigBlueButton.
• Contracts covers DocuSign, against Documenso, and does not offer a legal opinion.
• Security and compliance covers CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Vanta and Drata, and names what open source does not do.

How do we use this map?

We quote a migration only where a mature system exists and someone will run it. Everywhere else the recommendation is to keep the subscription, or to own the record beside it. The engagement, when there is one, is open-source business systems: select, deploy, integrate, document, hand over. The cost argument that sits under every row is open source versus commercial SaaS.