16 Handpicked Open-Source Projects to Improve Your Developer Workflow

In the modern age of development, having an efficient developer workflow plays a huge role in shipping quality software as fast as possible.

Open source is a valuable resource with tons of projects that are supported by the community and allows us to better tailor the solutions for our particular needs.

In this article, I decided to manually handpick 16 of my favorite open-source projects that can boost your development workflow and allow you to save time.

From testing environments, and auth solutions to robust analytics, database managers, and deployment solutions, I hope that these tools will improve your craft.

I also added direct links, descriptions, and previews of each project so that you can get an idea about them right away while reading the article.

1. Firecamp

Firecamp is a cross-platform API development tool. It puts REST, GraphQL, and WebSocket API testing into one interface.

This allows you to test and debug in a single application, reducing wasted time on context switches between different tools.

2. Budibase

Budibase is an open-source, low-code platform for building powerful and effective internal tools and business apps.

It enables rapid application development, reduces manual coding, and can be integrated with many popular databases/services.

3. Hanko

Hanko is an open-source auth solution for creating passwordless logins with passkeys and passcodes.

It produces a secure yet easy-to-implement system for authentication, reducing complexity and time spent managing user authentications.

4. Cerbos

Cerbos is a policy-based access control system that makes it easy for developers to manage user permissions.

It decouples the access control logic from the application code, which provides flexibility in managing authorization rules.

5. Primo

Primo is a visual CMS for static sites that allows developers to edit the content of the sites you are building on the go.

It is also integrated with an intuitive visual editor to give the best developer experience with an instant preview.

6. Typebot

Typebot is a platform to create chatbots in a no-code interface.

You can further embed them anywhere on your web/mobile apps, and collect results in real-time to help in user support.

7. Mermaid

Mermaid is a diagramming tool using JavaScript that takes the textual definition of diagrams and charts and draws them.

It allows users to visually create flowcharts, sequence diagrams, and classes, among others, in a dynamic way in either a browser or markdown files.

8. Flipt

Flipt is an enterprise-ready, GitOps-enabled, CloudNative system for managing the feature roadmap of your applications.

It allows gradual rollout, A/B testing, and experimentation to follow DevOps best practices and separate releases from deployments.

9. SigNoz

SigNoz is a free-to-use observability platform with out-of-the-box metrics, logs, and traces for troubleshooting.

This provides an easy-to-use interface and detailed overview for real-time diagnosis of performance issues and application optimization.

10. Plausible

Plausible Analytics is an open-source web analytics tool that extensively focuses on privacy and is considered easier to use than Google Analytics.

It provides clear and actionable insights without unnecessary bloat and clutter, making it easier for the developers to monitor performance on the website.

11. Supabase

Supabase is an open-source alternative to Firebase. It can also serve as a backend-as-a-service, providing real-time databases, authentication, and storage.

It allows developers to quickly develop and scale their applications with minimal setup while utilizing tools they already know.

12. Prisma

Prisma is an open-source object-relational mapping tool that provides easier database access for Node.js and TypeScript applications.

It provides type-safe database queries, automated migrations, and a rich data model, leading to more efficient and error-free database management.

13. Beekeeper

Beekeeper Studio is a modern, open-source SQL editor and DB manager.

It provides an interface to write queries, manage the databases, and visualize your data for MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, SQL Server, and more.

14. Coolify

Coolify is an open-source, self-hosted Heroku / Netlify / Vercel alternative for the deployment and management of web apps and databases.

It helps you manage your servers, applications, and databases on your own hardware; you only need an SSH connection.

15. Jest

Jest is a fast and safe JavaScript testing framework with a focus on simplicity.

It comes with an easy-to-use test environment with lots of features to enhance performance, like snapshot testing or parallelization.

16. Oh My Zsh

Oh My Zsh is a community-driven framework for managing your Zsh configuration.

It is equipped with a number of helpful plugins and themes, which extend the terminal with customizability with little effort.

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