Collaboration

Self-Hosting Penpot: Open Source Figma Alternative with Docker When Adobe acquired Figma for $20 billion in 2022 (later abandoned), it sent a clear message: your design tools are only as independent as the company behind them. Penpot exists so that message doesn’t have to matter. Penpot is a fully open-source design and prototyping platform licensed under MPL 2.0. It runs in the browser, supports real-time collaboration, outputs native SVG/CSS/HTML, and — crucially — can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure. No vendor lock-in, no per-seat pricing that scales into absurdity, no surprise acquisitions that change the terms overnight. ...

If your team relies on Slack but you’re tired of message history limits, per-seat pricing, and having your conversations live on someone else’s servers — Mattermost is the answer. It’s an open-source, self-hosted team communication platform that looks and feels like Slack, but runs entirely on your hardware. What is Mattermost? Mattermost is a collaboration platform built for teams that need full control over their communication data. It offers channels, direct messages, threads, file sharing, search, and a plugin ecosystem — all packaged in a modern web interface that’ll feel familiar if you’ve used Slack or Microsoft Teams. ...

Self-Hosting Docmost: Notion Alternative with Real-Time Collaboration If you’ve been looking for a self-hosted replacement for Notion or Confluence that doesn’t feel like it was built in 2010, Docmost is worth your attention. It’s an open-source collaborative wiki and documentation platform with real-time editing, a clean modern UI, and all the features you’d expect from a paid knowledge base tool. What sets Docmost apart from the crowded field of self-hosted wikis is polish. The editor is fast. Real-time collaboration actually works. And it ships with diagram support (Draw.io, Excalidraw, and Mermaid), nested spaces with granular permissions, comments, page history, embeds, and file attachments — all out of the box. ...

Excalidraw is one of those tools that looks deceptively simple — a hand-drawn style whiteboard in your browser — but once you start using it, you realize it’s replaced half your diagramming stack. Architecture diagrams, flowcharts, wireframes, quick sketches during meetings — it handles all of it with a clean, intuitive interface. The hosted version at excalidraw.com works great, but self-hosting gives you full control over your data, private collaboration without third-party servers, and the ability to embed it into your own workflows. ...