os-alt — open-source alternatives in your terminal

$ npx os-alt slack

Prints the self-hostable open-source alternatives for a SaaS, with license, setup time, monthly cost, GitHub health and stars — straight in your shell.

Wraps the public osalt.dev API. No login. No telemetry of our own (the API is rate-limited but otherwise unauthenticated). Single dependency-free Node script.

Install / use

You don't install it. Just run:

npx os-alt <saas-slug>

Examples:

npx os-alt slack
npx os-alt datadog
npx os-alt notion
npx os-alt pagerduty

If npm hasn't picked up the package yet, the GitHub-URL fallback always works:

npx github:SolvoHQ/os-alt-cli slack

Other commands

npx os-alt --list      # every indexed SaaS slug (currently ~100)
npx os-alt --help
npx os-alt --version

Slug not found?

Prefix fallback is built in: npx os-alt slac resolves to slack. If the prefix matches multiple SaaS, the CLI lists them and exits 2.

Output

Slack  Team chat
Slack is the default for persistent team chat. The self-hostable replacements …
anchor: $8.75/user/mo on Pro; message history capped on free tier

name                 license              setup            monthly cost     health         ★
Mattermost           AGPL-3.0 (Team Ed…   15min docker-…   $5 VPS handle…   alive today    37k
Rocket.Chat          MIT                  15min docker-…   $10 VPS — Mon…   alive 1d       45k
Zulip                Apache-2.0           30-60min (the…   $10 VPS minim…   alive today    25k

Mattermost: Slack → Workspace settings → Import/Export → Export …
Rocket.Chat: Admin → Import → Slack. Upload Slack export …
Zulip: Use the upstream `manage.py convert_slack_data` …

Full page → https://code-rho-dun.vercel.app/slack/
Migration  → https://code-rho-dun.vercel.app/migrate-from-slack-to-mattermost/
Data:  https://code-rho-dun.vercel.app/api/saas/slack.json

Requirements

• Node 18+ (uses the built-in fetch).
• No transitive deps. The package is one file.

Env

var	default	meaning
OSALT_API_BASE	https://code-rho-dun.vercel.app	API host (will become osalt.dev)
OSALT_WEB_BASE	same as OSALT_API_BASE	base URL printed in the footer
NO_COLOR=1	unset	disable ANSI colors

Why a CLI?

The web is great for browsing. But when you're sketching infrastructure in a terminal, opening a browser to compare three Slack alternatives is friction. npx os-alt slack is two seconds of throughput.

The numbers (stars, last-commit age, archived flag) are computed at site build time against the GitHub API, so what the CLI prints is what the site shows — including the “alive / stale / dead” classification.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Contributing

Bug reports and slug requests are welcome: https://github.com/SolvoHQ/os-alt-cli/issues.