Meetily
Meetings
Privacy-first, local-first meeting assistant built on Rust and Tauri — transcribes on your laptop, no bots on the call, nothing leaves the machine.
Literacy
In practice.
Concise and executive-level. Familiarity and practical use — not a claim of expertise in every item. Chips below link out to official product pages or authoritative concept sources.
Open Source
Open source, by default.
Most of the tools I reach for first are open source — not out of ideology, but because data sovereignty, zero vendor lock-in, and the ability to self-host are the same values behind the infrastructure and AI work on this site. A team that can run its own stack, read its own code, and keep its own data isn't hostage to a vendor's roadmap or pricing page.
This is a working list, not a comprehensive directory — meetings, project management, team chat, documentation, whiteboarding, and diagramming. Just what's actually good.
Plane
Roadmaps
A high-velocity, self-hosted alternative to Jira and Linear — issues, cycles, and execution paths without the enterprise tax.
Mattermost
Team Chat
A secure, open-core alternative to Slack — channels, DMs, and deep developer workflows, with message history that isn't paywalled.
Wiki.js
Docs
A fast, markdown-based knowledge base on Node.js — architecture specs, PRDs, and operational wikis in one place.
Excalidraw
Whiteboard
The standard for rough-draft ideation — hand-drawn aesthetic, end-to-end encrypted real-time collaboration, no account required.
AFFiNE
Canvas + Docs
A local-first workspace merging infinite-canvas whiteboarding with Notion-style docs — brainstorm and write the PRD in the same app.
draw.io
Diagrams
The engineering staple for structured technical diagrams — architectures, flowcharts, UML, cloud topologies. Runs entirely client-side.
LibreOffice
Office
The free, offline productivity suite — a robust fallback for heavy documents and spreadsheets with no cloud tethering.
Program Delivery
Jira
Confluence
Smartsheet
Microsoft Project
Word
Excel
PowerPoint
Tableau
VMware
Qualys
Quest
HP Zerto
NetApp
Cisco
Okta
macOS
Open-Source Project Management
Self-hosted alternatives worth knowing — product, infrastructure, and hybrid delivery.
Plane
Product
Self-hosted Linear / Jira / ClickUp alternative — issues, cycles, roadmaps, triage.
OpenProject
Infrastructure + Product
Classic, agile, and hybrid — Gantt, dependencies, portfolios, work packages.
WeKan
Infrastructure + Product
Self-hosted Kanban — change queues, ops follow-up, simple product boards.
Leantime
Product
Goals, milestones, and execution — strategy tied to delivery.
Kanboard
Infrastructure
Lightweight Kanban — service queues, maintenance, low operational overhead.
Cloud / Infrastructure
Security / Governance / FinOps
AI / Emerging Technology
LLMs
AI Agents
MCP
Embeddings
Local AI
Private AI
RAG
Vector Search
Local Inference
AI Infrastructure
AI Governance
Current AI / Development Practice
Actively hands-on — not a claim of equal professional depth in every tool.
Cursor
Claude
ChatGPT
VS Code
Kilo
OpenClaw
Claude Code
MCP
OpenRouter
Gemini
GitHub
Ollama
LM Studio
OpenWebUI
Hugging Face
LangChain
LlamaIndex
FAISS
Qdrant