The FOSS Awards – The Winners

We launched the FOSS Awards to help celebrate the role Free Open Source Software plays in our lives.

With over 5,000 votes cast, it was great to see the passion and enthusiasm that you all have for the open source community. A huge thanks to everyone who voted.

Your votes have been tallied and the results are now in. Each category has a winner and two ‘Highly Recommended’ apps. In this post we’ll highlight those winners, but you can see the full results here: FOSS Awards.

Here’s the rundown by category:

Communication

This was one of the categories that received the most votes. Rocket.chat won out, followed by Mattermost and Element.

CRM & Support

Chaskiq was the winner here, but Dolibarr and SuiteCRM came in as Highly Recommended.

Knowledge & Documentation

Joplin was the runaway victor here, followed by MediaWiki and Standard Notes.

Project Management

In the kanban battle, Focalboard got the most votes. WeKan and Kanboard were runners up.

Email

Thunderbird was the most popular FOSS email client, followed by Roundcube and Mailspring.

Password Managers

In a closely-run contest, Passbolt pipped Bitwarden and KeePass at the post.

Community & Social

Flarum won in the forum FOSS votes, followed by Discourse and Mastodon.

Analytics

Matomo finished first in the analytics category, with AWStats and Plausible coming second and third.

Ecommerce

OpenCart was the number-one ecommerce tool, while Magento (Adobe Commerce) and PrestaShop were highly recommended.

Content Management Systems

While Joomla! dominated in the early stages of the voting, WordPress came through as the winner towards the end, followed by Drupal.

Final words

It’s important to remember that all the FOSS featured in these awards are worthwhile considering using. Intentionally, we haven’t used the term ‘best’ in these awards. Just because one app got more votes than another doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s materially ‘better’ than another.

Anyone could vote, and people are more likely to vote for the software they’re using. They may not have tried the alternatives. Or it may be just that the developers were better at wrangling their users to vote for them! Popularity doesn’t always translate to mean ‘best’.

In the end, these awards are about celebrating ALL free and open source software, regardless of the number of votes they received. Even those that weren’t nominated!

We wanted to highlight the fantastic work of the whole FOSS community, who often contribute to their projects in their spare time. Through their selfless work, they make our lives better.

So thanks again to all who voted, but a special thanks goes those devs that make the whole thing possible: nice one!