Self-hosted alternatives to Disqus
The free tier injects ads and trackers into your readers' browsers, on your domain.
Below are 10 open-source projects that cover the same ground, each scored 0–100 on how actively it is actually maintained — commit volume, release cadence and recent trend. 9 of the 10 are currently rated healthy or better. Ordering reflects that score, not sponsorship.
| Project | Health | Activity (11 mo) | Stars | Licence | Last release |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Infisical Community Edition Platform for secrets, certificates, and privileged access management. | Thriving · 95 | 29k | MIT | 23 Sept 2026 | |
| penpot Web-based design and prototyping platform meant for cross-domain teams. | Thriving · 91 | 60k | MPL-2.0 | 23 Sept 2026 | |
| Teleport Certificate authority and access plane for SSH, Kubernetes, web applications, and databases. | Thriving · 89 | 21k | Apache-2.0 | 9 Jul 2026 | |
| Reactive Resume One-of-a-kind resume builder that keeps your privacy in mind. Completely secure, customizable and portable. | Thriving · 88 | 43k | MIT | 26 Sept 2026 | |
| Usertour User onboarding platform allowing you to create in-app product tours, checklists, and surveys in minutes effor | Thriving · 88 | 2.3k | AGPL-3.0 | 18 Sept 2026 | |
| OpenZiti Fully-featured, zero trust, full mesh overlay network. Includes a 2FA support out of the box, clients for all | Thriving · 84 | 4.4k | Apache-2.0 | 25 Sept 2026 | |
| Wavelog Webbased Logging Software for Radio Amateurs. Enhanced QSO logging, statistics and maps for your browser. | Thriving · 84 | 542 | MIT | 23 Sept 2026 | |
| Anubis Web AI firewall utility which protects upstream resources from scraper bots. | Healthy · 79 | 23k | MIT | 17 Sept 2026 | |
| remark42 Lightweight and simple comment engine, which doesn't spy on users. It can be embedded into blogs, articles or | Healthy · 72 | 5.6k | MIT | 14 Sept 2026 | |
| Isso Lightweight commenting server written in Python and Javascript. It aims to be a drop-in replacement for Disqus | Slowing · 46 | 5.3k | MIT | 26 Mar 2026 |
How these were picked
Every project listed here is open source and can run entirely on hardware you control. We start from the categories that match Disqus's job — Miscellaneous, Communication - Social Networks and Forums — then rank by health score so that a popular-but-abandoned project never appears above a smaller one that is actively shipping. The scoring method is documented in full.
The scores are recomputed from repository data on every rebuild, so this page reflects the state of these projects as of 1 Oct 2026 — not the day it was written.
Infisical Community Edition
Platform for secrets, certificates, and privileged access management.
Best fit: Teams looking for an open-source, self-hosted option to centralise secrets management and access control across their technical infrastructure.
Worth knowing: Operating a centralised secrets manager introduces a critical single point of failure and high availability requirement for your infrastructure. It also overlaps with established identity and secrets management alternatives, meaning migration overhead should be considered.
penpot
Web-based design and prototyping platform meant for cross-domain teams.
Best fit: Teams looking for a self-hosted design and prototyping tool that avoids proprietary cloud ecosystems and subscription lock-in.
Worth knowing: Migrating existing assets from established proprietary design tools can sometimes introduce formatting inconsistencies or require manual layout adjustments.
Teleport
Certificate authority and access plane for SSH, Kubernetes, web applications, and databases.
Best fit: Engineering teams managing diverse, distributed infrastructure who need granular audit trails and strict identity-based access controls.
Worth knowing: Operating a central certificate authority creates a single point of failure and a high-value security target, requiring careful key management and high availability planning.
Reactive Resume
One-of-a-kind resume builder that keeps your privacy in mind. Completely secure, customizable and portable.
Best fit: It suits individuals who want absolute control over their personal data and prefer to generate professionally styled resumes in a secure, self-managed environment.
Worth knowing: You will need to handle your own data backups and ensure proper access controls if you expose the instance to the wider internet.
Usertour
User onboarding platform allowing you to create in-app product tours, checklists, and surveys in minutes effortlessly.
Best fit: Teams that need to design product walkthroughs and gather user feedback directly within their own applications while maintaining strict data privacy.
Worth knowing: The AGPL-3.0 licence may have strict copyleft implications if you modify the code and offer it as a service to external users.