Top 100 Open Source Projects Of 2026

The kernel that runs the internet — most servers, all of Android, every Chromebook, most embedded devices. Linus Torvalds + thousands of maintainers; the most consequential OSS project ever.

Container orchestration that became the cloud's universal abstraction. Originally Google's Borg-inspired project; now under CNCF with 1500+ contributors.

The world's most advanced open-source relational database. The default choice for greenfield projects in 2026; powers Supabase, Neon, and most modern serverless DBs.

Meta's UI library that defined two generations of frontend. Server Components and the React Compiler ship in React 19 / 20; powers Next.js, Remix, React Native.

Microsoft's typed JavaScript superset. The default language of modern web development; 90%+ of new TS-or-JS projects pick TS in 2026.

JavaScript runtime that put JS on the server and birthed the entire npm ecosystem. Still the dominant non-browser JS runtime despite Bun and Deno momentum.

The reference implementation of Python. The language of AI/ML and one of the top three languages by usage. PEP 703 (no-GIL) ships in 3.14.

Memory-safe systems language that's eating Linux kernel modules, foundational infra, and security-critical code. Steepest learning curve but unmatched safety guarantees.

Google's pragmatic systems language. Runs Kubernetes, Docker, Prometheus, etcd, Terraform, Cockroach — half of cloud-native infra is Go.

The distributed version control system Linus also wrote. The most-used dev tool on earth; the substrate of GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket.

Microsoft's open-source editor (the OSS core, not the proprietary build). Surpassed all competitors; the foundation Cursor, Windsurf, and Codium build on.

Vercel's React framework — App Router, Server Actions, Edge runtime. The default for new full-stack React projects in 2026.

Utility-first CSS framework that won the framework wars. Tailwind v4 reset the engine to Rust; the de facto styling layer for shadcn/ui, Vercel, and most modern apps.

Copy-paste component library built on Radix + Tailwind. Not technically a 'library' — that's the point. The dominant component system for new React apps.

The most-starred open-source AI coding tool — 153k+ stars in 2026. Provider-agnostic, terminal-native, MCP-compatible. Reset the bar for OSS agentic CLIs.

The library that made every modern LLM accessible. Stewards the AI model commons; transformers.js extends this to browsers.

Meta's deep-learning framework that won research and now anchors production training/inference. PyTorch 2.x compile is the default training stack in 2026.

Google's ML framework — less popular than PyTorch for new research but still the basis of much production inference (especially mobile via TFLite).

Google's functional ML library with XLA compilation. The framework that trained Gemini, PaLM, and many other Google models.

Georgi Gerganov's CPU-and-Metal LLM inference engine in C/C++. Powers Ollama, LM Studio, and basically every 'local LLM' app on the planet.

High-throughput GPU LLM serving with PagedAttention. The reference open-source inference engine for production serving in 2026.

One-command local LLM hosting on Mac/Linux/Windows. The 'docker for models' that made local AI mainstream.

The most-installed agent framework SDK. Now anchored by LangGraph for state machines and LangSmith for observability.

Open-source VS Code AI coding extension — 58k+ stars, Apache 2.0. Mat's reference IDE-agent reference implementation.

Git-native CLI coding agent — 41k+ stars. Pioneered the diff-based edit format that almost every other agent now uses.

Anthropic's open protocol for connecting agents to tools and data. The ecosystem layer underpinning Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Cline.

The text-to-image model that started the open-source generative-AI wave. Continues as the foundation for AnimateDiff, ControlNet, LoRA fine-tunes, etc.

Node-graph UI for AI image and video pipelines. The de-facto research/production interface for open-source generative AI in 2026.

Alibaba's open-source video generation model, 14B MoE — outperforms several closed commercial models on VBench. Best open-source AI video generator in 2026.

OpenAI's open speech-to-text model. The standard for transcription; powers /audio transcribe, dictation apps, and the entire podcast-summarization industry.

Jarred Sumner's all-in-one JS runtime + package manager + bundler in Zig. Drop-in replacement for Node many times faster; serious Node challenger.

Ryan Dahl's secure-by-default TypeScript-first runtime. Deno 2 (2024) shipped npm compatibility and shifted Deno from 'curiosity' to 'real option'.

Evan Wallace's blazingly fast JS bundler in Go. Underpins Vite, tsx, and many tooling chains; reset the speed bar for JS tooling.

Evan You's dev-server and bundler — defines modern frontend DX. Vite 6 unified Rollup + Rolldown for production builds.

Rich Harris's app framework — Svelte 5 (runes) re-platformed reactivity. Loved disproportionately to its market share; many devs' favourite framework.

Multi-page-app framework optimised for content sites. The default for marketing sites, blogs, and documentation in 2026.

Ryan Florence + Michael Jackson's React framework that merged into React Router 7. Strong on web fundamentals (forms, redirects, progressive enhancement).

Vue's full-stack framework — Server Components, Nitro deployment, edge-native. The Vue counterpart to Next.js.

Evan You's progressive frontend framework. Vue 3 + Pinia is the European/Chinese counterweight to React; the calmest of the big-three frameworks.

Google's full-batteries-included frontend framework. Angular 19/20 reset DX with signals; still the enterprise-Java-shop default.

Solomon Hykes's container runtime that made Linux containers usable. The kernel of cloud-native; Docker Inc.'s open-core engine still dominates dev workflows.

Red Hat's daemonless container engine — Docker-compatible CLI without the privileged daemon. Default in modern Linux distros.

HashiCorp's IaC tool and its Linux Foundation fork OpenTofu — the BSL/MPL split of 2023. Together they remain the dominant IaC layer.

Red Hat's agentless configuration management tool. Default for declarative server provisioning despite the Salt/Chef era ending.

The Kubernetes package manager. Helm Charts are the way most Kubernetes-native apps ship — Prometheus, Grafana, cert-manager, etc.

Time-series database for monitoring metrics. The CNCF graduate that became the metric layer for cloud-native operations.

Dashboards for time-series and logs. The visualisation layer for Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Mimir — the Grafana Labs stack.

Unified observability standard — traces, metrics, logs. Replaced OpenTracing + OpenCensus; the spec every observability vendor implements.

Grafana Labs' log aggregation system — 'Prometheus for logs'. Cheap object-storage-backed log queries by labels.

Distributed tracing — Jaeger (CNCF) and Tempo (Grafana) are the dominant open-source trace backends.

Distributed event streaming platform. The de-facto streaming backbone for big-data and real-time data architectures.

Kafka-compatible streaming engine in C++ with single-binary deployment. Increasingly chosen over Kafka for simpler ops.

Distributed-compute engine for big-data analytics and ML. The Databricks engine; the cornerstone of modern data engineering.

Open table format for huge analytic datasets. Won the format wars vs Delta and Hudi; even Databricks supports Iceberg natively now.

Data Build Tool — SQL-based analytics-engineering framework. The 'transform' layer of every modern data team's stack.

The de-facto workflow orchestrator for data pipelines. Astronomer's commercial offering keeps OSS Airflow vibrant.

Python-native workflow orchestrator competing with Airflow. Newer DX; strong adoption in MLOps and modern data teams.

Yandex's columnar OLAP database. The fastest open-source analytical DB; powers PostHog, Cloudflare Analytics, Plausible.

In-process OLAP database — 'SQLite for analytics'. The most-celebrated dev tool of 2024-2026; runs in browsers, Lambda, Python, R.

D. Richard Hipp's embedded relational database — the most-deployed database on earth (every iOS/Android app). Public-domain code.

Salvatore Sanfilippo's in-memory key/value store and the Linux Foundation fork Valkey (2024) after Redis's BSL move. Both widely deployed.

The dominant document database. Server Side Public License since 2018; the reference flexible-schema database for many web apps.

Distributed SQL DB modelled on Google Spanner. BSL-licensed; popular for global-scale strongly-consistent transactional apps.

Open-source Postgres-based Firebase alternative — auth, storage, edge functions, vector. The platform itself is OSS (per-component).

Columnar in-memory format for analytics. The substrate of modern data interop; powers DuckDB, Polars, pandas 2.0, Spark Connect.

Rust-native DataFrame library that's the modern challenger to pandas. Often 10× faster on large data; rapidly winning ML/analytics workflows.

Python DataFrame library and the language of data science. pandas 2.x added Arrow-backed types; still the most-imported analytics library.

Numerical Python — the foundational n-dimensional array library. Every scientific Python stack sits on top of NumPy.

Classical-ML library — clustering, regression, classification, preprocessing. Still the workhorse for tabular ML in 2026.

Project Jupyter — notebooks, Lab, JupyterHub. The dominant interactive computing UI for data science, research, and education.

Sebastian Ramirez's Python web framework with first-class async, OpenAPI, and type hints. The default for new Python APIs in 2026.

The 'batteries-included' Python web framework. Powering Instagram, Pinterest, Mozilla, Disqus — still the production Python framework for content-heavy apps.

DHH's Ruby framework — the original 'convention over configuration' web framework. Still ships GitHub, Shopify, Basecamp, 37signals products.

Taylor Otwell's PHP web framework — the dominant PHP framework with first-class queueing, scheduling, and a great DX.

Pivotal/VMware's Java framework — the JVM equivalent of Rails/Django. Anchors a huge chunk of enterprise backends.

Igor Sysoev's HTTP server and reverse proxy. Runs ~33% of all active sites; still the dominant web server.

Matt Klein's L7 proxy and edge/service mesh data plane. The data plane for Istio, Consul Connect, and AWS App Mesh.

Matthew Holt's HTTPS-by-default web server. Automatic Let's Encrypt; great choice for solo / small-team deployments.

Daniel Stenberg's HTTP client and library. Shipped in every operating system; the single most ubiquitous program after maybe sh.

Cryptography library that secures most of the internet's TLS. Foundational security; the AGL/Cloudflare BoringSSL fork remains influential too.

Open Broadcaster Software — the streaming/recording tool used by basically every Twitch streamer and many video professionals.

Open-source 3D suite — modelling, sculpting, animation, simulation, rendering. Used in feature films, AAA games, and indie 3D.

The Swiss-Army-knife of video/audio processing. Almost every piece of media on the internet has been through FFmpeg.

Open-source audio editor — multi-track, cross-platform, GPL. Recently controversial under Muse acquisition but still the OSS audio editor.

Open-source digital-painting tool. Particularly beloved by manga/comic artists; Linux/Mac/Windows.

GNU Image Manipulation Program. Long-derided Photoshop alternative — GIMP 3 (2025) is a meaningful generational upgrade.

Open-source vector graphics editor. The go-to SVG editor for most non-professionals.

VideoLAN's video player that opens anything. Ships on every desktop; the most-installed open-source desktop app.

PHP CMS still powering ~40% of the open web. Open-source core; commercial ecosystem (Automattic) around it.

Modern publishing platform with native subscriptions. The Substack-alternative for serious publishers; OSS core with hosted offering.

Headless CMS in Node.js. The dominant open-source headless CMS for modern Jamstack content stacks.

Application error and performance monitoring. Open-source core (BSL) plus hosted SaaS; one of the best-run OSS commercial cos.

Open-source product analytics. Self-hostable Mixpanel/Amplitude alternative; one of the fastest-growing OSS-commercial cos.

Open-source, privacy-friendly Google Analytics alternative. Self-hostable; cookie-less by default. Strong adoption in EU/GDPR-aware orgs.

Open-source Calendly alternative. Self-hostable scheduling infrastructure for individuals, teams, and apps.

Open-source Slack alternative for self-hosted team chat. Strong in government/defense/regulated sectors.

Open-source team communication platform. Mattermost competitor; deeper customisation and a larger out-of-the-box feature set.

Workflow automation tool — Zapier alternative that's self-hostable. Fair-code licensed; massive growth as agentic flows became mainstream.

Open-source smart-home platform. The hub of choice for non-cloud-dependent home automation; Nabu Casa commercial offering supports the project.

Configuration system for ESP32/ESP8266 devices. The companion to Home Assistant; turns a $5 chip into a powerful home-automation node.