How Macrostack works
Macrostack helps you decide whether a free, open-source, or self-hostable tool can replace a paid or locked-down one — and which to pick. This page shows exactly how every entry is researched, verified, scored, and ranked, so you can judge our judgment.
The rules every entry must pass
Every entry is real and verified.
Licenses are checked against each project's own repository or official site and recorded with the exact SPDX label. Links must resolve. Pricing and lock-in facts are current. No invented tools, no guessed licenses, no dead projects.
Neutral, never adversarial.
We describe proprietary products factually and respectfully. We are a decision guide, not a campaign — and when the paid tool is genuinely the better fit for you, we say exactly that.
Honest trade-offs, both ways.
Self-hosting has real costs — your time, your hardware, your backups — and every entry lists real cons alongside the pros. Open-source is never oversold here.
Rankings are editorial and never bought.
The order of alternatives and the top pick are editorial judgments based on the research. No vendor can pay to rank, and monetization is always downstream of an honest recommendation.
The Sovereignty Score, in the open
Every alternative carries a Sovereignty Score out of 100 — a measure of how much control you keep over your software, your data, and your hardware when you use it. It is not a quality grade and not a black box: the score is the sum of six published components, and nothing else. A brilliant proprietary app can score low and still be the right choice for you; the score tells you about ownership, the write-up tells you about fit.
| Component | Max | What earns it |
|---|---|---|
| Open-source license | 30 | OSI-approved license earns full marks; source-available roughly half; proprietary-but-free a token few; closed earns none. |
| Self-hostable | 25 | You can run it entirely on infrastructure you control. |
| Local-first / data ownership | 15 | Works offline; your data lives with you by default. |
| No vendor lock-in | 15 | Open, standard formats; easy export; no forced cloud account. |
| Active maintenance & community | 10 | A healthy release cadence and a real community behind it. |
| Hardware independence | 5 | Runs on modest hardware you own; no proprietary device required. |
| Total | 100 |
Scores are rounded to whole numbers. A proprietary-but-local product (a closed smart-home hub that works offline, say) can still score moderately on the data-ownership and lock-in components — that is honesty, not a contradiction.
Freshness and corrections
Projects die, licenses change, prices move. Every entry carries the date its facts were last verified, shown at the bottom of its page, and entries are re-checked on a rolling basis. If you spot anything out of date — a license, a price, a dead link — that is a correction we genuinely want; every page invites it.
How the site makes money
Some pages carry clearly labeled partner links — managed hosting for a tool you have just chosen, or a server to run it on. When a link is monetized it is visibly marked as sponsored and carries the machine-readable label search engines expect. Two things never change: rankings are decided before monetization is considered, and a vendor cannot buy a recommendation at any price.
Who runs Macrostack
Macrostack is independently owned and operated. It is not sponsored by, affiliated with, or reviewed by any vendor listed on the site — including the open-source projects we recommend. The research pipeline pairs automated, source-verified research with human editorial review: nothing is published without a person approving it.