Open source AI tooling is a developer thing, and the numbers are stark

If you want to run an AI tool yourself — inspect it, host it, keep your data on your own machine — whether that is even possible depends almost entirely on what job you are trying to do.

We counted. Every listing here records whether the maker publishes the source, taken from the maker's own site, and on 9 August 2026 there were 701 of them.

The gradient

Of the 185 tools we list across marketing, design and communication, two publish their source: DiffusionBee, which runs Stable Diffusion locally under AGPL-3.0, and Ultravox, an MIT-licensed speech model. Marketing, on its own, is still a flat zero across 78 listings.

Corrected after publishing. This article first said that not one of them published its source, and put the count at 193. Both were wrong. 193 double-counted the eight tools that sit in two of the three categories — the distinct figure is 185. And the zero came from our own openSource flag rather than from checking: fetching all 185 sites and looking for a repository turned up DiffusionBee (13,580 stars) and Ultravox (4,508), both flagged closed in our data and both plainly not. The flags are fixed and the table above is recomputed. Two more, shadcn studio and Liveblocks, publish code under custom licences rather than an OSI one, so they are left as they were — see the caveat at the end. We then checked the flag the other way too, on all 89 listings marked open source: 78 link a repository from their own homepage, and of the eleven that do not, nine are well-known projects whose repository sits in their docs — GitButler at 21,452 stars, GPT4All at 77,406, MinerU at 77,201. One was wrong in the flattering direction: CLIRank is an API directory, and the open-source language on its pages describes the tools it catalogues rather than itself. Its flag is now off, which is why AI reads 13% and Search 6% here. One, iSpeech, we cannot check either way — its homepage renders three words without JavaScript, so there is nothing for us or for the model that first read it to go on, and we have left it alone and said so.

The shape survives the correction and the reason it does is the interesting part: two open-source tools out of 185 is still a rounding error next to 71 out of 271 in developer tools.

Why the shape is not an accident

Open source is a distribution strategy before it is an ethic, and it only works where the people evaluating the tool can read code.

A developer choosing between two libraries can look inside one of them, and that inspection is worth something to them — so publishing the source wins adoption that a closed competitor cannot buy. LangChain, LlamaIndex, Aider, Cline and Chroma all got where they are partly that way.

A marketer choosing between two campaign tools is not going to read the repository, so publishing it costs the vendor their moat and buys them nothing. The rational move is to keep it closed, and every one of the 78 marketing tools here has made it.

The exceptions prove the shape rather than breaking it. The handful of open-source tools in image and writing — ComfyUI, Stability AI, Black Forest Labs — are model and pipeline projects whose users are largely technical, sitting in a creative category because of what they produce, not because of who runs them.

What this means if you are choosing a tool

If you are a developer, self-hosting is a real option and you should price it in. A quarter of the category is inspectable, and the free tier of a closed competitor is worth comparing against the total cost of running the open one yourself, which is rarely zero but is often lower than it looks.

If you are in marketing, design or communication, stop looking for it. You will spend an afternoon searching for the open-source equivalent of the tool you are evaluating and there isn't one. The question worth asking instead is about data export and lock-in: what happens to your work when you stop paying.

Open source does not mean free either. Fourteen of the tools here publish their source and sell the hosted version, which is a legitimate model and a different one — the source is open and the convenience is the product.

What we are not claiming

This is our catalogue, not the whole market. 701 tools is a fraction of what exists, weighted towards what launches publicly and gets listed. A category reading zero here means we have not found one, which is weaker than "there is none" — and if you know of one, tell us or submit it and the number changes.

The flag itself is the maker's own claim, read off their site. We do not audit licences, and "open source" gets used loosely enough that some of these are source-available rather than OSI-licensed. Where that matters to you, check the repository before you commit.

The counts are regenerated as the catalogue grows, so the table above is what the site holds today rather than what it held when this was written. Browse the open-source ones if you want the current list rather than the summary.