Curated Collection

French Open Source Champions

The open-source companies coming out of France that the rest of the world quietly depends on.

20 hand-picked European tools · curated by European Tech Map

France has produced an outsized number of successful open-source software companies — from headless CMSs powering global brands to search engines, analytics platforms and PaaS infrastructure. These are the projects you can install today, inspect line by line, and run on your own infrastructure if you want to.

  1. 1. Strapi

    Headless CMS

    Paris, France · Open source

    The most popular open-source headless CMS in the world. 60k+ stars on GitHub, used by NASA, IBM and Walmart.

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  2. 2. Meilisearch

    Search engine

    Paris, France · Open source

    Open-source search engine in Rust — millisecond-level results, typo tolerance, easy self-hosting.

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  3. 3. Matomo

    Web analytics

    Lyon, France · Open source

    The leading open-source web analytics platform. 1M+ websites use it instead of Google Analytics.

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  4. 4. Akeneo

    Product Information Management

    Nantes, France · Open source

    Open-source PIM with a Community Edition trusted by retailers like Auchan, Sephora and Carrefour.

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  6. 6. Sylius

    Headless e-commerce

    Paris, France · Open source

    Symfony-based open-source e-commerce framework for custom B2B and B2C builds.

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  7. 7. Mautic

    Marketing automation

    Paris, France · Open source

    The open-source HubSpot alternative — campaigns, segmentation, lead scoring.

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  8. 8. XWiki

    Enterprise wiki

    Paris, France · Open source

    Open-source structured wiki — the self-hostable Confluence replacement.

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  9. 9. CryptPad

    End-to-end encrypted docs

    Paris, France · Open source

    End-to-end encrypted collaboration suite from XWiki SAS — docs, sheets, kanban, all zero-knowledge.

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  10. 10. PeerTube

    Federated video hosting

    Paris, France · Open source

    Federated, ActivityPub-based video platform from Framasoft — the YouTube alternative without ads.

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  11. 11. Framasoft

    Open-source toolkit

    Lyon, France · Open source

    Non-profit publishing 30+ free, ethical web services and software alternatives.

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  13. 13. Tuleap

    ALM and project tracking

    Toulouse, France · Open source

    Open-source application lifecycle management — Jira + Confluence + GitLab in one.

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  14. 14. Traefik Labs

    Cloud-native edge router

    Paris, France · Open source

    The most popular cloud-native reverse proxy and ingress controller — 50k+ GitHub stars.

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  15. 15. Vates

    Virtualization

    Grenoble, France · Open source

    Maintainers of XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra — open-source VMware alternative.

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  17. 17. BlueMind

    Open-source mail and groupware

    Toulouse, France · Open source

    Open-source enterprise mail and groupware — the Exchange/Microsoft 365 replacement.

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  18. 18. SOGo

    Groupware server

    Lyon, France · Open source

    Open-source groupware server with native ActiveSync and CalDAV support.

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  19. 19. Jahia

    Digital experience platform

    Lyon, France · Open source

    Open-source DXP and CMS — Java-based, used by enterprises and governments.

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  20. 20. Joplin

    Note-taking

    Paris, France · Open source

    Open-source, end-to-end encrypted note-taking app — the Evernote alternative.

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Frequently asked questions

Are all these projects fully open source?
Each listed product has a publicly available source repository under an OSI-approved or source-available license. Some companies (like Strapi or Meilisearch) operate on an open-core model with a paid cloud offering.
Can I self-host them?
Yes. That is the entire point of including them here — you can run every single one of these on your own infrastructure, in any region you choose, with no vendor lock-in.

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