The Open Source we use at Vates: 2025 edition

Two years ago, we shared our self-hosting journey and the open source tools that power everything we do. A lot has happened since then—most notably, we've grown to nearly 100 people. And yet, our infrastructure? Largely unchanged.

Yes, a fully open source, fully self-hosted company can scale—and does so quite well, thank you very much.

Same servers, more RAM

You might expect that a 5× increase in company size over the last three years would call for a fleet of new servers, a cloud migration, or at least some blinking lights in a rack somewhere. Not really.

We’re still running on three compute servers purchased in 2019, with some extra refurbished RAM and two new NVMe SSDs added along the way. Our storage server was already refurbished when we got it—and already paid off. Same goes for the RAM, also refurbished and also very reasonably priced. The bottom line? Six years of production with no significant hardware change.

We like to say we’ve scaled horizontally—just not in the datacenter.

Formalizing our Open Source policy

As Vates expanded and I handed off sysadmin responsibilities to a dedicated team, we took the opportunity to clarify our internal software sourcing policy. It's simple and follows this priority order:

1. Prefer open source, self-hosted tools by default.
2. If no viable option exists, use the best available tool in self-hosted—but challenge that choice every year.
3. If going SaaS, prioritize vendors based in our region (e.g., French or European), especially those aligned with open standards and responsible data practices.

We still have a few long-time exceptions—like our HR SaaS (Lucca) and some niche software for accounting or compliance—but overall, this framework guides the vast majority of our tooling decisions. And it works.

Now, let’s take a look at the latest changes to our stack.

Our New Tools (and some replacements)

As we grow, some tools no longer fit—and new needs emerge. Here are the latest additions to our open source stack (plus a few well-deserved retirements).

📝 Spreadsheets: Grist

While Calc + Collabora still works for simpler spreadsheets, Grist has become our go-to for more complex, structured data. It sits somewhere between Excel and Access—powerful, relational, and flexible enough for prototyping real data-driven applications.

👷 Project Management: Plane

We’ve transitioned from Wekan to Plane for project management. While Plane is Open Core (and we typically prefer fully open source), its feature set and active development make it a compelling choice. It’s closer in capabilities to Jira, which aligns well with the growing complexity of our internal projects.

📊 Business Intelligence: Metabase

Previously, we relied on Kibana and ElasticSearch. But as our data matured and became more relational, we shifted toward Metabase, which has proven to be a more natural fit for dashboards and business insights. It’s clean, easy to use, and fits well with our current data pipeline.

📃 Forms: Formbricks

Think Google Forms, but self-hosted and open source (mostly). Formbricks now powers much of our internal and external feedback collection. It’s sleek and effective—though we weren’t thrilled when SSO was removed in a recent update. Still, it’s become a key tool for gathering input across the organization.

📖 Documentation: Docusaurus

With VuePress deprecated, we moved our XCP-ng and XO documentation to Docusaurus. It offers local search (via LunR), good performance, and doesn’t rely on third-party services for indexing. So far, so good.

☎️ Web Conferencing: BigBlueButton (BBB)

We replaced Jitsi with BBB, which handles larger meetings and works better across complex network environments. While it introduces a bit more latency (by design), it scales far better and supports recordings—essential for training sessions and company-wide meetings.

🔒 Password Management: VaultWarden

A fantastic self-hosted alternative to Bitwarden. Not only does VaultWarden simplify password management across browsers and devices, it also enables secure sharing across teams and supports integrated 2FA. It’s a real improvement, especially now that I’m no longer just using Firefox for everything.

🧪 On our radar: upcoming tools

We're always testing and experimenting. These tools aren’t in production yet, but they’ve caught our eye and may join the lineup soon.

🏠 Data Warehouse: ClickHouse (possibly)

As our data needs grow, a proper data warehouse may soon be required. ClickHouse is currently the leading candidate, and we’ll be evaluating it over the coming months.

🤖 LLM Interface: OpenWebUI

Looking for a self-hosted ChatGPT alternative? We’ve started experimenting with OpenWebUI, running on a GPU server (8× GPUs with 16 GiB each) we were lucky enough to acquire. It provides a sleek interface and supports a range of local models like LLaMA. It’s early days, but promising.

Under observation: tools we might replace

Not everything ages gracefully. Some tools are showing their limits, and we're keeping a close watch—or actively looking for alternatives.

💬 Support and customer relationship: Zammad

Zammad has served us well, but it’s not without its challenges—performance issues and resource consumption among them. Today, both our sales and support teams rely on it, but we’re exploring whether a split (or a specialized replacement for technical support) might be a better fit long-term. Alternatives like Grafana OnCall are also being considered for better escalation workflows.

📽 Slides: Marp

We’ve used Remark.js for a long time, and it still works fine. But we’re exploring Marp as a more modern way to create slides directly from Markdown. We'll share more once we’ve tested it in production.

Still Going Strong

Many of our core tools are still the same—and still handling our growth with ease. Here’s a quick recap of our unchanged, battle-tested stack:

• Virtualization & Backup: XCP-ng / Xen Orchestra
• SSO / Directory: OpenLDAP, Keycloak
• Email & Calendars: BlueMind, CalDAV
• File Sharing: Nextcloud
• Live Chat: Mattermost
• Blogs & Forums: Ghost, NodeBB
• Code Repositories: Gitea
• Infrastructure Management: NetBox
• Inventory: Snipe-IT
• Service Status: Uptime Kuma
• Monitoring: Netdata
• Build System: Koji
• CDN: Mirrorbits (for XCP-ng packages)
• Marketing Automation: Mautic
• CRM: EspoCRM. Quick note: we are now using the "Advanced Pack", providing automation for our sales team, it works great! The CRM usage is ramping up, and we are not disappointed by it!
• Slides: Remark.js
• Clipboard Sharing: PrivateBin

In conclusion

We started this journey as three co-founders, and today, Vates is a team of nearly 100 people. Throughout this growth, one thing hasn’t changed: our commitment to open source—not just using it, but building it.

We’ve built our entire business by relying on open source tools wherever possible, and we've also built our own open source products—like XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra—which now power datacenters all over the world.

In other words, we’re doing both:

• Using open source to run our company
• Building open source to grow our company

It’s a double demonstration:
✅ Yes, you can rely on open source to operate at scale.
✅ Yes, you can build a sustainable business by creating open source software.

We’ll be back next year with the 2026 edition. Until then, keep self-hosting, stay curious—and never let anyone tell you open source can’t scale.