This is a list of free and open source web development and web design software (CMS - Content management systems, Servers, databases, Hosting control panels...).

 

- Drupal CMS

Drupal is content management software. It's used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. But what sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that dynamic web experiences need.

It's also a great choice for creating integrated digital frameworks. You can extend it with any one, or many, of thousands of add-ons. Modules expand Drupal's functionality. Themes let you customize your content's presentation. Distributions are packaged Drupal bundles you can use as starter-kits. Mix and match these components to enhance Drupal's core abilities. Or, integrate Drupal with external services and other applications in your infrastructure. No other content management software is this powerful and scalable.

The Drupal project is open source software. Anyone can download, use, work on, and share it with others. It's built on principles like collaboration, globalism, and innovation. It's distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). There are no licensing fees, ever. Drupal will always be free.

The Drupal community is one of the largest open source communities in the world. We're more than 1,000,000 passionate developers, designers, trainers, strategists, coordinators, editors, and sponsors working together. We build Drupal, provide support, create documentation, share networking opportunities, and more. Our shared commitment to the open source spirit pushes the Drupal project forward. New members are always welcome.

 

- Joomla CMS

The definition of a CMS is an application (web-based), that provides capabilities for multiple users with different permission levels to manage (all or a section of) content, data or information of a website project, or intranet application. Managing content refers to creating, editing, archiving, publishing, collaborating on, reporting, distributing website content, data and information.

Joomla! is used all over the world to power millions of websites of all shapes and sizes.

Joomla! can be used for:

  • Corporate websites or portals, intranets and extranets

  • Small business websites

  • Online magazines, newspapers, and publications

  • E-commerce and online reservations

  • Government, non-profit and organisational websites

  • Community-based, school and church websites or portals

  • Personal or family homepages ...

 

- WordPress

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL that is usually used with the MySQL or MariaDB database servers but can also use the SQLite database engine. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system, referred to inside WordPress as Themes. WordPress is originallly created as blog-publishing service but has evolved to support other types of web content including more traditional mailing lists and forums, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems (LMS) and online stores. WordPress is used by more than 60 million websites, including 33.6% of the top 10 million websites as of April 2019, WordPress is one of the most popular content management system (CMS) solutions in use. WordPress has also been used for other application domains such as pervasive display systems (PDS).

To function, WordPress has to be installed on a web server, either part of an Internet hosting service like WordPress.com or a computer running the software package WordPress.org in order to serve as a network host in its own right.  A local computer may be used for single-user testing and learning purposes.

 

- TYPO3

TYPO3 is an Enterprise Content Management System. If you need to create, manage and output any kind of digital content, TYPO3 is the right tool for you. You can start small and grow fast, but while your business case might change - you'll never need to change the Content Management System since TYPO3 adapts to your needs.

TYPO3 is open source software under the GNU General Public License. This means that we supply the software to you free of charge and legal obligations. It has always been this way, it is this way, and it will stay this way.

If you should need additional functionality which we don't provide out of the box, head over to our TYPO3 Extension Repository and find plugins, admin modules, services, themes and much more.

TYPO3 has a very active community which has been organized into different teams and committees to ensure the continuous development and improvement of TYPO3.

 

- OpenCart

Opencart is an easy to-use, powerful, Open Source online store management program that can manage multiple online stores from a single back-end. Administrative area simply by filling in forms and clicking “Save”. There are many professionally-written extensions available to customize the store to your needs.

An OpenCart store can be ready to take orders soon after installation. All you have to do is have it installed for you (any web hosts do it for free), select a template form the many free or low-cost template sites, and your product descriptions and photos, click a few settings, and you are ready to begin accepting orders. Our free Installation & Quick Start chapters show you how.

FREE, open-source and easy to use ecommerce platform! No monthly fees, no catches; just an effective and customizable platform for your new ecommerce store. Simply install, choose your template, and add products and you’re ready to start accepting orders.

OpenCart comes with a fully mobile friendly admin area, complete with detailed product, order and customer management, sales reports, marketing tools and even more - allowing you to manage every aspect of your new online store from any device, anywhere in the World. With a huge range of features included out-of- the-box and over 14,000 additional extensions available to download, OpenCart is perfect for ecommerce stores of any size, any industry, any budget.

 

- Zen Cart

Zen Cart truly is the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. The ecommerce web site design program is developed by a group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think ecommerce web design could be, and should be, done differently.

Some shopping cart solutions seem to be complicated programming exercises instead of responding to users' needs, Zen Cart puts the merchants and shoppers requirements first. Similarly, other shopping cart software programs are nearly impossible to install and use without an IT degree, Zen Cart can be installed and set-up by anyone with the most basic web site building and computer skills.

There are hundreds of shopping cart programs available, but none come close to offering the level of options, features and support available with Zen Cart. Even the commercial programs have a hard time competing.

Zen Cart® is Free Open Source software. It is licensed under GPL2, meaning you are free to modify the source code in whatever ways your application requires.

 

- Vesta CP

Vesta control panel is an open source hosting control panel, which can be used to manage multiple websites, creat and manage email accounts, FTP accounts, and MySQL databases, manage DNS records and more. It has the fine touch of Softaculous auto installer that is able to install more than 439 apps with one click, we hope it would be appreciated with our not so experienced users and in general will make vesta even simpler to use and to build a web site.

To get latest version you just need to get to "Updates" tab and update vesta core package to release 22. It is completely safe and will perform update automatically. Enjoy latest vesta!

 

- ISPConfig

ISPConfig is a widely used Open Source Hosting Control Panel for Linux, licensed under BSD license and developed by the company ISPConfig UG.[1] The ISPConfig project was started in autumn 2005 by Till Brehm from the German company projektfarm GmbH.

ISPConfig allows administrators to manage websites, email addresses, MySQL and MariaDB databases, FTP accounts, Shell accounts and DNS records through a web-based interface. The software has 4 login levels: administrator, reseller, client, and email-user. ISPConfig supports the Linux based operating systems CentOS, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu.

The following services and features are supported:

  • Manage single or multiple servers from one control panel.

  • web server management for Apache HTTP Server and Nginx.

  • Mail server management (with virtual mail users) with spam and antivirus filter using Postfix (software) and Dovecot (software).

  • DNS server management (BIND, Powerdns).

  • Configuration mirroring and clusters.

  • Administrator, reseller, client and mail-user login.

  • Virtual server management for OpenVZ Servers.

  • Website statistics with Webalizer and AWStats.

 

- Sentora

Sentora is a free to download and use web hosting control panel developed for Linux, UNIX and BSD based servers or computers. The Sentora software can turn a domestic or commercial server into a fully fledged, easy to use and manage web hosting server.

Our team work and provide the software as a 'hobby' project, we are not commercially backed nor do we do this for financial reward, we give up our spare time to develop, support and maintain the software.

Sentora is written in PHP and utilises various other GNU/open-source software packages such as Apache HTTPd, PHP, Dovecot, Postfix, ProFTPd and MariaDB to name a few.

 

- Webmin

Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely.

Almost all the development of Webmin was done by Jamie Cameron, though many people have contributed patches and translations into additional languages. There are also many third-party modules that were developed by other people separately.

All recent versions of Webmin are under a BSD-like licence, meaning that it may be freely distributed and modified for commercial and non-commercial use.

 

- Popular Linux server distributions: 

Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution.

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Popular Linux distributions include Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu. Commercial distributions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Desktop Linux distributions include a windowing system such as X11 or Wayland, and a desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE Plasma. Distributions intended for servers may omit graphics altogether, or include a solution stack such as LAMP. Because Linux is freely redistributable, anyone may create a distribution for any purpose.

 

- NGINX

Nginx is a web server which can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. The software was created by Igor Sysoev and first publicly released in 2004. A company of the same name was founded in 2011 to provide support and Nginx plus paid software.

Nginx is free and open-source software, released under the terms of the 2-clause BSD license. A large fraction of web servers use NGINX, often as a load balancer.

 

- Apache HTTP server

The Apache HTTP Server Project is a collaborative software development effort aimed at creating a robust, commercial-grade, featureful, and freely-available source code implementation of an HTTP (Web) server. The project is jointly managed by a group of volunteers located around the world, using the Internet and the Web to communicate, plan, and develop the server and its related documentation. This project is part of the Apache Software Foundation. In addition, hundreds of users have contributed ideas, code, and documentation to the project. This file is intended to briefly describe the history of the Apache HTTP Server and recognize the many contributors.

 

- MySQL

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter, and "SQL", the abbreviation for Structured Query Language.

MySQL is free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU General Public License, and is also available under a variety of proprietary licenses. MySQL was owned and sponsored by the Swedish company MySQL AB, which was bought by Sun Microsystems (now Oracle Corporation).

MySQL is a component of the LAMP web application software stack (and others), which is an acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python. MySQL is used by many database-driven web applications, including Drupal, Joomla, phpBB, and WordPress. MySQL is also used by many popular websites, including Facebook, Flickr, MediaWiki, Twitter, and YouTube.

The MySQL server software itself and the client libraries use dual-licensing distribution. They are offered under GPL version 2, or a proprietary license.

Support can be obtained from the official manual. Free support additionally is available in different IRC channels and forums.

 

- PHP

PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited to web development.

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.