Most articles about open source user research tools list features. This one reads the licence files.
We pulled the licence and repository data for every major tool in this category directly from GitHub on 3 August 2026, and the results reframe the category: of the ten tools below, only four are unambiguously open source across the entire product. Three are open core — the enterprise features you need are carved out under a separate commercial licence. One, despite ranking everywhere for "open source Typeform alternative," is not open source at all.
That matters, because the reason most teams choose open source for research is data control — and the features that make data control real (SSO, granular access control, audit logging) are exactly the ones vendors put behind the commercial wall.
Quick comparison: verified licences and repository data
| Tool | Category | GitHub stars | Licence | Truly open source? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PostHog | Product analytics | 37,457 | MIT core + Enterprise Licence on ee/ | Open core |
| Matomo | Web analytics | 21,737 | GPL-3.0 | Yes |
| Formbricks | Surveys / in-app | 12,707 | AGPLv3 + EE licence on modules/ee | Open core |
| OpenReplay | Session replay | 12,396 | Open core, ee/ carve-out | Open core |
| Typebot | Conversational forms | 10,234 | FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0 | No — source-available |
| HeyForm | Forms | 8,911 | AGPL-3.0 | Yes |
| SurveyJS | Survey libraries | 4,822 | MIT (library only) | Library yes, Creator no |
| LimeSurvey | Surveys | 3,685 | GNU GPL | Yes |
| QualCoder | Qualitative coding | 657 | LGPL-3.0 | Yes |
| Taguette | Qualitative coding | 87 | BSD-3-Clause | Yes |
Star counts and licence data retrieved from the GitHub API on 3 August 2026. All repositories except Taguette had commits within the previous two weeks.
The licence trap: three tiers pretending to be one
Tier 1 — genuinely open source
LimeSurvey, Matomo, HeyForm, QualCoder and Taguette are what they say they are. LimeSurvey''s licence file opens with "This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License," and its Community Edition gives you every core survey feature at no licence cost. Matomo is GPL-3.0 throughout.
There is still a catch worth knowing: LimeSurvey''s hosted tiers gate SSO, LDAP and SAML behind the custom-priced Corporate plan. The self-hosted Community Edition is free, but if you want managed hosting and enterprise authentication, you are back in a sales conversation.
Tier 2 — open core
Formbricks, PostHog and OpenReplay all use the same architectural pattern, and all three state it openly in their root licence files.
Formbricks: "All content that resides under the apps/web/modules/ee directory of this repository ... is licensed under the license defined in apps/web/modules/ee/LICENSE" — which is the Formbricks Enterprise Edition (EE) licence. PostHog uses an identical construction for its ee/ directory, governed by the PostHog Enterprise licence. OpenReplay''s root licence states plainly: "OpenReplay monorepo uses multiple licenses."
This is a legitimate and increasingly common business model, not a bait and switch. But you need to know which side of the line your requirements fall on before you commit engineering time to a deployment. If your security review demands SSO and role-based access control, the free tier is unlikely to satisfy it.
Tier 3 — source-available, not open source
Typebot is licensed under the Functional Source License, Version 1.1, Apache 2.0 Future License (FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0). FSL is a source-available licence: you can read and modify the code, but commercial-competition use is restricted, and it only converts to Apache 2.0 two years after each release.
FSL is not an OSI-approved open source licence. Typebot is an excellent conversational form builder and its licence is published transparently — but if you landed on it from a search for "open source Typeform alternative," you should know that the licence does not mean what the search term implies. If a genuinely open licence is a procurement requirement, this one will fail review.
What each tool is actually good for
Surveys and forms
LimeSurvey is the serious one. Twenty-plus years of development, 30+ question types, advanced branching logic, quota management, and 80+ languages. It is a PHP application backed by MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL. If you need a rigorous standalone questionnaire — academic research, regulated environments, complex conditional logic — nothing else on this list is close. Hosted plans start at €34/month (Basic, 1,000 responses/month), with Expert at €348/year (10,000 responses/year) and Business at €900/year (50,000 responses/year). All hosted prices include 21% VAT.
Formbricks is the modern in-product option — link, email, pop-up and in-app surveys targeted at specific user segments, deployable with Docker. Its cloud tier is free for 250 responses/month, then $74/month for Pro (2,000 responses/month) and $325/month for Scale (5,000 responses/month). It is the closest open-source analogue to an in-app micro-survey tool. The docs comparison Koji vs Formbricks covers where the two diverge.
HeyForm (AGPL-3.0, 8,911 stars) is a clean, genuinely open form builder. SurveyJS is different in kind: the survey-library package is MIT-licensed and is a set of JavaScript components you embed in your own application — but the visual Creator is a commercial product. If you have engineers and want survey rendering inside your own app, SurveyJS is the right shape. If you want a product rather than a library, it is not.
For teams comparing these against commercial options, see our roundups of the best survey software and Typeform alternatives.
Analytics and session replay
PostHog is the most-starred tool on this list at 37,457 stars, combining product analytics, session replay, feature flags and experiments. Matomo (21,737 stars, GPL-3.0) is the privacy-focused Google Analytics replacement, and remains the strongest genuinely-open option for teams whose driver is GDPR rather than cost. OpenReplay does session replay with self-hosting so recordings never leave your infrastructure — a real advantage when replays capture personal data. See the best session replay tools for how these compare with commercial platforms.
All three answer what users did. None answers why.
Qualitative analysis
This is the thinnest corner of the open-source landscape, and worth knowing about because commercial QDA software is expensive.
QualCoder (LGPL-3.0, 657 stars) is actively maintained — it had commits on the day we checked — and handles coding of text, images, audio and video. Taguette (BSD-3-Clause) is the simpler, friendlier option for highlighting and tagging interview transcripts, though at 87 stars and a last commit in February 2026 it moves considerably more slowly.
Both are credible free alternatives to NVivo or ATLAS.ti for a solo researcher or a student. Neither offers AI-assisted theme detection, and both assume you already have transcripts. Our guide to NVivo alternatives and qualitative research tools covers the commercial and AI-native options.
What open source does not cover
Lay the ten tools out by research activity and a gap appears immediately:
| Research activity | Open-source option? |
|---|---|
| Surveys and forms | Yes — LimeSurvey, Formbricks, HeyForm |
| Behavioural analytics | Yes — PostHog, Matomo |
| Session replay | Yes — OpenReplay |
| Qualitative coding | Yes — QualCoder, Taguette |
| Card sorting / tree testing | No maintained option |
| Participant panel / recruitment | No — panels are inherently commercial |
| Moderated interviews | No |
| AI-moderated interviews | No |
Open source covers the parts of research that are software problems. It does not cover the parts that are conversation problems. You cannot self-host a participant panel, and until recently you could not self-host — or automate — the interview itself.
That is not an accident. A survey tool renders a form; an interview requires something that listens to an answer and decides what to ask next. That has only recently become buildable, and no open-source project has shipped it.
The real cost of "free"
Zero licence cost is not zero cost. Before choosing self-hosting for a research stack, budget honestly for:
- Infrastructure — a server, a database, object storage for recordings, plus backups you have actually tested.
- Engineering time — deployment, upgrades, and security patches. LimeSurvey self-hosting specifically requires a server, PHP familiarity, and comfort with configuration files.
- Compliance ownership — self-hosting moves GDPR responsibility to you. It does not remove it. You now own the retention schedule, the deletion requests and the breach plan. See GDPR-compliant AI user research and research data residency for what that actually involves.
- The enterprise licence anyway — if you need SSO, you will likely end up paying for one of the commercial tiers on top of the hosting you are already running.
Teams often find the honest comparison is not "free versus $74/month" but "$74/month versus a server plus several engineer-days a year plus the compliance burden." Our roundup of free user research tools covers the forever-free commercial plans that avoid both.
Where Koji fits
Koji is not open source, and we will not pretend otherwise. What it does is fill the gap the table above exposes: the conversation itself.
Koji runs AI-moderated voice and text interviews. The AI conducts the session, follows up in the moment on vague or contradictory answers, and probes for reasoning the way a skilled researcher would — with no moderator bias and no scheduling. It then produces automatic thematic analysis across every transcript and a shareable report in one click. No open-source project on this list does any part of that.
It also does what most of these tools split across three deployments. Instead of a survey tool plus an analytics tool plus a QDA tool — three servers, three upgrade cycles, three sets of GDPR obligations — Koji combines six structured question types (open_ended, scale, single_choice, multiple_choice, ranking, yes_no) with open conversation in a single study, so the number and the reason arrive together.
On cost, the comparison is more even than you would expect. Koji Insights is €29/month for 29 credits and Interviews is €79/month for 79 credits. A text conversation costs 1 credit, a voice interview 3, and a report refresh 5 — so €79 buys roughly 26 AI-moderated voice interviews a month. And only conversations scoring 3 or higher on a quality gate consume credits, so junk responses do not bill you. That is comparable to Formbricks Pro at $74/month, except you are getting moderated interviews rather than a form, with no server to run and no compliance burden to absorb.
For teams whose driver is genuinely data sovereignty rather than budget, the right answer may well be LimeSurvey or Matomo, and we would not argue. For teams whose driver is understanding customers faster, enterprise security and SOC 2 posture is worth reading alongside this list — a well-run vendor is often a better privacy outcome than a self-hosted deployment nobody has patched in eight months.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best open source user research tool in 2026?
It depends on the activity. For rigorous standalone surveys, LimeSurvey (GNU GPL, free self-hosted Community Edition) is the strongest genuinely open option. For in-product surveys, Formbricks. For privacy-first analytics, Matomo (GPL-3.0). For qualitative coding, QualCoder (LGPL-3.0). There is no open-source option for moderated or AI-moderated interviews, card sorting, or participant panels.
Is Typebot open source?
No. Typebot is licensed under the Functional Source License, Version 1.1, Apache 2.0 Future License (FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0), which is a source-available licence, not an OSI-approved open source licence. It restricts competing commercial use and converts to Apache 2.0 two years after each release. Typebot is a strong conversational form builder, but it will fail a procurement requirement that specifies open source.
What does "open core" mean for tools like PostHog and Formbricks?
It means the main codebase is open source but specific directories are carved out under a commercial licence. PostHog''s root licence reserves its ee/ directory under the PostHog Enterprise Licence; Formbricks does the same for apps/web/modules/ee under the Formbricks EE Licence. Typically the enterprise-gated features are SSO, granular access control and audit logging — precisely what security reviews require — so check which side of that line your requirements fall on before deploying.
Is self-hosting actually cheaper than a SaaS research tool?
Often not, once you count everything. Zero licence cost still means paying for servers, storage, backups, upgrades and security patches, plus engineering time. Self-hosting also transfers full GDPR responsibility to you — retention, deletion requests and breach handling. Compared with a €29–79/month SaaS plan, a self-hosted deployment plus several engineer-days a year frequently costs more in total.
Is there an open source alternative to UserTesting or Dovetail?
Not a complete one. You can approximate parts of the stack — OpenReplay for session replay, QualCoder or Taguette for transcript coding, LimeSurvey for surveys — but no open-source project provides moderated interviews, a participant panel, or AI-driven thematic analysis. Those remain commercial capabilities.
Can I run AI-moderated interviews with open source tools?
No. As of August 2026 there is no open-source project that conducts AI-moderated research interviews. Survey tools render forms and branch on answers; they do not listen to a response and decide what to ask next. Koji does this with AI voice and text interviews, automatic thematic analysis and one-click reports, starting at €29/month with 10 free credits to try.
Get the part open source cannot give you
Open source is genuinely excellent for surveys, analytics and transcript coding — and if data sovereignty is your driver, LimeSurvey and Matomo deserve a serious look. Just read the licence file before you commit, because "open source" in this category means three different things, and one of them means "not open source."
What no repository on this list can give you is the conversation: someone asking a good follow-up question at the moment a customer says something surprising.
Try Koji free with 10 credits, no credit card required. Launch a study in minutes, let the AI moderator run voice interviews at any scale, and get themes and a shareable report automatically — from question to insight in hours, not weeks, with no research expertise required.
