Awesome Privacy
List of free, open source and privacy respecting services and alternatives to privative services.
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[!IMPORTANT]
Anonymity, Privacy, and Security are often used interchangeably, but they actually represent distinct concepts. It is important to understand the differences between them. Read more in this section below.
The primary focus of this list is to provide alternatives that prioritize privacy. These alternatives give you control over your data and do not collect or sell it.
Contents
2FA
⛔ Avoid using apps that won't let you export your keys easily.
- Authy
- Google Authenticator
✅ Instead use
- 🤖 Aegis - A free, secure and open source app for Android to manage your 2-step verification tokens. Supports variety of imports from other apps (Google Authenticator, Authy etc.), vault encryption and exporting keys (plaintext or encrypted).
- ente Auth - A free, cross platform, end-to-end encrypted and open source app for managing your 2-step verification tokens. From the makers of ente Photos, and uses the same battle tested infrastructure. Needs an ente.io account.
- Owky 💀 - Free and Open Source Two-Factor Authenticator for IOS users.
- 🤖 FreeOTPPlus - Enhanced fork of FreeOTP-Android providing a feature-rich 2FA authenticator.
- 🤖 Authenticator Pro - Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) client for Android + Wear OS.
- Proton Authenticator - Proton Authenticator is an open source and end-to-end encrypted 2FA app that’s simple and free to use.
- 2FAS Auth - Open source TOTP authenticator for iOS and Android with a companion browser extension and no account required. GPL-3.0 licensed.
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Analytics
⛔ Avoid any analytics service that comes from Google, Facebook, Microsoft or any private service. These kind of analytics hurt user privacy.
✅ Instead use
- Ackee - Self-hosted website analytics.
- Aptabase - Open-source, privacy-first and simple analytics for mobile and desktop apps.
- Cabin - Privacy-first, carbon conscious web analytics.
- GoatCounter - Privacy aware, lightweight and open-source analytics platform.
- Matomo - Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers' privacy.
- Nullitics - Zero-effort open-source cheap analytics.
- Pirsch - Pirsch is a simple, privacy-friendly, open-source alternative to Google Analytics — lightweight, cookie-free and easily integrated into any website or backend.
- Plausible - Simple and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics.
- Shynet - Modern, privacy-friendly, and detailed web analytics that works without cookies or JS.
- Swetrix - Privacy-focused, fully cookieless and opensource (and selfhostable) web-analytics service.
- Umami - A simple, fast, website analytics alternative to Google Analytics.
- Unidentified Analytics - Naive ip-based tracking that works everywhere (web, command-line, email, etc). No account required. Developer friendly.
- Rybbit - Open-source and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics that is 10x more intuitive.
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Android
Android App Store
⛔ Avoid
- Google Play Store
✅ Instead use
- F-Droid - F-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform.
- Droid-ify - Lightweight F-Droid client with Material UI.
- Aurora Droid - Aurora Droid is a modern FOSS client for F-Droid.
- Foxy Droid 💀 - Unofficial F-Droid client in the style of the classic one.
- FossDroid - Fossdroid's aim is to promote free and open source apps on the Android platform: newest, trendiest and the most popular ones.
- SkyDroid 💀 - Decentralized App Store for Android
- Obtainium - Get app updates directly from the source.
- Accrescent - A novel Android app store focused on security, privacy, and usability.
Alternative Google Play Store clients
- Aurora Store - Aurora Store is an open-source alternative Google Play Store frontend client with privacy and modern design in mind.
⛔ Avoid
- ADB AppControl - A simple adb wrapper with a terrible privacy policy to collect things like device information and what applications you install/uninstall.
✅ Instead use
Android Dialer
⛔ Avoid
Third-party dialers found on the play store. They may contain ads/trackers and may ask for unnecessary permissions.
✅ Instead use
- Koler - Uniquely stylized phone app with customizable features.
- Fossify Phone - A handy phone call manager with phonebook, number blocking and multi-SIM support.
Android File Manager
⛔ Avoid
Preinstalled file managers and third-party file manager apps found on the play store. They may contain ads/trackers and may ask for unnecessary permissions.
✅ Instead use
- Amaze File Manager - Simple and attractive Material Design file manager for Android.
- Material Files - An open source Material Design file manager, for Android 5.0+.
- Ghost Commander - Dual-panel file manager.
- 🤖 Fossify File Manager - Open source file manager for Android with no ads, no tracking, and no internet permission. GPL-3.0 licensed.
Android Keyboard
⛔ Avoid
- GBoard (Google)
- SwiftKey
✅ Instead use
- AnySoftKeyboard - The only Android keyboard you'll ever need. Free as in speech and Free as in beer.
- FlorisBoard - FlorisBoard is a free and open-source keyboard for Android 6.0+ devices. It aims at being modern, user-friendly and customizable while fully respecting your privacy. Currently in early-beta state.
- Futo Keyboard - A modern keyboard that respects your privacy and security, with features such as offline voice input, swipe typing and smart autocorrect.
- Heliboard - A privacy-conscious and customizable open-source keyboard, based on AOSP / OpenBoard with many additional features and improvements, including support for custom dictionaries, themes, and glide typing.
- Indic Keyboard - Indic Keyboard is a versatile keyboard for Android users who wish to use Indic and Indian languages to type messages, compose emails and generally prefer to use them in addition to English on their phone.
- OpenBoard 💀 - OpenBoard is a 100% foss keyboard based on AOSP, with no dependency on Google binaries, that respects your privacy. It is no longer updated, but still works.
- Simple Keyboard - Simply keyboard and nothing more.
Android Gallery
Your phone gallery is a deeply personal aspect of your life, it may contain images and videos that capture intimate moments, locations, and people important to you. Protecting its privacy is essential to prevent misuse of this information, not only for you, but it also ensures the privacy of friends and family captured in these photos, who may not consent to having their images shared.
[!NOTE]
For a private way to store and backup your photos see Photo Storage section.
⛔ Avoid
- Google Photos has privacy issues. They collect a lot of data about you, which you can see in their privacy policy. Google can scan your photos and might flag them for different reasons, as shown in this incident. They also use your photos to improve their AI technology.
- Amazon Photos also has similar privacy problems. Like Google Photos, it gathers a lot of information from your photo gallery. You can see a bit of what kind of data they collect in their examples list.
- Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, etc. Gallery
✅ Instead use
- Aves - Beautiful gallery and metadata explorer app, built for Android with Flutter.
- Fossify Gallery - Fork of Simple Gallery. Browse your memories without any interruptions with this photo and video gallery.
Android Launcher
⛔ Avoid
Third-party launchers found on the play store. They may contain ads/trackers and may ask for unnecessary permissions.
✅ Instead use
- Lawnchair - No clever tagline needed.
- OpenLauncher 💀 - Customizable and Open Source Launcher for Android.
- KISS - Lightning fast, open-source, < 200kb Android launcher.
- Olauncher - Minimal AF (ad-free) launcher app for Android.
- Pie Launcher - Android home screen launcher that uses a dynamic pie menu instead of fixed positioned icons.
- Bliss Launcher - The default launcher of the /e/ Android-based OS.
It allows users to easily create and browse group of apps and it displays notification badges on app icons.
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Artificial Intelligence
When using cloud-based AI services, the data you input is often collected and stored by the service provider. This may include not only the content of your requests but also metadata, such as timestamps or IP addresses. Third-party servers may grant access to your data to their employees, partners, or even other users, depending on their privacy policies. Data may be used for various purposes, including model training, research, or even marketing activities. Your requests to a third-party AI service may be tied to your user information and payment details, linking your data to your identity.
ChatGPT
- Jan - Jan is an open source alternative to ChatGPT that runs 100% offline on your computer.
- llama.cpp - Inference of Facebook's LLaMA model in pure C/C++ so it can run locally on a CPU.
- LocalAI - Self-hosted, community-driven simple local OpenAI-compatible API written in go. Can be used as a drop-in replacement for OpenAI, running on CPU with consumer-grade hardware.
- ollama - Get up and running with Llama 2 and other large language models locally.
- PasteGuard - Privacy proxy for LLM APIs that masks PII and secrets before they reach cloud providers. Self-hosted, OpenAI-compatible, and restores original data in responses.
- Shimmy - Privacy-focused AI inference server with OpenAI API compatibility, zero cloud dependencies, and local model processing.
- Tinfoil - Verifiably private AI Chat and OpenAI-compatible inference in the cloud. Uses NVIDIA confidential computing and open source code pinned to a transparency log for end-to-end verifiability.
- Open WebUI - Self-hosted web interface for Ollama and other local models that gives you a private ChatGPT-style chat. BSD-3 licensed.
- LibreChat - Self-hosted chat interface that connects many AI models behind one private UI you control. Open source, MIT licensed.
AI Coding
- Continue - Open-source autopilot for VS Code and JetBrains—the easiest way to code with any LLM
- Cline - Open source AI coding for VSCode. See every decision and use your own models.
- Zoo Code - Cline fork with some improvements; community successor to the discontinued Roo Code.
- OpenCode - The open source coding agent. Connect local models or any providers of your choice.
- Aider - Terminal AI pair programmer that edits code in your local git repository using your own API keys. Apache-2.0 licensed.
- Tabby - Self-hosted code completion assistant that runs on your own hardware as an alternative to GitHub Copilot. Apache-2.0 licensed.
Text to Speech
- Kokoro FastAPI - Dockerized FastAPI wrapper for Kokoro-82M text-to-speech model w/CPU, ONNX and NVIDIA GPU support, handling, and auto-stitching.
- MeloTTS - a high-quality multi-lingual text-to-speech library by MIT and MyShell.ai.
- Piper - A fast, local neural text to speech system that sounds great and is optimized for the Raspberry Pi 4.
- Espeak - eSpeak NG is an open source speech synthesizer that supports more than hundred languages and accents. Voices will sound rather robotic.
- Chatterbox - Local text-to-speec
A curated awesome-list of free, open-source and privacy-respecting alternatives to mainstream services that harvest your data — from mail and messengers to VPNs, browsers and AI.