“What are the best open source projects similar to Macro and Twenty in that they do a bit of everything and are good references to build your own projects with?”
Restrict the shortlist to the best modern SaaS references — real maintained products, even if smaller in scope — and redo the research around them.
Live research on 20 September 2026 consolidated thousands of repository, review and deployment pages into 15 high-confidence modern open-source SaaS products, challenged against a broader 25-candidate set. This is a curated best-reference shortlist, not a census of every open-source SaaS; semantic scores were retrieval aids, and the tiers below are editorial, based on how useful each codebase is to read and reuse.
From the broader 25-candidate challenge set: Tesseral is a useful B2B auth component reference but not a complete product SaaS; Supabase, Convex, InsForge, TrailBase and bknd are backend-as-a-service infrastructure rather than product references; the Haunted SaaS Skeleton, Nebutra Sailor, AI App Builder Open and other starters, templates and unverified young projects were excluded from the shortlist despite high semantic scores.
| Project | Tier | Product | Stack | License | Official | Independent |
|---|
Method: live research on 2026-09-20. Discovery searched 1,788 unique general results (116 candidate mentions); named-project research searched 2,181 repository/technical plus 764 product results; validation searched 2,586 official and 3,114 independent pages, with semantic processing covering the first 2,000 pages per oversized pass and 16 named projects queried per pass. Findings consolidated to 15 high-confidence modern-SaaS rows plus a 25-candidate challenge set. Semantic scores (0–1) are retrieval-relevance aids, not quality rankings; landscape positions and tiers are editorial. Product descriptions, patterns and caveats are truncated for space; each row links its own official source (GitHub-heavy by nature) and, where available, an independent assessment from another host.