Fider alternatives

Fider is the best-known self-hosted feature request tool, free under AGPL-3.0 and still actively patched. It is also a project whose own site, getfider.com, now redirects to fider.io, a paid cloud service run by a UK company, and whose docs recommend that cloud instance ahead of self-hosting. Here is what that means and what else is worth considering.

Checked 22 August 2026, against Fider's own site and each alternative's pricing page.

Why are people looking for a Fider alternative?

Two problems show up in most of these searches. The first is operational: Fider needs Docker, PostgreSQL 12 or later, and your own SMTP provider or Amazon SES, none of which runs itself. The second is commercial: Fider's docs now say "the easiest way to get started with Fider is to use our Cloud Instance," and self-hosting is a single footer link on a site built to sell the hosted version instead. A third gap: no changelog feature at all. Roadmap, voting and private boards, yes. A place to tell customers what shipped, no.

Fider also tried, briefly, to paywall parts of itself. Version 0.33.0, shipped March 2026, gated moderation and SEO indexing behind a paid tier. Version 0.34.0, released 27 April 2026, reversed that: "the open core licensing model that we started to move towards was aborted, and we moved back to making everything FULLY open source." The code is open again, but the same company that tried it once now runs the paid Cloud Instance its own docs lead with.

What does Fider actually cost, self-hosted versus cloud?

Free is the licence, not the running cost. UserJot's own costed comparison of self-hosting Fider puts the infrastructure at $70 to $125 a month before any engineering time, plus roughly five hours a month once deployed. That is UserJot's number, published to argue against self-hosting, but it is the most detailed public costing anyone in this category has produced.

How do the alternatives compare?

Which self-hosted alternatives are actually alive?

Three other open-source projects sit in the same space, and they are not equally healthy.

Quackback is AGPL-3.0, 237 stars, and the newest of the three, and the only one doing real content marketing about self-hosting, arguing that "a $20/month VPS can run a feedback platform that would cost $200+/month on a SaaS plan." That figure is Quackback's own, not independently verified, and a project this young has not had years of production use to test it against.

LogChimp has 1,119 stars and is open core in the way that matters most: Boards, Roadmaps and Comments sit behind a $24 a month, billed yearly, paid tier, even on the build you host yourself. Free self-hosting gives you posts, customers, one admin role and a custom domain, not much of what most people picture as a feature request board.

ClearFlask is Apache-2.0, a real licence difference from the AGPL the other three carry, 448 stars, last pushed 5 August 2026.

One name on other people's lists does not belong on this one. Astuto's repository was archived read-only on 8 February 2026, its maintainer pointed people at Fider, and its hosted service ran for under a year before it shut. Do not deploy it, whatever a listicle says.

Which hosted alternatives are worth it if you want out of self-hosting entirely?

UserJot is the most direct comparison: its own page against Fider concedes "Is Fider ever the better choice? Yes," while arguing that "free is the licence, not the operation." UserJot costs $29 a month, priced per workspace, with 2 boards free, and ships AI duplicate detection plus a changelog that drafts itself from the original request once a post ships.

Canny.io is the largest name in the category: 25 tracked users free, then $79 a month billed yearly or $99 monthly, priced per tracked user rather than per seat. Its Autopilot AI reads support conversations from Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gong and Zoom into triaged feedback without anyone filing anything, a genuinely larger product than Fider is trying to be.

Nolt.io is worth naming for one reason: 22 or more interface languages out of the box, plus two-way integrations with Jira, Linear, Asana, monday.com, Intercom, Slack, Discord and Teams, at $29 a month billed yearly or $39 billed monthly.

What does Fider still do better than everything on this list?

Worth saying plainly, because a page that only lists problems is not honest about the software. Fider is free, genuinely actively maintained, last pushed 9 August 2026, carries 4,476 stars and 842 forks, and gives a real roadmap, voting and private boards under a licence that will never turn into a subscription underneath you. Three security fixes in three months, v0.35.0, v0.36.0 and v0.36.1, cut both ways: problems are being found fast, and fixed fast. The reason to look elsewhere is operational and increasingly commercial, not that the software is bad.

How should you actually decide?

Three questions, in order. First, do you want to run a server at all? If not, everything self-hosted here, Fider included, is off the table, and the real comparison is between the hosted vendors and a static option like Docket that needs no server to keep alive. Second, if you do want to self-host, is the paid gate acceptable? LogChimp's is real money for the parts most people actually want; Fider, Quackback and ClearFlask do not have one. Third, if a hosted subscription instead, model it at the size you expect to be in three years, not now: Canny.io's tracked users only ever go up, and Nolt.io's entry board count does not grow with you.

There is no version of this decision where the answer is Astuto. For what a feature request tool is built from, see feature request tools; for every self-hosted option in detail, see the open source options compared; for the full running-cost case, see self-hosting a feature request board.

Frequently asked questions