The 10 Coolest Open-Source Software Tools Of 2025 (So Far)
Here’s a look at 10 open-source software tools—including software for building AI agentic applications, querying data across distributed sources and creating 3D animations—that’s caught our attention this year.
Open-source software tools continue to increase in popularity because of the multiple advantages they provide including lower upfront software and hardware costs, lower total-cost-of-ownership, lack of vendor lock-in, simpler license management and support from active communities.
In the following slides, as part of the CRN 2025 Year So Far project, we take a look at some of the most popular open-source software products that have caught our attention. Some of these have been around for some time and are already widely used while others are relatively new.
Not surprisingly, the wave of AI and generative AI application development is a major driver for new open-source software products and adoption. Some of the products on this list are in the software development space or help answer the need to manage the huge volumes of data that feed AI systems.
These products are available under open-source licenses such as the MIT License, Apache 2.0 License, GNU GPL and others. Many of them are managed by community organizations that oversee the products’ ongoing development from contributors. Others are developed by startups that offer commercial editions and services of their products in addition to open-source versions of their software.
Apache Iceberg
Apache Iceberg is an open-source, high-performance table format designed for large-scale, analytical data workloads, particularly for data lake and data lakehouse system architectures, according to the iceberg.apache.org website.
What’s the problem being addressed? As businesses and organizations look to scale up data analytics and data lake systems and develop ways to provision AI applications, AI agents and large language models with data, they find themselves hindered by siloed data, scattered across hybrid cloud environments and locked up in databases with incompatible data formats.
Apache Iceberg has quickly become a critical standard for businesses and organizations developing a data lake or data mesh strategy, according to data cloud company Snowflake, an Iceberg supporter. It provides the foundation for a unified, flexible data architecture that promises interoperability, performance and ease of use.
Iceberg offers features such as schema evolution, time travel and hidden partitioning, enabling reliable and efficient data management across different query engines (including Spark, Trino, Flink and others.)
Apache Iceberg is supported by just about every leading vendor in the big data space including Amazon Web Services, Cloudera, Databricks, Google Cloud, Oracle, Qlik, Snowflake and others.
Apache Iceberg is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. Apache Iceberg v3 Table Specification was ratified by the Iceberg community this past spring.
Blender
Blender is a free and open-source 3D animation software suite that can be used to create animation video, video games and even interactive applications.
Blender provides tools for a range of tasks including 3D modeling, animation visual effects and more, according to the blender.org website that describes the software as “a powerful tool used by individuals and studios alike.”
Key features and capabilities include 3D modeling, animation and rigging, rendering, simulation, video editing, motion tracking and compositing. (Rendering is the compute-intensive process of converting a 3D model into animation.)
Blender 4.4, released on March 18, offers improved animation workflow, better modeling capabilities and new sculpt brush tools.
Blender has been around for 30 years – version 1.0 launched in January 1995. But the software is having its moment in the spotlight: Blender was used as the rendering tool in the creation of the highly acclaimed animated feature “Flow” that won both the Academy Award: Best Animated Feature Film and Golden Globe: Best Motion Picture – Animated award earlier this year.
Blender is owned by its contributors and is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
Budibase
Budibase is an open-source, low-code platform for creating business applications and automated workflows that its proponents say saves development engineers hundreds of hours with features such as pre-built components, integrations with external data sources, and automation capabilities.
Budibase simplifies and accelerates the development of internal business applications, including forms, administrative panels and client portals, used within a company or organization to streamline workflows and manage data, according to the budabase.com website. It’s seen as being particularly useful for building CRUD (create, read, update, delete) applications.
Budibase is developed by Budibase, which was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
A free edition of Budibase is offered while the company also offers commercial premium and enterprise editions, for monthly fees, with more functionality and support services. While each package has its own license, according to GitHub, Budibase can be considered “to be GPLv3 licensed overall.”
Eidolon AI
There’s nothing hotter in the IT industry right now than AI agents. So it’s no surprise that Eidolon AI, an open-source platform designed to simplify the development and deployment of AI agents within enterprise environments, is getting noticed.
Eidolon AI provides a modular, pluggable agent SDK (software development kit) for building agentic applications and a built-in HTTP server for agent deployment, “enabling developers to efficiently create agent-based applications,” according to the eidolonai.com website.
Eidolon AI is designed to treat AI agents as services—a concept that facilitates the creation of complex AI systems with multiple interacting agents. The platform’s modular architecture allows for easy component swapping, according to eidolanai.com, making it possible to customize agents with different large language models (LLMs), RAG (retrieval augmented generation) implementations, and other tools without extensive rewrites.
The system also offers pre-built agents. In addition to the built-in HTTP server, agents can be directly deployed to Kubernetes.
Eidolon AI is available under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.
MCP Toolbox for Databases
With development of AI applications, agents and other software happening so rapidly, a growing problem is how best to integrate these new AI systems with other IT systems and data sources.
One increasingly popular answer is Model Text Protocol (MCP), an open standard developed by Anthropic for connecting AI applications, including agents and chatbots, with external tools and data sources.
MCP Toolbox for Databases is an open-source MCP server that allows developers to easily and safely connect AI systems and their large language models to structured data repositories usingh a standardized protocol, eliminating the need to develop custom integrations.
With MCP Toolbox for Databases, AI applications and agents can be linked to a range of SQL databases, including PostgreSQL and MySQL, to access data for operational and analytical tasks.
Previously known as Gen AI Toolbox for Databases, MCP Toolbox for Databases was developed by Google, which now makes it available under the Apache 2.0 open-source license. It is available through GitHub where it has been riding high on the website’s trending list.
MindsDB
MindsDB is an AI data automation server that connects and unifies enterprise data, allowing people, AI agents and applications to ask questions of large-scale, distributed data sources.
MindsDB includes a federated query engine that works with structured and unstructured data across scattered databases, data warehouses, SaaS applications and other data sources, according to the MindsDB website.
In May MindsDB, the San Francisco-based company that develops the software, unveiled a new open-source AI chat interface for the MindsDB software. The addition “enables users to interact with connected databases and knowledge bases using natural language” by merging semantic understanding and SQL querying into a single experience, according to the company.
MindsDB is available under the open-source MIT license, according to GitHub, while the MindsDB Core component specifically uses the Elastic License 2.0.
Mistral Devstral
Devstral is an open-source language model that is purpose built for developing AI agentic applications.
Unveiled on May 21, Devstral is the result of a collaborative effort between Mistral AI, one of the industry’s leading AI model developers, and All Hands AI, a startup that offers tools that automate routine developer tasks for building AI agents.
Devstral is based on Mistral-Small-3.1. One of the biggest advantages of Devstral is its lightweight design – it operates with just 24 billion parameters. The model is capable of operating on a single Nvidia RTX 4090 GPU and can run on a laptop computer.
Another key capability: Devstral can process substantial amounts of code and instructions at a time, according to a DigitalOcean review, allowing it to handle complex problems with large codebases.
Devstral is designed to act as a full software engineering agent, optimized for integration into agentic frameworks like OpenHands, SWE-Agent and OpenDevin. The model also has a 128k context window. All this means that Devstral is capable of such tasks as navigating large codebases, resolving complicated issues and generating code, according to Mistral.
Devstral is available under the Apache 2.0 license.
OpenNebula
OpenNebula is an open-source cloud management and edge computing platform for creating and managing private, public and hybrid cloud systems, according to the opennebula.io website.
The OpenNebula software provides a unified way to manage virtualized infrastructure, containerized applications and serverless computing systems. It supports both traditional virtual machines and LXC containers and can be used to build and operate infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds. Key features include multi-tenancy, automatic provisioning and elasticity.
OpenNebula was first released in 2008. The OpenNebula core is developed by OpenNebula Systems, headquartered in Madrid, Spain, with a U.S. office in Burlington, Mass. and a development lab in Brno, Czech Republic.
OpenNebula is getting a lot of looks these days given the turbulence in the virtualization arena sparked by Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. OpenNebula is seen as a possible alternative to VMware, along with Red Hat OpenStack, Apache CloudStack, Nutanix, Proxmox and others. OpenNebula is also positioning itself as a leading open-source platform for building multi-tenant AI factories.
OpenNebula Systems even revamped its Partner Connect Program, announced in November, with an eye towards recruiting VMware partners who are looking for VMware alternatives.
The Community Edition of OpenNebula, available under the Apache License 2.0, is a fully featured edition of the software that is updated every six months and made available through the OpenNebula Communty Forum. (A commercial Enterprise Edition, with additional features and support, is available for a subscription fee from OpenNebula Systems.)
Information about OpenNebula is also available through GitHub. The 6.10 Series is the current long-term support edition of OpenNebula. Version 6.10.4, a maintenance release, became available on June 3 while the 6.99.90 development release became available on June 24.
OpenNebula Systems released OpenNebula 7.0 “Phoenix” on July 3. Key additions to the new release include enhanced storage capabilities and expanded backup support, improved capacity planning, foundational support for AI- and GPU-accelerated workloads, improved hybrid cloud provisioning and new support for the ARM architecture.
PostgreSQL Database
PostgreSQL is another open-source software product that’s been around for a while but has been getting a lot of recent attention.
EDB has been making news with its PostgreSQL-based EDB Postgres AI flagship database offering, for example. Databricks’ new Lakebase software, introduced in June, is based on the PostgreSQL technology the company acquired when it bought database startup Neon earlier this year for $1 billion. Also in June, AI and data cloud platform giant Snowflake struck a deal to buy Crunchy Data, a provider of PostgreSQL database software.
PostgreSQL is a powerful object-relational database engine with a broad range of features and capabilities including extensibility and scalability, cross-platform compatibility and object-relational support. While it is primarily used for heavy-duty, high-volume transaction processing applications—the database supports the ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability) standard for guaranteeing the integrity and reliability of database transactions—it is also sometimes used for complex data warehouse and analytics tasks.
PostgreSQL got its start at the University of California, Berkeley in 1986 as a research project to improve the earlier Ingres database, according to postgresql.org, the website of the Postgres community.
On May 8 updates to all supported versions of the database were released including PostgreSQL 17.5, 16.9, 15.13, 14.18 and 13.21. PostgreSQL is available through the Postgresql.org website under the PostgreSQL License, a liberal open-source license similar to the BSD or MIT licenses.
Rasa
Rasa is an open-source conversational AI platform for building, testing and deploying next-level text- and voice-based chatbots and virtual assistants.
The software blends a conversational AI engine with the Rasa Studio no-code user interface, according to the Rasa.com website. It includes a machine learning framework to automate text- and voice-based conversations, according to the Rasa GitHub page.
Rasa allows users to build contextual assistants that work with Slack, Facebook Messenger, Webex Teams, the Microsoft Bot Framework, Twilio and more.
Rasa is available under the Apache 2.0 license. In addition to the open-source Rasa core framework, the Rasa company, headquartered in Berlin, Germany, also offers the Rasa X and Rasa Pro commercial products.