Open Source RMM Software: 7 Platforms, 12 Stacks, 60+ Tools

Seven projects deliver full open-source RMM functionality. The rest – and there are dozens marketed under that label – only handle monitoring. No remote access, no patching, no scripting.

Below is the reference architecture that emerges when you combine every documented community stack, from the OpenFrame mapping (130+ MSPs deployed) to individual setups shared across Reddit r/msp, r/sysadmin, and GitHub.

You don't need all of this. Most MSPs start with TacticalRMM + one or two additions and expand as gaps become obvious.

Below is every tool in detail.

Standalone Open-Source RMM Platforms

Here's what qualifies as a full open-source RMM.

TacticalRMM

TacticalRMM is the foundation of nearly every community-built open-source MSP stack. Built with Django, Vue, and Go, it covers endpoint monitoring, alerting, remote access (via embedded MeshCentral), Windows patch management, scripting in PowerShell, Bash, and Python, asset inventory, and reporting. The project has ~4,200 GitHub stars, 50+ contributors, and an active Discord community.

The v0.20 release cycle (late 2025) added SSO, session management for administrators, bulk script execution with custom field updates, and a separate Global Keystore with granular permissions.

The origin story says a lot about where the project came from – one MSP operator, frustrated with the commercial tools, building an RMM on nights and weekends that now underpins open-source stacks across hundreds of deployments.

The project's documentation quality rivals commercial products, and that community issue response times typically range from hours to days for critical problems – with members often providing workarounds before official patches land. That's a strong signal of community health.

The caveats: TacticalRMM's license is source-available, not OSI-approved open source. It restricts SaaS reselling. Code-signed agents require a $50/month GitHub sponsorship. Windows support is strongest – Linux and macOS agents exist but aren't as mature. For production use, plan on 4GB RAM, 4 CPU cores, and 50GB storage at minimum; larger deployments (1,000+ agents) need 8GB RAM or more.

MeshCentral

MeshCentral (~6,200 stars, Apache 2.0) is the gold standard for self-hosted remote access. It provides web-based remote desktop, terminal, file management, Intel AMT support, 2FA, session recording, and device group management. It's the backbone of TacticalRMM's remote desktop capability, but it also works well as a standalone lightweight RMM for organizations that mostly need remote access with some device management.

Where it falls short: no native patch management, no advanced scripting automation. If remote access is your primary gap and you don't need full RMM orchestration, MeshCentral on its own can cover a lot of ground.

NetLock RMM

Built by 0x101 Cyber Security in C#/Blazor (~270 stars, AGPL-3.0), NetLock launched in 2024–2025 with monitoring (CPU, RAM, disk, services, custom sensors), alerting across Email, Teams, Telegram, and ntfy.sh, scripting in PowerShell, Bash, and Zsh, Microsoft Defender management, asset inventory, and policy management. It runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS and deploys via Docker/Kubernetes with a one-click installer.

The gap: no built-in GUI remote desktop – remote shell only. You'll need to pair it with MeshCentral or RustDesk for full remote support. Still early-stage (the star count reflects that), but the feature set is broad for a project that's less than two years old.

OpenUEM

OpenUEM (~57 stars, Go/HTMX, Apache 2.0) launched in 2025 and its creator openly notes it could also be called "OpenRMM." It covers asset inventory, remote assistance via VNC/RDP from the browser, software deployment through Winget, Flatpak, and Homebrew, Windows Update monitoring, antivirus status tracking, and profile-based automation. Won SourceForge's Rising Star recognition in January 2026. Remote code execution and role-based access control are still under development.

The Rest of the Field

OpenRPort (community fork of RPort, Go, MIT) picked up where RPort left off after RealVNC acquired and closed-sourced it in September 2023. Provides SSH, RDP, and VNC access from the browser, TCP/UDP tunneling, basic monitoring, scripting, and inventory. Maintained by the community but smaller than the original project.

Medulla RMM (~36 stars, Python/XMPP, GPL) is a French-origin project that's more capable than its star count suggests. It covers the full device lifecycle: remote access, asset inventory, software deployment, OS imaging, backup, compliance management, and GLPI integration. Complex to set up, small international community, but functionally comprehensive.

Theopenem (C#/.NET, GPL) focuses on Windows endpoint management: software deployment (MSI, EXE, MSP), OS imaging/cloning, inventory, Windows Update management, power management, printer management, and scripting. Windows-only. More endpoint management suite than monitoring platform, but fills a real gap for MSPs with Windows-heavy environments.

Two more worth tracking: Endar (Go, alpha stage) takes a compliance-focused approach with validation and enforcement scripts but can't yet scale beyond small deployments. OpenRMM was intended as an open-source RMM but development moved to a private repository – effectively abandoned.

Combination Stacks MSPs Actually Run

No single open-source tool fully replaces a commercial RMM. The community consensus across Reddit r/msp, r/sysadmin, GitHub, and MSP forums is that 3–6 tools combined gets you there. Here are the documented stacks with real deployments behind them.

The OpenFrame Mapping

Documented by Flamingo team, with 130+ MSPs deployed. This mapping covers 155 commercial vendors across 19 categories with open-source replacements. The core RMM stack: TacticalRMM (replaces ConnectWise Automate/Datto/Kaseya), RustDesk or MeshCentral (replaces ScreenConnect/TeamViewer), Wazuh (replaces SentinelOne/CrowdStrike for SIEM), LibreNMS or Zabbix (network monitoring), Odoo (replaces ConnectWise Manage for PSA), and BookStack (replaces IT Glue for documentation). MSPs running this stack report 30–50% software cost reduction.

The SecureTokens Production Stack

One of the few confirmed production deployments with published numbers. CEO Stephen Garriques reported that switching to TacticalRMM + Wazuh cut licensing costs while eliminating vendor lock-in. Lean and opinionated – just two core tools rather than trying to replicate every feature of a commercial suite.

Watch: Secure Tokens Case Study

TacticalRMM + Zabbix + Grafana

The most commonly recommended "deep monitoring" stack in community discussions. TacticalRMM handles endpoint management, scripting, and patching. Zabbix provides enterprise-grade infrastructure monitoring with auto-remediation via remote command execution. Grafana delivers real-time NOC-style dashboards. A dedicated Zabbix template for TacticalRMM data exists on GitHub, and pre-configured Grafana dashboards that pull from TacticalRMM's PostgreSQL database are maintained by the community.

This is the stack to consider if your existing monitoring feels shallow – if you're getting alerts but not the infrastructure-level visibility that lets you catch problems before they become tickets.

TacticalRMM + RustDesk

This stack replaces MeshCentral with RustDesk's self-hosted relay server for remote desktop. RustDesk has a more modern feel and 109,000+ GitHub stars, which signals where community momentum is heading. A dedicated integration exists on GitHub (vegetable8/TRMM-RustDesk-Integration). The trade-off: you lose MeshCentral's native iframe integration with TacticalRMM, which means switching between windows for remote sessions. And RustDesk's licensing is split – the community server is AGPL, but enterprise features like LDAP and the web console require proprietary Server Pro.

The "MSP Nerd" Startup Stack

Designed specifically for new MSPs getting off the ground (GitHub vantzs/msptools, 35 stars): TacticalRMM + MeshCentral for RMM, Passbolt for password management, Theopenem for software deployment and imaging, Diagrams.net for network diagrams, NetBox for IP address management, Chocolatey + ProGet for Windows package management, PingCastle for Active Directory security auditing, and UVDesk for helpdesk ticketing. It's the most prescriptive stack available – useful if you don't want to evaluate every category yourself.

The Component Toolkit

If you're building a stack piece by piece – or filling gaps in an existing setup – here's what's available, organized by function.

Monitoring and Alerting

These tools provide the "RM" half of RMM. The ones that matter most for MSPs also offer auto-remediation.

Zabbix (~5,500 stars, GPL) is the most RMM-complete monitoring platform that isn't technically an RMM. Agent-based and agentless monitoring, full alerting, remote command execution for auto-remediation, custom scripting, built-in reports with SLA tracking, and auto-discovery. Supports Linux, Windows, macOS, BSD. Version 7.4 is actively maintained.

Wazuh (~14,900 stars, GPL) started as security monitoring but has become a core component of most open-source MSP stacks. Endpoint security monitoring, file integrity monitoring, vulnerability detection, active response (automated remediation scripts triggered by events), and compliance reporting for PCI, HIPAA, and GDPR. Agent-based across Windows, Linux, and macOS.

Prometheus + Grafana (63,200 + 66,000 stars) is the cloud-native monitoring standard. Prometheus collects metrics and handles alerting; Grafana visualizes everything. No built-in remediation – you'll need Ansible, Rundeck, or StackStorm for management actions. Best fit for Kubernetes and cloud-native environments.

Netdata (~73,000 stars) delivers per-second real-time monitoring with ML-powered anomaly detection. Single-line install script. No remediation, no scripting, no formal reporting. Good as a supplementary visibility layer, not a primary monitoring tool.

Icinga 2 (~2,200 stars, GPL) modernizes Nagios with a C++ engine, REST API, distributed monitoring, and event commands for auto-remediation. It's plugin-compatible with the entire Nagios ecosystem, which means thousands of existing checks work out of the box. Actively maintained with security releases through early 2026.

Checkmk Raw (~1,700 stars, GPL) ships with 2,000+ pre-configured plugins and auto-discovery that can map your network topology without manual configuration. Agent-based and agentless. The catch: auto-remediation and advanced reporting are limited in the free Raw edition – the full feature set requires the Enterprise license.

LibreNMS (~4,600 stars, GPL) excels at SNMP-based network monitoring with auto-discovery, flexible alerting, and bandwidth/billing reports. If your gap is network visibility rather than endpoint management, this is the strongest open-source option. Forked from Observium's last GPL release and has surpassed it.

Nagios Core (~2,000 stars, GPL) still has the largest plugin ecosystem in the monitoring world, but the UI is notoriously poor – virtually all modern deployments pair it with Grafana for visualization. Version 4.5.11 released January 2026. Worth considering only if you're already invested in Nagios plugins.

A few newer tools worth watching: osquery (~23,200 stars, Apache 2.0) treats endpoints as SQL-queryable databases with 200+ virtual tables – best managed through Fleet (~6,100 stars), which adds a web UI and policy-based alerting. Velociraptor (~3,800 stars) provides deep endpoint forensics using its own query language. Neither is a traditional monitoring tool, but both fill visibility gaps that standard RMMs miss.

Remote Access

MeshCentral remains the default for TacticalRMM integration – full web-based remote desktop, terminal, file management, and session recording under Apache 2.0.

RustDesk (~109,000 stars) has explosive adoption as a self-hosted TeamViewer alternative. Cross-platform with P2P encryption and NAT traversal. The catch: the community server is AGPL and feature-limited. Enterprise features like LDAP, web console, and address book management require the proprietary Server Pro at $0.10/device/month. A TacticalRMM + RustDesk integration exists on GitHub, but you lose MeshCentral's native iframe integration.

Apache Guacamole (~4,500 stars, Apache 2.0) provides clientless browser-based remote desktop supporting RDP, VNC, SSH, Telnet, and Kubernetes. No client software needed – pure HTML5. Best for internal/LAN access or behind VPN.

Remotely (~5,000 stars, GPL-3.0) is built with .NET 8/Blazor and provides remote control, scripting (PowerShell, Bash, CMD), file transfer, and API webhooks. Designed with MSPs in mind.

Patch Management and Configuration

Ansible (~63,000 stars, GPL-3.0) is the dominant automation framework. Agentless via SSH/WinRM, YAML playbooks, and a massive module library covering OS patching, Chocolatey integration for Windows software, configuration management, and cloud provisioning. TacticalRMM handles smaller scripting tasks; Ansible handles fleet-wide orchestration.

Foreman + Katello (~2,500 stars) is the most enterprise-grade open-source Linux patch management platform – the upstream for Red Hat Satellite 6. Full lifecycle management with Content Views, lifecycle environments (Dev → QA → Prod), and errata tracking.

Chocolatey (~10,000 stars) is the standard Windows package manager with 9,500+ community packages. TacticalRMM uses it for software deployment. The open-source CLI handles install/update/remove; Business edition ($17+/license/year) adds version sync and auditing. winget (~12,000 stars, MIT) is the emerging native Windows alternative with 8,000+ packages, built into Windows 11.

Asset Inventory and Reporting

GLPI (~5,700 stars, GPLv3) is the most complete open-source ITSM suite: asset management, ITIL helpdesk, hardware and software inventory via GLPI Agent, software deployment, network discovery, and license tracking. Version 11.0 released March 2026. The natural CMDB/ticketing backend for an open-source RMM stack.

Snipe-IT (~13,500 stars, AGPL-3.0) leads for physical asset lifecycle management with check-in/check-out workflows, barcode scanning, license management, and LDAP sync.

NetBox (~19,900 stars, Apache 2.0) is the gold standard for network infrastructure documentation: IPAM, DCIM, racks, circuits, VLANs, and REST + GraphQL API.

Workflow Automation

n8n (~160,000 stars) is the fastest-growing workflow automation tool and the glue that connects open-source RMM stacks. A typical workflow: alert fires in Zabbix → creates a ticket in GLPI → notifies your Slack channel → triggers an Ansible playbook. 400+ integrations.

Semaphore UI (~10,500 stars) provides a lightweight Ansible/Terraform web UI as a single Go binary – the simpler alternative to AWX (~15,100 stars), which is the full open-source Ansible Tower.

What to Watch out for

Open-source RMM isn't a shortcut. Here are the trade-offs you'll actually hit.

Set-up complexity is real. TacticalRMM requires Linux skills to install and maintain. The documentation is thorough – rivals commercial products, actually – but you'll still need someone who's comfortable with Docker, DNS configuration, Let's Encrypt certificates, and PostgreSQL. Adding Zabbix, Wazuh, and GLPI on top means managing four separate services, their databases, their updates, and their interactions. Plan for 1–3 months of reduced productivity during migration – the same timeframe commercial RMM migrations take, but with more hands-on configuration work and less hand-holding from a vendor's onboarding team.

TacticalRMM's licensing has nuance. It's source-available, not OSI-approved open source. You can't resell it as a SaaS offering. Code-signed agents – which you'll want for production deployments where endpoints have security software that flags unsigned executables – require a $50/month GitHub sponsorship. That's a fraction of commercial RMM licensing, but it's not zero. And it's a dependency on a single project's continued development, which is a different kind of vendor risk than what you're used to.

Windows-first maturity. TacticalRMM's Windows support is the strongest. Linux and macOS agents are functional but less mature. If you're managing a mixed-OS environment, expect to supplement with OS-specific tools – Foreman or Uyuni for Linux lifecycle management, for example. This isn't a dealbreaker, but it does add complexity to your stack if you're managing beyond Windows endpoints.

No SLA on community support. You'll get help on Discord, GitHub issues, and Reddit. Some of it will be faster and more knowledgeable than commercial vendor support – the TacticalRMM community is notably active, and issue response times often range from hours to days for critical problems. But there's no guaranteed response time, no account manager to escalate to, and no one to blame when something breaks at 2 AM on a Saturday. If your compliance requirements mandate vendor SLAs, this is a hard constraint.

Integration labor is the hidden cost. Commercial RMMs handle the glue between monitoring, ticketing, patching, and reporting. With an open-source stack, you're building those connections yourself – usually through n8n workflows, API scripts, or custom Ansible playbooks. That's labor hours. Factor it into your total cost calculation honestly, not optimistically.

Dead ends to avoid. Several formerly popular projects are abandoned or closing down: Spacewalk hit end-of-life in May 2020 (use Uyuni or Foreman instead), RPort was closed-sourced by RealVNC in September 2023 (the OpenRPort fork continues but with less momentum), and Puppet open-source is deprecated as of 2025. Terraform switched to a Business Source License – use OpenTofu if you need open-source IaC.

How to decide if open-source RMM fits your MSP

You're a strong fit if you have someone on your team comfortable with Linux administration, you're managing 50+ endpoints (enough for the time investment to pay off), and your current RMM costs are a real line item you'd like to reduce or control. MSPs with in-house scripting skills get the most out of TacticalRMM's automation capabilities. If you're already writing PowerShell scripts to work around your current RMM's limitations, that energy translates directly.

You're a weaker fit if you're managing fewer than 20 endpoints, or your current RMM is working well and costs aren't a concern.

Start small. Don't rip out your commercial RMM and replace it overnight. Set up TacticalRMM alongside your existing tools. Deploy agents to a subset of endpoints – maybe a single client, or your internal machines. Run both in parallel for 30–60 days and compare the alerting, the remote access experience, the scripting workflow, and the reporting. You'll learn where the open-source stack covers your needs and where the gaps are before you're committed.

Pick your battles. Maybe you keep your commercial RMM for now but switch remote access to MeshCentral or RustDesk – cutting a ScreenConnect or TeamViewer bill in the process. Maybe you add Wazuh for security monitoring alongside whatever you're already running, because your current SIEM costs are the real pain point. The modular nature of open-source tools means you can swap individual components without rebuilding everything.

Do the real math. Commercial RMM licensing at $4–5/endpoint/month across 500 endpoints is $24,000–30,000/year. An open-source stack running on a $100–200/month VPS with $50/month for TacticalRMM signed agents is $1,800–3,000/year in hard costs. Add the labor: plan for 40–80 hours of initial set-up time (more if you're adding Zabbix, Wazuh, and GLPI to the stack) and 2–5 hours per week of ongoing maintenance. The OpenMSP community reports 30–50% software cost reduction across the full stack. Your numbers will depend on your current spending, your team's technical capacity, and how many of those maintenance hours would've been spent managing your commercial tools anyway.

Consider the non-financial upside. Vendor lock-in isn't just about money – it's about what happens when your RMM vendor gets acquired, changes their API, kills a feature you depend on, or forces a platform migration. With an open-source stack, the code doesn't disappear. The community doesn't shut down because a PE firm decided to consolidate. Your agents don't stop working because someone in another company's finance department decided to change the pricing model.

The category is growing. NetLock RMM and OpenUEM both launched in 2024–2025, which means the standalone open-source RMM category is expanding beyond just TacticalRMM. The OpenMSP community now has 30+ MSPs running open-source stacks in production. The question is whether your team has the capacity to take advantage of them – and if the honest answer is "not yet, but we're watching," that's a fine place to start.