Best Automation open-source projects

OSSU Computer Science Curriculum is a GitHub-hosted list at ossu/computer-science that sequences free, third-party university and MOOC courses into a full computer science education. It groups coursework into Intro CS, Core CS (eight required subject areas), Advanced CS electives, and a peer-evaluated Final Project, with each course annotated by duration, weekly effort, and prerequisites. The README frames it as an alternative to a CS degree, not a shortcut: it follows the CS 2013 curricular guidelines and expects the learner to supply their own structure and motivation.

trekhleb/javascript-algorithms is a GitHub repository of JavaScript implementations of well-known algorithms and data structures under an MIT license. Every entry gets a dedicated README explaining it, and the collection is cross-referenced by data structure, by algorithm topic, and by algorithmic paradigm such as backtracking or divide and conquer.

You Don't Know JS Yet is Kyle Simpson's book series at getify/You-Dont-Know-JS. The README lists Get Started and Scope & Closures as finished second-edition titles, an ebook called The Unbooks holding draft chapters on Objects & Classes and Types & Grammar, and two titles marked canceled, Sync & Async and ES.Next & Beyond. Every chapter is readable in the repository, and per the README, the series is closed to new outside contributions.

Microsoft PowerToys is a free, open-source bundle of standalone Windows utilities Microsoft maintains directly on GitHub. Each of the 30-plus tools handles one narrow job, from window layouts to batch file renaming, and can be switched on or off independently from a single settings app.

Node.js is a JavaScript runtime maintained at nodejs/node, open-source and built to run across Linux, macOS, and Windows, available on GitHub. The README documents three release types, Current, LTS, and Nightly, an open governance model backed by the OpenJS Foundation, and a checksum-and-signature process for verifying downloaded binaries.

Puppeteer is a JavaScript library maintained at puppeteer/puppeteer that gives Node.js code a high-level API for controlling Chrome or Firefox, talking to the browser through the Chrome DevTools Protocol or the newer WebDriver BiDi standard. Installing the `puppeteer` package fetches a compatible Chrome build automatically, while `puppeteer-core` skips that download for setups managing their own binary. The README also points to chrome-devtools-mcp, a Puppeteer-based MCP server, and to an experimental WebMCP API.

Bun JavaScript runtime is an all-in-one toolkit for JavaScript and TypeScript that ships as a single executable and doubles as a bundler, test runner, and npm-compatible package manager. Written in Rust (per the README) and built on the JavaScriptCore engine, it aims to be a drop-in replacement for Node.js with faster startup and lower memory use.

Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that puts local control and privacy first. It runs on your own hardware — a Raspberry Pi or a local server — and ties thousands of smart-home devices together, so the logic that runs your house lives in your house, not on someone else's cloud.

RuView is a WiFi sensing platform: ESP32 firmware, a Python library, pretrained CSI models, and a MetaHarness CLI that together turn ordinary WiFi signals into presence detection, contactless vital signs, and early-stage pose estimation without a camera.

Paperclip is a self-hosted Node.js server and React dashboard that orchestrates a team of AI agents — human and bot — under one org chart, complete with goals, budgets, approval gates, and an audit trail, so a company built out of agents runs like a business instead of a pile of disconnected scripts.

Anime.js is a JavaScript animation library maintained at juliangarnier/anime, animating CSS styles, SVG shapes, DOM attributes, and plain JavaScript objects through one animate() function. The README documents a V4 rewrite that moved to ES module imports, along with a migration guide for developers still running V3, and states the project is released under the MIT license.

uBlock Origin is a free, open-source content blocker for Chromium and Firefox that blocks ads, trackers, coin miners, popups, and malware sites by default using EasyList, EasyPrivacy, and several other curated filter lists. It's built for low CPU and memory use, and Firefox is the browser the project itself points to as where it works best — Chrome's Manifest V2 sunset in 2026 is the thing to watch if you're on Chromium.

Scrapy is an open-source Python framework hosted at scrapy/scrapy, built for crawling websites and extracting structured data. The README describes it as cross-platform, requiring Python 3.10 or newer, maintained by Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) together with outside contributors, and distributed via both PyPI and conda-forge under a BSD-3-Clause license.

draw.io Desktop is the official Electron build of jgraph/drawio, the open-source diagramming editor, packaged as a desktop application for Windows, macOS, and Linux under the Apache-2.0 license. The README frames the app's isolation from the network, aside from a disableable update check, as its central design goal rather than a list of features beyond the web editor.

MediaCrawler is a Python scraper built on Playwright that collects public posts, comments, and creator data from seven Chinese social platforms — Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, Weibo, Tieba, and Zhihu — by riding an already logged-in browser session instead of decrypting each platform's signing algorithm.

PDF.js renders PDF files directly in the browser via HTML5 canvas, using a web worker so the parsing step stays off the main thread. Mozilla maintains it under Apache-2.0, and it ships as both a standalone library and the default PDF viewer built into Firefox.

DefinitelyTyped is a pnpm monorepo hosting thousands of `.d.ts` packages published to npm under `@types/<package>`, so you install them like `npm install --save-dev @types/react` and the compiler picks them up automatically. The catch is the two-year TypeScript support window — older TS versions can still get older package versions via npm dist-tags, but there's no guarantee you'll find what you need for legacy projects. When contributing, you generate package scaffolding with `dts-gen`, write a `<package>-tests.ts` file that gets type-checked (not run), and validate with `pnpm test <package>` which runs dtslint including the newer `attw` checks for package.json `exports`/`type` alignment. The repo is large enough that Microsoft recommends a blobless clone, and PRs go through a self-service bot workflow rather than manual review — which keeps throughput high but means you're navigating tooling docs more than talking to humans. If the library you want typed is on npm, authors are asked to bundle their own declarations instead of contributing here.

Huginn is a self-hosted Ruby on Rails platform for building 'Agents' that read the web, watch for events, and act on your behalf, wired together as a directed graph on a server you control instead of a vendor's cloud.

Day.js is a lightweight JavaScript date library that solves the Moment.js footprint problem without asking you to rewrite your existing code. It delivers the same API surface as Moment.js—parsing, formatting, manipulation, and querying—in a 2kB bundle, and it stays immutable by design, which prevents a whole class of bugs that Moment's mutability enables. The plugin system lets you add features like advanced formatting on demand rather than bloating your build, and locales load the same way. The trade-off is that while the core is mature, some plugins are less battle-tested than Moment's ecosystem, so for obscure edge cases you may need to dig into the source. If you're starting fresh and size matters, it's an easy choice; if you're migrating a large Moment codebase, the API familiarity makes the port mostly mechanical but still time-consuming.

Apache Airflow is a Python-based platform for programmatically authoring, scheduling, and monitoring workflows. It defines workflows as code (DAGs), which makes them maintainable, versionable, testable, and collaborative. The platform features a scheduler that executes tasks on an array of workers, following specified dependencies, complemented by command-line utilities and a user interface for visualizing pipelines, monitoring progress, and troubleshooting. Airflow is designed for workflows that are largely static and change slowly, finding use in traditional data pipelines, machine learning orchestration (training, retraining, evaluation, deployment), and coordinating steps in AI pipelines. It operates on principles of dynamic, extensible, and flexible pipeline definitions, utilizing Jinja templating, and recommends idempotent tasks that pass metadata via XCom rather than large data volumes directly.

Paperclip is a self-hosted Node.js server and React dashboard that orchestrates a team of AI agents — human and bot — under one org chart, complete with goals, budgets, approval gates, and an audit trail, so a company built out of agents runs like a business instead of a pile of disconnected scripts.

ToolJet is an open-source low-code platform for building internal tools, dashboards, and workflows. You drag components onto a canvas, wire them to databases and APIs, and self-host the result with Docker or Kubernetes. It's the community foundation under the paid ToolJet AI product.

Yoji is an Electron-based local AI desktop companion that combines file automation, voice interaction, and a hormone-driven emotional system into a single desktop app. The agent manages files, executes scripts, and extends via MCP. A Live2D cat-girl avatar responds to your emotional state and time of day. The trade-off for this much capability is a complex setup requiring manual model configuration — you bring your own DeepSeek or Qwen API key. Voice features are macOS-only, and the project's 709 GitHub stars reflect a small but active user base rather than mainstream adoption.

cibuildwheel is the pypa/cibuildwheel command-line tool for building and testing Python wheels across macOS, Windows, and Linux from inside a CI pipeline. The README lists support for GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, CircleCI, and GitLab CI, targeting CPython 3.9 through 3.15, PyPy, and GraalPy, plus manylinux, musllinux, Pyodide (WebAssembly), Android, and iOS wheels. It repairs each wheel with auditwheel, delocate, or delvewheel depending on platform and reinstalls it to run your test suite before anything ships.

Home Assistant Apps (home-assistant/addons) is the official repository of Docker-based extensions for Home Assistant, renamed from "add-ons." It packages supporting services — an MQTT broker, a MariaDB database, Zigbee and Z-Wave hardware bridges, SSL certificate handling, and more — as apps installable through the Home Assistant frontend, licensed under Apache-2.0.

GitHub Agentic Workflows (`gh-aw`) is a GitHub CLI extension for defining AI-driven repository automation in Markdown with YAML frontmatter, compiled by the `gh aw compile` command into standard GitHub Actions workflows. It targets work that needs judgment calls rather than fixed rules — triaging an issue, reviewing a pull request, or drafting a repo report — running through GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Google Gemini, or Pi as the underlying engine, with sandboxed, read-only-by-default execution and writes gated through `safe-outputs`.

CDS is OVH's open-source continuous delivery and DevOps automation platform, written in Go and hosted at github.com/ovh/cds under the BSD-3-Clause license. It organizes CI/CD work around CDS Workflows, which chain pipelines together with joins and forks so a single build-and-deploy pipeline can back many applications instead of one pipeline per app. The README describes a multi-component system — API, workers, hatcheries for auto-scaling, and a cdsctl CLI that mirrors the full web UI — and says CDS has run in production at OVH since 2015.

Dagu is an open-source workflow orchestrator from dagucloud/dagu, written in Go and released under the GPL-3.0 license. It ships as one self-hosted executable with a built-in Web UI and no external database, defining pipelines as DAGs in YAML and running steps as shell commands, containers, SSH jobs, or AI coding-agent CLIs through a built-in MCP server.

Conversational RPA SDK for Chatbot Makers. Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/7q8NBZbQzt

Web Extension for saving a faithful copy of a complete web page in a single HTML file

Python version of the Playwright testing and automation library.

ChatterBot is a machine learning, conversational dialog engine for creating chat bots

Apache DolphinScheduler is the modern data orchestration platform. Agile to create high performance workflow with low-code

📊 APIs for web automation, testing, and bypassing bot-detection.

AutoHotkey - macro-creation and automation-oriented scripting utility for Windows.

Custom Selenium Chromedriver | Zero-Config | Passes ALL bot mitigation systems (like Distil / Imperva/ Datadadome / CloudFlare IUAM)

Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Python to build reliable crawlers. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or GPTs. Download HTML, PDF, JPG, PNG, and other files from websites. Works with Parsel, BeautifulSoup, Playwright, and raw HTTP. Both headful and headless mode. With proxy rotation.

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Chef Infra, a powerful automation platform that transforms infrastructure into code automating how infrastructure is configured, deployed and managed across any environment, at any scale

Automated Binance trading bot with pluggable strategies, historical backtesting, and a live dashboard