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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

mkmaciso automates the download-and-package process for macOS installer images, pulling straight from Apple's update servers and outputting either an ISO (for VMs) or DMG (for bootable USB). The core script runs on any Mac with macOS 10.9 or newer; if you lack one, free GitHub Actions runners handle the build. Version coverage stretches from OS X Lion (10.7) to macOS 26 Tahoe. The tool earns its keep for Proxmox, QEMU, and VMware users who need a macOS VM without Apple hardware, and for anyone building Hackintosh boot media on Linux or Windows. The tradeoff is real: Intel Macs are the tested path, Apple Silicon support is experimental, and the workflow requires CI etiquette (don't spam free runners).

Kestra is an open-source orchestration and scheduling platform. You define workflows as declarative YAML — with a UI to help — and it runs them event-driven or on a schedule across data pipelines, AI tasks, and infrastructure jobs.

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.

Hatchet is an orchestration engine written in Go that coordinates background jobs, AI agents, and durable workflows for applications written in Python, TypeScript, Go, and Ruby. The README says it prioritizes correctness, reliability, horizontal scalability, and observability. Self-hosting is straightforward because both the task runtime and the observability system share a Postgres backend — no separate broker or time-series store required. Beyond queuing and automatic retries, Hatchet supports cron jobs, event-based triggering, DAGs for data pipelines, and scale controls like priority ordering, rate limiting, and fair scheduling. The platform runs as the managed Hatchet Cloud service or can be self-hosted; the README notes load-testing to 10k tasks/second while acknowledging higher resource use than non-durable queues.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

📊 Python APIs for Web Automation, E2E Testing, and Data Scraping. CDP Mode bypasses bot-detection and handles CAPTCHAs. Includes a Stealth mode for Playwright.

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

webhook is a lightweight incoming webhook server to run shell commands

Next-gen browser and mobile automation test framework for Node.js

:zap: The most powerful PowerShell module for fine-tuning Windows 10 & Windows 11 on GitHub

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.