Open Source RMM Software: 30+ Tools and 5 Stacks for MSPs

Updated: 8 September, 2026

Open source RMM software gets recommended constantly and deployed far less often, because the gap between "free to download" and "running in production across 30 client tenants" is where the real cost sits. Seven projects aim at the whole RMM job rather than one slice of it, and only Tactical RMM covers all four core functions; the rest, and there are dozens marketed under that label, handle monitoring alone. Getting the category right matters more than getting the tool right. The full open source MSP software directory covers all ten categories with verified maintenance status.

TL;DR

• Definition. Self-hosted remote monitoring and management you run on your own infrastructure, under a license you can modify.
• Only one full platform. Tactical RMM is the single open source tool built for the whole RMM job, and it still delegates remote access to MeshCentral.
• Everything else composes. Monitoring, remote access and patching, assembled by you.
• Real cost. Engineering time, not licensing: 40-80 hours of setup.
• Multi-tenancy. The weakest spot in the category.

What Counts as Open Source RMM, and What Doesn't

RMM as MSPs use the term means four things running together: agent-based monitoring and alerting, remote access to the endpoint, scripted remediation, and patch management. Commercial platforms ship all four in one console with multi-tenant separation on top.

Almost nothing in open source does all four. The category splits into monitoring engines that watch infrastructure and say nothing about patching, and remote access gateways that connect you to a machine and monitor nothing.

That is the trade. You are not swapping one product for a cheaper product, you are swapping a product for a stack you assemble and maintain. The licensing saving is real and the engineering cost is also real, and which one dominates depends entirely on whether you have someone who enjoys running Postgres.

Watch the license too. "Free tier" and "open source" get used interchangeably in vendor marketing, and they are different things. A community edition capped at 25 devices with closed source is free, not open. Everything listed below is under a recognized open source license, with one flagged exception.

The Reference Architecture

Below is the 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 do not need all of this. A common starting point is TacticalRMM plus one or two additions, expanding as gaps become obvious.

Full Open Source RMM Platforms

These are the projects that attempt the whole RMM job rather than one slice of it.

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 an embedded MeshCentral instance, Windows patch management, scripting in PowerShell, Bash, and Python, asset inventory, and reporting. The project has ~4,200 GitHub stars and 50+ contributors. It also runs 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 hundreds of deployments.

The caveats matter. TacticalRMM's license is source-available, not OSI-approved open source, and it restricts SaaS reselling. Code-signed agents require a $50/month GitHub sponsorship. Windows support is strongest, while Linux and macOS agents exist but are less mature. For production use, plan on 4GB RAM, 4 CPU cores, and 50GB storage at minimum; deployments above 1,000 agents need 8GB RAM or more.

MeshCentral

MeshCentral (~6,200 stars, Apache 2.0) is the reference implementation for self-hosted remote access. It provides web-based remote desktop, terminal, file management, Intel AMT support, 2FA, session recording, and device group management, with agents for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It is the backbone of TacticalRMM's remote desktop capability and also works standalone. The project is maintained largely by Ylian Saint-Hilaire.

Where it falls short: no native patch management and no advanced scripting automation. If remote access is your primary gap, see the full MeshCentral deployment and security guide for sizing and setup details. Our MeshCentral review for MSPs covers how it performs as the remote-access layer.

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.

It aims at the same job as Tactical RMM with a stronger multi-tenant and whitelabel story, which is the gap MSPs hit first. The gap on its side: no built-in GUI remote desktop, remote shell only, so pair it with MeshCentral or RustDesk. The project is under two years old and the community is small, so documentation is thinner than the mature projects. Worth a lab deployment rather than a production migration in 2026.

OpenUEM

OpenUEM (~57 stars, Go/HTMX, Apache 2.0) launched in 2025 and its creator 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. It 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. It provides SSH, RDP, and VNC access from the browser, TCP/UDP tunneling, basic monitoring, scripting, and inventory. It is maintained by the community but smaller than the original project.

Medulla RMM (~36 stars, Python/XMPP, GPL) is a French-origin project 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, functionally comprehensive.

Theopenem (C#/.NET, GPL) focuses on Windows endpoint management: software deployment (MSI, EXE, MSP), OS imaging and cloning, inventory, Windows Update management, power management, printer management, and scripting. Windows-only, and more an endpoint management suite than a monitoring platform.

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

Monitoring Engines

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 is not technically an RMM. Agent-based and agentless collection, autodiscovery, templating, full alerting, remote command execution for auto-remediation, custom scripting, and built-in SLA reporting, scaling to tens of thousands of monitored items. What it takes in return is a learning curve built on SNMP and template management. Our Zabbix alternatives comparison covers where it fits against lighter options.

Checkmk Raw Edition (~1,700 stars, GPL) is the most approachable of the serious monitoring engines. Autodiscovery does most of the setup work Zabbix makes you do by hand, mapping network topology without manual configuration, and it ships with 2,000+ pre-configured plugins. The Raw edition drops the enterprise features around scale, auto-remediation, and reporting, but for a few hundred hosts it holds up.

Nagios Core (~2,000 stars, GPL) is the project everything else in this category descends from: stable, exhaustively documented, and dated in ways that show immediately in the interface. Its value in 2026 is the plugin ecosystem, two decades of community checks for hardware and services nothing else supports. Version 4.5.11 released January 2026. Teams choosing it today are usually maintaining an existing install or need one obscure check. Our Nagios alternatives breakdown narrows that half of the decision.

Icinga 2 (~2,200 stars, GPL) is a Nagios fork that kept the check logic and rebuilt everything around it: a C++ engine, a modern configuration language, a proper REST API, native distributed monitoring, and event commands for auto-remediation. It stays plugin-compatible with the Nagios ecosystem, so thousands of existing checks work out of the box. It stays actively developed with security releases through early 2026, and is a common choice in European MSP stacks.

LibreNMS (~4,600 stars, GPL) is focused hard on network devices. Autodiscovery over SNMP, CDP, LLDP, and ARP maps a switch estate with very little configuration, and the alerting and billing modules are useful for MSPs charging on bandwidth. Server and endpoint monitoring is thinner than Zabbix or Checkmk. It was forked from Observium's last GPL release and has since surpassed it.

Pandora FMS Community Edition (GPL) is unusually broad: infrastructure monitoring, log collection, inventory, and remote control in one product, with no agent cap on the Community Edition. Breadth costs depth, so each module is less developed than a dedicated tool, but it covers more ground per deployment than anything else here.

Wazuh (~14,900 stars, GPL) started as security monitoring and became a core component of open-source MSP stacks. Endpoint security monitoring, file integrity monitoring, vulnerability detection, and compliance reporting for PCI, HIPAA, and GDPR. Active response runs automated remediation scripts triggered by events.

Prometheus + Grafana (63,200 + 66,000 stars) is the cloud-native monitoring standard. Prometheus collects metrics and handles alerting. Grafana handles visualization. No built-in remediation, so pair it with Ansible, Rundeck, or StackStorm for management actions.

Netdata (~73,000 stars) delivers per-second real-time monitoring with ML-powered anomaly detection and a single-line install. No remediation, no scripting, no formal reporting, so treat it as a supplementary visibility layer.

osquery (~23,200 stars, Apache 2.0) treats endpoints as SQL-queryable databases with 200+ virtual tables. Fleet (MIT) is the management layer that makes osquery usable, turning its SQL interface into fleet-wide queries, policy checks, and reporting across Windows, macOS, and Linux, with MDM features layered on. It is the best answer here for "tell me every machine with an outdated browser," and no answer at all for remote control or patch deployment. It is increasingly the compliance evidence layer in open source stacks. Velociraptor (~3,800 stars) covers deep endpoint forensics using its own query language.

Remote Access

RustDesk (~109,000 stars, AGPL) is the closest open source equivalent to TeamViewer. Self-host the relay server and you get remote desktop and file transfer with no per-technician licensing and no session limits, and setup is quick compared with everything else here. The catch is licensing: the community server is AGPL and feature-limited, while LDAP, the web console, and address book management require the proprietary Server Pro at $0.10/device/month. A TacticalRMM integration exists on GitHub, but you lose MeshCentral's native iframe integration. Its Trustpilot reviews skew negative on the hosted service, which is worth weighing given that the reason to pick it is running your own relay. See our RustDesk alternatives for a full breakdown.

Apache Guacamole (~4,500 stars, Apache 2.0) provides clientless browser-based remote desktop supporting RDP, VNC, SSH, Telnet, and Kubernetes. Nothing needs installing on the technician side, which makes it useful as a jump host into client networks and as a way to give a client controlled access to one server without a VPN.

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

Patch Management, Inventory, and Automation

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

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

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

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, with version 11.0 released March 2026. It is the natural CMDB and 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, and LDAP sync. NetBox (~19,900 stars, Apache 2.0) is the reference tool for network infrastructure documentation, covering IPAM, DCIM, racks, circuits, VLANs, and a REST plus GraphQL API.

n8n (~160,000 stars) is the glue that connects open-source RMM stacks, with 400+ integrations. A typical workflow: an alert fires in Zabbix, creates a ticket in GLPI, notifies a Slack channel, and triggers an Ansible playbook. Semaphore UI (~10,500 stars) provides a lightweight Ansible and Terraform web UI as a single Go binary, the simpler alternative to AWX (~15,100 stars).

Review Platform Ratings at a Glance

Many of these projects have no vendor behind them, so review-site coverage is patchy. That absence is information: a tool with no G2 listing is usually one that nobody sells, which is often the point.

Ratings pulled August 2026 and they move, so check before quoting them to a client.

Three Ways To Assemble a Working Stack

Since only one project covers the whole job, the practical question is which combination covers it for your mix of clients. Three assemblies come up repeatedly, and they map to three different kinds of MSP.

The single platform route is Tactical RMM on its own, with the bundled MeshCentral handling remote access. One thing to install, one thing to patch, one thing to back up. It suits a smaller MSP with a Windows-heavy client base and a technician comfortable on Linux. The ceiling is multi-tenancy: the client and site hierarchy works, but it was not designed for 40 tenants each wanting their own branded reporting.

The monitoring-first route pairs a serious engine with a separate access gateway. Zabbix or Checkmk Raw for the watching, Apache Guacamole or RustDesk for reaching the machine, and your existing scripting for remediation. This suits MSPs whose clients run real infrastructure, servers and network gear rather than laptops, because the monitoring depth is where the value sits and endpoint patching matters less.

The compliance-first route puts Fleet at the centre. Fleet answers what is installed and whether it meets policy across every operating system, LibreNMS or Zabbix watches the network underneath, and remote access sits alongside. This suits MSPs selling into regulated clients, where the evidence trail matters more than the remote hands.

What none of these give you is a ticket. Every assembly here ends at the point where a technician needs to log the work, bill it, and tie it to a contract, which is the seam where open source RMM most often hands back to a commercial platform.

Five Stacks With Real Deployments Behind Them

No single open-source tool fully replaces a commercial RMM, and the community consensus across Reddit r/msp, r/sysadmin, GitHub, and MSP forums is that 3-6 tools combined gets you there. The assemblies above are patterns. These are documented setups with MSPs running them in production.

The OpenFrame Mapping

Documented by the Flamingo team, with 130+ MSPs deployed. This mapping covers 155 commercial vendors across 19 categories with open-source replacements. The core RMM stack: TacticalRMM in place of ConnectWise Automate, Datto, or Kaseya; RustDesk or MeshCentral in place of ScreenConnect or TeamViewer; Wazuh for SIEM; LibreNMS or Zabbix for network monitoring; Odoo for PSA; and BookStack in place of IT Glue. 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 plus Wazuh cut licensing costs. The same move removed the vendor lock-in that prompted the migration. Lean and opinionated, just two core tools rather than replicating every feature of a commercial suite. If you are on Datto RMM, here is a full migration walkthrough.

TacticalRMM + Zabbix + Grafana

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

Consider this one if your existing monitoring feels shallow, and you are getting alerts without the infrastructure-level visibility that catches problems like slow DNS lookups before they become tickets.

TacticalRMM + RustDesk

This stack replaces MeshCentral with RustDesk's self-hosted relay server for remote desktop, and a dedicated integration exists on GitHub (vegetable8/TRMM-RustDesk-Integration). The trade-off is losing MeshCentral's native iframe integration with TacticalRMM, which means switching between windows for remote sessions. If RustDesk is on your shortlist, see our RustDesk review.

The "MSP Nerd" Startup Stack

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

What a Tactical RMM Deployment Costs in Real Time

The licensing is free. Here is what is not.

Standing up Tactical RMM properly means a Linux host, Postgres, Redis, NATS, an embedded MeshCentral instance, three DNS records, and valid certificates on all of them. The documented install script handles most of it on a clean Debian or Ubuntu box, and a technician who knows Linux gets to a working install in an afternoon. A technician who does not will spend a week learning why the agent will not check in.

Then comes the part that does not appear in any install guide. Agent deployment across existing client fleets. Rebuilding the alert thresholds your commercial RMM shipped with defaults for. Writing the scripts that used to be a script library. Patch approval workflows. Backup and restore for the server itself, which is now a single point of failure you own rather than a vendor SLA.

Budget the migration in weeks of technician time, not hours, and run it in parallel with the outgoing platform rather than cutting over. MSPs reporting good outcomes on this migration moved one client at a time over a quarter. The ones reporting bad outcomes tried to move everything over a weekend.

Ongoing, expect a few hours a month of maintenance: updates, certificate renewals, occasional agent troubleshooting. That is the recurring cost that replaces the invoice, and it is the number to compare against when someone tells you open source RMM is free.

What To Watch Out For

Set-up complexity is the cost. TacticalRMM requires Linux skills to install and maintain. The documentation is thorough, but you still need someone 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.

TacticalRMM's licensing has nuance. It is source-available, not OSI-approved, and you cannot resell it as a SaaS offering. Code-signed agents, which you want for production deployments where endpoints run security software that flags unsigned executables, require a $50/month GitHub sponsorship. That is a fraction of commercial RMM licensing, but it is not zero, and it is a dependency on a single project's continued development.

Windows-first maturity. Linux and macOS agents are functional but less mature than the Windows agent. In a mixed-OS environment, expect to supplement with OS-specific tools such as Foreman or Uyuni for Linux lifecycle management.

No SLA on community support. You get help on Discord, GitHub issues, and Reddit, and TacticalRMM's community issue response times typically range from hours to days for critical problems, often with workarounds before official patches land. But there is no guaranteed response time and no account manager to escalate to. 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 build those connections yourself, usually through n8n workflows, API scripts, or custom Ansible playbooks. Those are labor hours, and they belong in the cost calculation.

Dead ends to avoid. Spacewalk hit end-of-life in May 2020, so use Uyuni or Foreman instead. RPort was closed-sourced by RealVNC in September 2023, and the OpenRPort fork continues with less momentum. Puppet open-source is deprecated as of 2025, and Terraform switched to a Business Source License, so use OpenTofu if you need open-source IaC.

Where Open Source RMM Stops Paying Off

The arithmetic changes with headcount. At five technicians and 400 endpoints, a week of setup and a few hours a month is cheap against a commercial per-endpoint bill. At 25 technicians and 4,000 endpoints across 40 clients, the multi-tenancy gaps start costing more than the licenses saved, because the workarounds become somebody's actual job.

Two specific limits show up repeatedly. Multi-tenant reporting, where clients want their own branded view and the tool has one global namespace. And PSA integration, where the ticket has to carry the asset, the time, and the contract terms, and no open source RMM talks fluently to a PSA out of the box. Our best RMM tools comparison puts the commercial options side by side on exactly these points.

Worth naming the middle path. OpenFrame is an AI-native all-in-one MSP and IT platform with native PSA included, so the RMM, remote access, and ticketing reference the same asset rather than three integrations pretending to. It is not open source and it is not free. What it offers is the consolidation without the vendor lock-in that made you look at open source in the first place, at pricing that stays predictable as endpoint counts grow.

How To Decide if Open Source RMM Fits Your MSP

You are a strong fit if you have someone comfortable with Linux administration, you are managing 50+ endpoints so the time investment pays off, and your current RMM costs are a line item you want to reduce or control. Teams with in-house scripting skills get the most out of TacticalRMM's automation, and our Tactical RMM review covers the hands-on evaluation. If you are already writing PowerShell to work around your current RMM's limits, that energy translates directly.

You are a weaker fit if you are managing fewer than 20 endpoints, or your current RMM works well and costs are not a concern.

Start small. Set up TacticalRMM alongside your existing tools rather than replacing them overnight. Deploy agents to a subset of endpoints, maybe a single client or your internal machines, then run both in parallel for 30-60 days and compare the alerting, the remote access experience, the scripting workflow, and the reporting.

Pick your battles. You might keep your commercial RMM and switch only remote access to MeshCentral or RustDesk, cutting a ScreenConnect or TeamViewer bill in the process. You might add Wazuh alongside what you already run, because SIEM costs are the real pain point. The modular nature of these tools means you can swap components without rebuilding everything. The lean stack approach applies the same logic to the whole toolchain.

Do the math. Commercial RMM licensing at $4-5/endpoint/month across 500 endpoints is $24,000-30,000/year. An open-source stack on a $100-200/month VPS with $50/month for signed agents is $1,800-3,000/year in hard costs. Add 40-80 hours of initial setup, more if you are adding Zabbix, Wazuh, and GLPI, plus 2-5 hours per week of ongoing maintenance. The OpenMSP community reports 30-50% software cost reduction across the full stack.

Consider the non-financial upside. Vendor lock-in is not just about money, it is 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 does not disappear, and the community does not shut down because a PE firm decided to consolidate.

The category is growing. NetLock RMM and OpenUEM both launched in 2024-2025, which means the standalone open-source RMM category is expanding beyond TacticalRMM alone. The OpenMSP community now has 30+ MSPs running open-source stacks in production.

Choosing open source RMM is choosing to employ the integration work rather than buy it. That is a reasonable trade when you have the skills in house and a defensible one when you do not have the budget. It stops being reasonable the moment the person maintaining the stack becomes the person you cannot afford to lose.

Free software, paid attention. Know which one you are spending.