Web development requires the use of several softwares. From imaging, designing, coding to usability testing and deployment, several softwares come into use regularly to create the most beautiful and useful websites. These softwares are often pretty expensive and not-so-flexible. Enter open source. Open source softwares are fast becoming preferred alternatives to these popular web development tools. Not only because they come cheaper or mostly free but also because you can actually have the source codes and modify them as per your requirement. So here’s our list of 43 must have open source, free softwares for web developers to beat the cost and go Open Source!

Code Editors

1. Amaya: It is the W3C’s web editor used to create and update documents directly on the web.
2. Aptana: It is a free, cross platform Javascript based development environment for developing Ajax applications. It also includes a Javascript debugger for troubleshooting other than code assists on Javascript, HTML, CSS and FTP/SFTP support.
3. BlueFish: It is a powerful editor for programmers / designers for writing scripts and programming codes. Supports many programming and markup languages, and it focuses on editing dynamic and interactive websites.
4. Eclipse: This software framework is written primarily in Java. In its default form it is a Java IDE, consisting of the Java Development Tools (JDT) and compiler (ECJ).
5. jEdit: They say it’s a “Programmer’s Text Editor” and so it is. It is one of the finest code editor for matured users with a large developers community behind it.
6. KompoZer: This one is an extremely easy-to-use complete web authoring software with a powerful WYSIWYG editor for non-technical users.
7. Nvu: This one is a perfect alternative for Dreamweaver and FrontPage. Makes it extremely easy for non-technical people to create attractive websites in a snap.
8. Quanta Plus: A stable and feature-rich web development environment.

Modelling Tools

9. ArgoUML: It is the leading open source UML modeling tool and includes support for all standard UML 1.4 diagrams.
10. Dia: Roughly inspired by “Visio”, the commercial Windows program, Dia can be used for various diagrams with special objects to help draw entity relationship diagrams, UML diagrams, flowcharts, network diagrams, and many more.
11. StarUML: StarUML is an open source project to develop fast, flexible, extensible, featureful, and freely-available UML/MDA platform running on Win32 platform.

File Transfers

12. Cyberduck: This FTP and SFTP browser has an easy-to-use interface, intergration with external editors and support for Mac OS X system technologies such as Spotlight, Bonjour, the Keychain and AppleScript.
13. FileZilla: One of the most popular open source file transfer protocol solution where both client and server are available.
14. FireFTP: FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP servers.
15. WinSCP: This open source SFTP and FTP client for Windows also offers basic file manager other than the normal secure file transfer between client and server. It uses Secure Shell (SSH) and supports, in addition to Secure FTP, also legacy SCP protocol.

Code Documentors

16. Javadoc: This tool is used for generating API documentation in HTML format from doc comments in source code. It can only be downloaded as a part of the Java 2 SDK.
17. JsDoc Toolkit: Based on the JSDoc project, this is an application, written in JavaScript, for automatically generating template-formatted, multi-page HTML (or XML, JSON, or any other text-based) documentation from commented JavaScript source code.
18. PHPDoc: Written in PHP, it is an adaptation of the Javadoc to the PHP world. It offers you a way to generate an API documentation of objectoriented and procedural code with certain markup in your source.
19. phpDocumentor: It is the current standard auto-documentation tool for the php language.

Usability & General Testing

20. BrowserShots: This is an extremely useful tool to check your design’s cross browser compatibility. It basically gives you screenshots of how your website looks in various browsers.
21. BrowsrCamp: This tool offers you to test your websites on MacOSX browsers.
22. DBMonster: This tool generates random test data and puts it into SQL database. It helps to test how an application can deal with large database.
23. Feng-GUI: They say it’s Feng Shui for GUIs. Rightly so as the tool offers heatmap service for your websites and images. The ViewFinder Heatmap service, is an artificial intelligence service which simulates human visual attention and creates an attention heatmap.
24. Xenu’s Link Sleuth: This tool checks Web sites for broken links. Link verification is done on “normal” links, images, frames, plug-ins, backgrounds, local image maps, style sheets, scripts and java applets. It displays a continously updated list of URLs which you can sort by different criteria. A report can be produced at any time.

Image Editing

25. Blender: You won’t need 3D Studio Max no longer. Blender is an equally powerful, 3D content creation suite that’s free and sure to give it’s expensive counterparts a run for their money. If you visit their site, be sure to check out their gallery.
26. GIMP: The GNU Image Manipulation Program is the most popular alternative to Photoshop. It doesn’t surely have all the functionality of Photoshop, but surely good enough for a free replacement.
27. GraphicsMagick: This is an image processing system with a robust and efficient collection of tools and libraries which support reading, writing, and manipulating an image in over 88 major formats including important formats like DPX, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PNG, PDF, PNM, and TIFF.
28. ImageMagick: It is is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (over 100) including DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. You can use it to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bezier curves.
29. Inkscape: It is an open source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
30. Karbon: It is a vector drawing application with an user interface that is easy to use, highly customizable and extensible making it a great application for users starting to explore the world of vector graphics as well as for artists wanting to create breathtaking vector art.
31. Krita: It is a creative application for raster images that helps you to create from scratch or work with existing images. It supports most graphics tablets out of the box.
32. Paint.NET: Free image and photo editing software for Windows. It has an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools.
33. Pencil: You can use this tool to create traditional hand-drawn animation (cartoon) using both bitmap and vector graphics.
34. Skencil: This one is a free vector drawing application that runs on GNU/Linux and other UNIX compatible systems. It is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes.
35. XnView: XnView is software to view and convert graphic files, apparently really simple to use and supports more than 400 graphics formats.

Color Matching & Sampling

36. Agave Colorscheme: A simple GNOME desktop application hat allows you to generate a variety of colorschemes from a single starting color.
37. Color Cop: It is a multi-purpose color picker for web designers and programmers. It features an eyedropper, magnifier, variable magnification levels and much more.

CSS

38. CSSED: It is a small developer editor and validator, that tries to ease the CSS editing  and features syntax highlighting, syntax validation, MDI notebook based interface, quick CSS properties and values insertion, auto-completion and dialog-based insertion of CSS complex values.
39. CSSTidy: It is an open source CSS parser and optimizer.  As opposed to most other CSS parsers, no regular expressions are used and thus CSSTidy has full CSS2 support and a higher reliability.

Miscellaneous

40. Beautify PHP: This program tries to reformat and beautify PHP source code files automatically.
41. PHP Accelerator: The ionCube PHP Accelerator is an easily installed PHP Zend engine extension that provides a PHP cache, and is capable of delivering a substantial acceleration of PHP scripts without requiring any script changes, loss of dynamic content, or other application compromises.
42. DBG – PHP Debugger & Profiler: DBG is a full-featured php debugger. It works on a production and/or development WEB server and allows you debug your scripts locally or remotely, from an IDE or console.
43. PuTTY: It is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator.