Open Source Alternatives
Open Source Robotics Alternatives to Foxglove
Robotics observability platform that records, visualizes, and searches robot data. Reads MCAP, ROS 1, and ROS 2 natively, with 20+ visualization panels and a hosted archive you can query across a whole fleet.
Foxglove is a trademark of its respective owner.
Updated Oct 2026
What you gain
- ✓Nobody can close the source again the way Foxglove closed Studio 1.x in February 2024
- ✓No $42 per developer seat and $20 per device stacking up as your robot fleet grows
- ✓Recordings and the search index sit on your own storage without buying the Enterprise tier
- ✓No 10 GB storage ceiling or 1 hour query-time cap the way the free plan enforces it
What you give up
- △No hosted archive that indexes recordings by device, time, and topic for fast query across terabytes
- △No Fleet device management or remote teleop for robots already in the field
- △No webhooks or REST API for wiring recordings into CI and data pipelines
- △No 20+ maintained panels covering diagnostics aggregation, GPS and GeoJSON maps, and state transitions in one app
Switching Cost
Foxglove does not hold your data hostage. MCAP is an open format Foxglove itself maintains as open source, so recordings move to Rerun or Dalaran without a converter, but layouts, custom panels, user scripts, and the indexed archive do not. A solo developer visualizing bags locally can switch in an afternoon; a team on Pro with custom extensions and a fleet feeding the data platform should budget two to four weeks, most of it rebuilding ingest and indexing rather than the viewer. The hidden cost is search: querying terabytes of past recordings by device, time, and topic has no mature open source equal, and teams find that out the week after they cancel.
| Lichtblick | Rerun | Dalaran | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Overlap | 75% | 55% | 55% |
| Migration | trivial | moderate | moderate |
| License | Mozilla Public License 2.0 | Apache-2.0 / MIT (dual) | Apache License 2.0 |
| Best for | Everyone | Everyone | Small teams |
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Drop-in Replacements
Ranked by feature coverage
Lichtblick
5875% coverageLichtblick is an integrated visualization and diagnosis tool for robotics, available in your browser or as a desktop app on Linux, Windows, and macOS.
Lichtblick is what happened after Foxglove closed its studio. Bosch forked the last open source version and kept building on it.
Rerun
8055% coverageVisualize, query, and stream to train on multimodal robotics data.
Rerun is a visual debugger for anything with sensors. Log images, point clouds, 3D transforms, joint states, and time series from Python, Rust, or C++, and the viewer replays them on one shared timeline so you can scrub to the exact frame where the robot decided a wall was a door.
Dalaran
5555% coverageDalaran: Apache-2.0, robotics-first visualization and data infrastructure for multimodal time-series. ROS 2 native, reads existing .rrd recordings. A hard fork of Rerun.
Dalaran is robotics visualization that speaks ROS 2 natively. Log topics, LiDAR, camera streams, and transforms, then get synchronized 3D playback and dataframe export.
Building Blocks
Foxglove is a platform. It bundles multiple capabilities into one subscription. These tools each cover one piece. Teams often assemble 2–3 of them instead of paying for the full suite.