Wox is a full-featured plugin-powered launcher that supports file and web searching.




The best open source alternative to Synapse is Wox Launcher. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to Synapse and many of them is open source so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternatives to Synapse are ueli, Ulauncher, Cerebro and Albert.
Wox is a full-featured plugin-powered launcher that supports file and web searching.




Developed with the Electron framework, ueli is the type of tool that adopts simplicity, leaving out any unnecessary options and configuration settings. It creates an icon in the system tray at startup, where it sits silently throughout its runtime, without disturbing you with...







Cerebro is an open source and free electron-based productivity software alternative to Alfred and Spotlight. It is focused on speed and good UI and UX. In most cases you don't even need to open another application, because you can see results right in Cerebro, like google...




Albert is a C++/Qt based desktop agnostic keyboard launcher that helps you to accomplish your workflows in a breeze. Its goals are usability and beauty, performance and extensibility.




GNOME Do allows you to quickly search for many items present on your desktop or the web, and perform useful actions on those items.





Quicksilver is a fast and free macOS productivity application that gives you the power to control your Mac quickly and elegantly.







MaxLauncher is a simple tabbed launcher that was designed to reduce the amount of time to find and run a program. It is capable of creating multiple data files, each of which can have a maximum of 10 tabs. Each tab and button is assigned a key(eg. F1-F10, 0-9, A-Z, etc.



Hotkey-activated desktop toolbar for launching files, folders, and websites, searching online resources, managing notes and reminders, pasting custom text, automating tasks with macros, handling clipboard history, performing calculations, and keeping windows on top.




dmenu is a dynamic menu for X, originally designed for dwm. It manages large numbers of user-defined menu items efficiently.

ASuite is a simple open source portable launcher for Microsoft Windows. Designed to run portable applications, you can start anything runnable (software, documents and other file types) from removable storage media (USB keys, hard drives, iPods, etc.).


Synapse, Kupfer, and Gnome Do are the three leaders in this category.