In simple English
This tool searches public websites and open databases to find potential customers and their email addresses. It scores each email to show whether it is confirmed, built from a pattern, or just a guess. You can organize your contacts, track sales deals, and run automated email sequences from your own computer. It stores all your data in a local file on your hard drive, so nothing goes to a cloud server. It costs nothing to run and does not require paid subscriptions for data.
What it is
A local lead generation and cold email command-line tool with a built-in web dashboard. It pulls contact data from public sources like OpenStreetMap, GitHub, and company websites without needing commercial API keys.
What it is good for
Solo builders and small teams who want to find customer contacts and run outbound email campaigns without paying for expensive sales software like Apollo or ZoomInfo.
- Runs entirely on your local machine using a SQLite (a lightweight database stored in a single file on your computer) file for data storage.
- Categorizes every email address by evidence level so you know which contacts are safe to email.
- Includes a full dashboard with sales pipeline tracking, task lists, and automated email sequences.
- Requires comfort with the command line or Node/Python environments to install and set up.
- Cold email deliverability depends entirely on your own SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, the standard technology used to send emails between servers) configuration and mailbox health.
- Uses the AGPL-3.0 licence (a software licence that requires you to share your code if you modify it and run it as a network service), which places restrictions on commercial hosting.
Apollo, Hunter, and ZoomInfo
n8n
- n8n-io/n8n208k stars
Automates workflows and data movement like OpenLeads, but without built-in lead discovery or sales pipelines.
- twentyhq/twenty59k stars
An open-source CRM (Customer Relationship Management system that tracks contacts and sales deals) alternative, though it lacks built-in public lead scraping.
- Notifuse/notifuse2.2k stars
Self-hosted newsletters, automations and transactional email, built on a delivery service you supply.
- krayin/laravel-crm24k stars
A self-hosted record of customers, leads and sales, built on the Laravel PHP framework.
- nikoksr/notify3.9k stars
A Go library that sends the same message to many messaging services through one call.
pipx install "openleads[all]" openleads web