Why Use SourceForge?

Downloads & Statistics

Our free, managed, global mirror network provides a better experience for your downloaders. And you get access to download statistics to find out who your users are.

• Unlimited bandwidth for Open Source projects
• Extensive worldwide mirror network
• Download statistics over time, by platform, and by region.
• Analytics are completely free, take no time to set up. Learn how and where your software is downloaded.
• Automatic platform detection: Windows, Mac, and Linux users get the right release, and you get the stats!

Open Source Directory

How will anyone know about your project if they can't find it? Your project is added to our Open Source Directory where potential users can browse and search for software.

• Categorize your project by topic, platform, license, etc
• We promote great projects as a staff pick, featured project, or project of the month.
• Users can review and recommend your project.
• Make your project stand out with screenshots and videos.
• Your project page can be shared with Twitter and Facebook.
• All downloads are scanned for malware, and served securely.

Forums, Blogs & Mailing Lists

Discussion forums are a standard tool, and are the communication hub of many projects.

• Subscribe to forums by email or rss
• Reply to forum posts by email
• Project admins can moderate discussion posts
• Spam bot protection
• Allow anonymous posting, only logged in users, or even a specific list of users
• If you prefer, your project can have a traditional mailing list
• Blog tool with threaded discussion
• Set posts to draft mode while working on them
• Full threaded discussion on blog posts, linking to other artifacts, and markdown formatting just like other tools

Integrated Issue Tracking

Issue tracking in SourceForge has been rethought from the ground up. Some of the features we’re particularly proud of are:

• Tickets (and all other SourceForge tools) let you use Markdown for formatting, and attach files.
• You can organize tickets with milestones, custom fields, and labels
• In addition to simple search, an advanced search syntax is available. Favorite searches can be saved for frequent use.
• Threaded discussion on tickets
• Subscribe to tracker updates through email or rss
• Links and backlinks to other artifacts throughout SourceForge (all of our tools have this)

Code Repositories

Of course the heart of your Open Source project is the source code, and this is an area where we really shine.

• Host code with git, Mercurial (hg), or Subversion (svn)
• Browser-based code browsing
• Link commits to tickets and other artifacts
• View color-coded commit diffs
• Forking and merge requests with git and hg
• View commit history as a graph

Documentation

Helping your users use your product is as important as making it in the first place. So we offer several different ways to create your documentation. We start with a wiki, but you can install and use any tools that you want in your project web space.

• Make wiki pages with markdown, attachments, threaded discussion, artifact linking
• Syntax highlighting for code snippets
• Browse wiki pages by name or tags
• Custom wiki macros make common tasks easier

And, it’s Open Source

And, as if all of that wasn’t enough, the SourceForge platform runs on Apache Allura which itself is Open Source! You can download it, host your own forge, and make enhancements to the code. We would love to have you help contribute to the Allura platform.

Since 1999, thousands of projects have chosen SourceForge to host not just their source code, but also their project communities. You'll be in great company.

• Apache OpenOffice
• PortableApps
• KeePass