Top 20 ASP.NET Core Open Source Projects in 2023

Open-source projects are useful for getting started and it serves as a good source for architecture reference.
GitHub hosts a number of open-source ASP.NET Core projects. These projects will help you study ASP.NET Core technology in-depth, with numerous sorts of architecture and development techniques.

This article list some of the best open source projects from various categories.

nopCommerce (nopCommerce Public License Version 3.0, 7.1k stars)

Free open-source ecommerce shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC / ASP.NET Core MVC ) with a vast community and a market place full of new features, themes and plugins. It is a popular open-source e-commerce shopping cart application. It is stable and supports several customizations to suit your needs. There are several plugins available to enhance it.

GrandNode (nopCommerce Public License Version 3.0, 1.8k stars)

Multi-platform, free, open source ecommerce shopping cart based on ASP.NET Core 2.1 and MongoDB derived from nopCommerce. GrandNode is one platform that suits various business models. It can successfully empower traditional B2C & B2B stores, helping local brands expand globally.

Visual Studio Code (MIT License, 129k stars)

New type of tool that combines the simplicity of a code editor with what developers need for their core edit-build-debug cycle. Code provides comprehensive editing and debugging support, an extensibility model, and lightweight integration with existing tools.

Visual Studio Community

A fully-featured, extensible, free IDE for creating modern applications for Android, iOS, Windows, as well as web applications and cloud services.

serilog (Apache-2.0 License, 5.2k stars)

Serilog is a diagnostic logging library for .NET applications. It is easy to set up, has a clean API, and runs on all recent .NET platforms. While it’s useful even in the simplest applications, Serilog’s support for structured logging shines when instrumenting complex, distributed, and asynchronous applications and systems.

NLog (BSD-3-Clause License, 5.4k stars)

NLog is a free logging platform for .NET with rich log routing and management capabilities. It makes it easy to produce and manage high-quality logs for your application regardless of its size or complexity. It can process diagnostic messages emitted from any .NET language, augment them with contextual information, format them according to your preference and send them to one or more targets such as file or database.

ML.NET (MIT License, 7.9k stars)

ML.NET is a cross-platform open-source machine learning (ML) framework for .NET.

ML.NET allows developers to easily build, train, deploy, and consume custom models in their .NET applications without requiring prior expertise in developing machine learning models or experience with other programming languages like Python or R. The framework provides data loading from files and databases, enables data transformations, and includes many ML algorithms. With ML.NET, you can train models for a variety of scenarios, like classification, forecasting, and anomaly detection.

MailKit (MIT License, 4.6k stars)

Cross-platform .NET library for IMAP, POP3, and SMTP. MailKit is a cross-platform mail client library built on top of MimeKit.

MimeKit (MIT License, 1.4k stars)

MimeKit is a C# library which may be used for the creation and parsing of messages using the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME), as defined by numerous IETF specifications.

EPPlus (Polyform Noncommercial License 1.0.0, 1.1k stars)

Create advanced Excel spreadsheets using .NET.

npoi (Apache-2.0 License, 4.3k stars)

A .NET library that can read/write Office formats without Microsoft Office installed. No COM+, no interop.

Entity Framework Core (MIT License,11.1k stars)

EF Core is a modern object-database mapper for .NET. It supports LINQ queries, change tracking, updates, and schema migrations. EF Core works with SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, SQLite, Azure Cosmos DB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and other databases through a provider plugin API.

FastReport (MIT License,1.8k stars)

FastReport provides free open source report generator for .NET 6/.NET Core/.NET Framework. You can use the FastReport Open Source in MVC, Web API, console applications. FastReport is written in C# and it is compatible with .NET Standard 2.0 and higher. Extendable FastReport architecture allows creating your own objects, export filters, wizards and DB engines.

HangfireIO (LGPL v3 License,7.4k stars)

Incredibly easy way to perform fire-and-forget, delayed and recurring jobs inside ASP.NET applications. CPU and I/O intensive, long-running and short-running jobs are supported. No Windows Service / Task Scheduler required. Backed by Redis, SQL Server, SQL Azure and MSMQ. Hangfire provides a unified programming model to handle background tasks in a reliable way and run them on shared hosting, dedicated hosting or in cloud.

HtmlSanitizer (MIT License,1.2k stars)

HtmlSanitizer is a .NET library for cleaning HTML fragments and documents from constructs that can lead to XSS attacks. It uses AngleSharp to parse, manipulate, and render HTML and CSS.

Because HtmlSanitizer is based on a robust HTML parser it can also shield you from deliberate or accidental “tag poisoning” where invalid HTML in one fragment can corrupt the whole document leading to broken layout or style.

SignalR Server (Apache-2.0 License, 2.4k stars)

ASP.NET Core SignalR is a new library for ASP.NET Core developers that makes it incredibly simple to add real-time web functionality to your applications. What is “real-time web” functionality? It’s the ability to have your server-side code push content to the connected clients as it happens, in real-time.

IdentityServer (Apache-2.0 License, 8.6k stars)

IdentityServer is a free, open source OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0 framework for ASP.NET Core. Founded and maintained by Dominick Baier and Brock Allen, IdentityServer4 incorporates all the protocol implementations and extensibility points needed to integrate token-based authentication, single-sign-on and API access control in your applications. IdentityServer4 is officially certified by the OpenID Foundation and thus spec-compliant and interoperable. It is part of the .NET Foundation, and operates under their code of conduct. It is licensed under Apache 2 (an OSI approved license).

BotSharp (Apache-2.0 License, 1.3k stars)

BotSharp is an open source machine learning framework for AI Bot platform builder. This project involves natural language understanding, computer vision and audio processing technologies, and aims to promote the development and application of intelligent robot assistants in information systems. Out-of-the-box machine learning algorithms allow ordinary programmers to develop artificial intelligence applications faster and easier.

Umbraco (MIT License, 3.6k stars)

The simple, flexible and friendly ASP.NET CMS used by more than 730.000 websites

ASP.NET Boilerplate (MIT License, 10.2k stars)

ASP.NET Boilerplate is a general purpose application framework especially designed for new modern web applications. It uses already familiar tools and implements best practices around them to provide you a SOLID development experience.

ASP.NET Core Starter Kit (MIT License, 1.1k stars)

ASP.NET Core Starter Kit is a real-world boilerplate and tooling for creating single-page web applications (SPA) oriented towards progressive enhancement design, cross-platform compatability and component-based UI architecture. It is built upon best of breed technologies including .NET Core, Kestrel, EF Core, Babel, Webpack, React, Redux, CSS Modules, React Hot Loader and more. This boilerplate comes in both C# and F# flavors.

Conclusion

Apart from these applications, you can check out some more awesome .NET Core libraries, tools, and frameworks on this GitHub page.

Syncfusion Company also provides Community License to companies and individuals with less than $1 million USD in annual gross revenue and 5 or fewer developers. It includes all the Syncfusion Enterprise Solutions.