Artificial intelligence is becoming an increasingly common feature of modern software. AI has changed the way people interact with applications. Coding is a striking example - even people with no experience can create programs or web applications, and terms like “vibe coding” have become popular. The use of AI is not limited to coding, though. Many vendors now offer AI-powered products and services for email, search, browsers, e-commerce, CMSs and website builders, and even password managers.
While the use of AI continues to grow, many people still prefer a more traditional, non-AI approach. They value simplicity and privacy and want greater control over the tools they use. If you are among them, we have put together a selection of AI-free tools that you can use to manage your web presence.
This web stack includes both self-hosted applications that require a web hosting account and desktop programs that you can use as alternatives to their often more popular, AI-powered counterparts.
The AI-free web stack
We have selected the applications below based on their popularity and our personal preferences. Of course, you can use any other non-AI application you prefer. Almost all of the tools on this list either do not use artificial intelligence by default or do not use it at all. For those that do offer AI features, they can be disabled, allowing you to use the applications without worrying about whether the company behind them respects your choice not to have your data used for AI.
We are not affiliated with any of the applications or platforms listed below, nor do we endorse any of them. The links to their websites are not affiliate links. We selected these applications and platforms based on our personal experience and preferences.
Site creation
The most important part of a web presence is the website, so we will start with a tool for building one. AI-powered applications have made website creation easier than ever, but if you want full control over the content and functionality of your site, there are still plenty of options.
Top pick: WordPress
WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) for building websites. It powers a significant share of all websites on the web. It has a huge ecosystem of free and paid themes and plugins, giving you plenty of flexibility to build and customize your site.
While you can add plugins that connect WordPress to popular AI services, the WordPress core, as well as thousands of themes and plugins, can be used without AI. If you are not a fan of the AI hype, WordPress is an excellent choice for building a website in a more traditional way.
Another major advantage of WordPress is its huge community. If you run into an issue, there is a good chance that someone has already encountered it and shared a solution, making it much easier to troubleshoot problems.
The vast selection of themes and plugins allows you to change the look of your website and add a wide range of features with just a few clicks, without relying on AI.
Download | Hosting for WordPress
If you decide to try WordPress, or already have experience building websites with it, take a look at our WordPress-optimized web hosting plans. ICDSoft won a Top Tier Award in ReviewSignal’s WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks!
Alternatives:
ClassicPress
ClassicPress is a fork of WordPress that keeps the classic TinyMCE editor as the default option for creating and editing content. It does not include the Gutenberg editor, which is now the default in WordPress, as its goal is to preserve the original WordPress publishing experience.
ClassicPress 2.x is based on WordPress 6.2 and continues to use the classic editor. The ClassicPress directory also includes a selection of themes and plugins, all of which are AI-free.
Download | Hosting for ClassicPress
Joomla
Another popular content management system that does not use AI in its core. Joomla is a versatile and feature-rich platform that can be used to build almost any type of website. It has a dedicated community, and some members have voiced concerns about the potential loss of originality, creativity, skills, and independence that can come with relying on AI.
Of course, Joomla extensions are available that allow users to generate content using provider-agnostic AI frameworks. Nonetheless, the CMS itself does not use AI by default.
The ICDSoft Website Builder
All our shared hosting plans include a template-based website builder. While you have the option to use an AI prompt to generate a website initially, you can also simply browse a large selection of industry-specific templates and choose one that suits your new project. Managing the website and adding content does not involve artificial intelligence, and the builder remains very easy to use.
The site builder offers a wide range of blocks that you can add and customize to create the pages you need. It also makes it easy to integrate third-party services, such as Cal.com for appointment scheduling, Tawk.to for live chat, Hotjar Analytics, and more. You can also add dozens of optional Elfsight widgets, including Age Verification, Amazon Reviews, TikTok Feed, Job Board, Google Maps, and many others.
ICDSoft Website Builder Hosting and Demo
Emails
Email remains one of the most popular communication channels. It is used for official correspondence, account verification, password resets, and much more. This is why many people are wary of AI features being added to desktop and webmail clients.
Top pick (desktop app): Thunderbird
Thunderbird is a free, open-source email client developed by Mozilla, a company with strong focus on privacy. It offers intuitive management of email, calendars, and contacts. You can use a unified inbox or manage separate accounts, tag and organize messages, and customize the application with additional themes and add-ons.
The classic versions of Firefox and Thunderbird are still at the heart of what Mozilla does. These remain our biggest areas of investment — and neither of these products will force you to use AI.
Mark Surman, Mozilla President
The Thunderbird team explicitly states on its website that it does not use user data to train AI models, providing additional reassurance for people who want to keep their information private and away from AI processing. Thunderbird is cross-platform and available for desktop and mobile devices.
Download (Windows, Linux, MacOS) | Google Play
Top pick (webmail client): Roundcube
Roundcube is a powerful, yet lightweight webmail client that can easily replace a desktop email program. It supports drag-and-drop, sender identities, address books, shared IMAP folders, message import and export, encryption, responsive themes, and more.
Roundcube also supports third-party plugins, making it possible to add features such as calendars, advanced search, and even multiple accounts in a single session with just a few clicks. It does not include any AI-powered features, so your messages are not sent to an external AI platform for processing.
Download | Email hosting with Roundcube
We offer Roundcube with all our hosting plans by default. For your convenience, we have added a powerful calendar, message encryption, and useful features such as folder size information, right-click context menus, and more.
Certain options, such as spam and antivirus protection, are included with our web hosting services and are usually managed through the hosting Control panel. However, they can also be managed directly through Roundcube.
Users who prefer webmail-only access can restrict IMAP access with just a couple of clicks in the Roundcube settings, effectively preventing external email clients from accessing their mailbox.
Alternatives
Betterbird
Betterbird is a fork of Thunderbird that adds numerous features and aims to provide improved bug handling compared with the original application. Its goal is to offer a better user experience for people who are accustomed to managing their email with Thunderbird, while still incorporating Thunderbird's bug fixes. Some of Betterbird's exclusive features include vertical tabs, multi-line message views, tab restoration, IDN support, and more. Like Thunderbird, Betterbird does not use AI features.
Download (Windows, Linux, MacOS)
Mailbird
Mailbird is a modern desktop email client that offers a free plan as well as premium tiers. In addition to standard email features, it includes email tracking, message snoozing, attachment search, and more. Mailbird uses AI for features such as spellchecking and email generation, but these features can be disabled with a couple of clicks, allowing you to use it as a powerful traditional email client. Mailbird can also be integrated with services such as Instagram, Slack, Google Calendar, and more.
Download (Windows, MacOS)
Code editor
The rise of artificial intelligence has significantly changed the way people write code. Software development is among the areas most affected by AI, with some companies laying off thousands of employees and increasingly relying on AI-assisted development and "vibe coding" to build their software products. Yet, there are still plenty of options if you prefer to create and edit code without AI.
Top pick: Notepad++
Notepad++ is a lightweight, AI-free, open-source code editor. It supports more than 80 programming languages with syntax highlighting and is well known for its extensive plugin ecosystem, with hundreds of plugins available through its repository. We selected Notepad++ for its excellent performance and customization options. The project is also notable for using its website and version codenames to draw attention to human rights issues around the world.
Download (Windows)
Alternatives
VSCodium
The name may sound familiar because it closely resembles that of the popular Visual studio Code (VS Code) software, developed by Microsoft.
What sets VSCodium apart is that it is free, open-source software with a strong focus on privacy. It does not include Microsoft's telemetry or Copilot AI, so no AI coding assistant is enabled by default. While VSCodium does not support some proprietary extensions available for VS Code, it remains a great choice if you are looking for a free, open-source, and privacy-focused code editor without built-in AI features.
Download (Windows, Linux, MacOS)
Sublime Text
Sublime Text is a lightweight and fast code editor with a minimalist interface. It handles large files and multiple projects with ease without sacrificing performance. Thousands of plugins are available, allowing you to add features and automate various tasks.
Sublime Text does not require an account or an internet connection to operate. It is distributed as shareware, meaning you can use it for free indefinitely without losing access to any features. A popup will occasionally remind you to purchase a license, but it does not prevent you from continuing to use the application. Sublime Text is suitable for professional and amateur programmers, bloggers, teachers, and students who need to organize large amounts of text, highlight text, or automate repetitive tasks.
Download (Windows, Linux, MacOS)
Version control
If you develop a web application, version control is essential. It allows you to keep track of changes, collaborate with others without accidentally overwriting each other's work, and preserve previous versions of your code in case something goes wrong.
So far, AI has not become a core part of traditional version control systems, although experimental AI-assisted projects are already in development. AI is also making its way into areas such as automatic merging and conflict resolution, as well as semantic version control, which aims to track changes to the meaning of code rather than simply changes to individual lines.
It may only be a matter of time before AI-native version control systems emerge. Version control management platforms, however, are already increasingly incorporating AI features. The systems we have selected here do not rely on AI and are unlikely to do so in the foreseeable future.
Top pick: Git
Git is the industry-standard distributed version control system. It is particularly well suited to software development, but it can also be used to manage websites, documents, and other types of files. It is fast and supported by a huge ecosystem of graphic user interface (GUI) tools for browsing repositories and committing changes, command line tools, and hosting services.
Many Git hosting platforms now offer AI-powered features such as Copilot. However, Git itself does not use AI, and you can use it with AI-free GUI tools such as GitHub Desktop, GitList, and MeGit.
Download (Windows, Linux, MacOS)
Alternatives
Apache Subversion (SVN)
Apache Subversion is the second most popular version control system. It remains the preferred choice for many software companies. Some of its key features include:
- Atomic commits - changes are applied completely or not at all.
- File and directory versioning - SVN tracks changes, renames, moves, and deletions.
- Conflict detection and merging - helps manage simultaneous edits by multiple users.
- Access control - SVN supports user authentication and access permissions.
Similar to Git, SVN can be managed using various GUI tools, including TortoiseSVN, SmartSVN, and others.
Download (Windows, Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD and more)
If you decide to use Git for your next project, it is available with all our hosting plans. We also offer GitList, a web-based repository viewer, through our App Installer.
Analytics
An important part of managing a website is understanding how it performs. Analytics can help identify potential issues, uncover sections and pages that are not performing well, and provide valuable insights into whether a marketing campaign is successful.
Google Analytics is the most widely used analytics platform, but it increasingly relies on AI to detect trends, predict user behavior, identify anomalies, and generate recommendations. Other popular platforms, such as Microsoft Clarity, Adobe Analytics, and Hotjar, also incorporate AI features. If you are uncomfortable with these platforms using your data for AI-related purposes, or simply prefer an analytics solution without AI, take a look at the options below.
Top pick: Matomo
One of the best alternatives to Google Analytics, Matomo can be used as a standalone application or integrated into CMS platforms such as WordPress. It is free and open source, and is built around principles of transparency, independence, security, and reliability.
Matomo allows website owners to see where their visitors come from and how they interact with their websites. It also offers features such as session recordings, heatmaps, goals tracking, A/B testing, retention analysis, paid advertising tracking, and more. If you currently use Google Analytics, switching to Matomo is straightforward, and you can import your historical Google Analytics data.
Alternatives
Plausible
This is a lightweight, yet powerful analytics platform that runs on European infrastructure. Unlike Google Analytics and many other analytics platforms, it does not use AI to analyze your data.
Plausible also does not use cookies or collect personal information, which means that, when configured appropriately, websites using it can generally operate without requiring consent for analytics cookies. The platform displays its core metrics on a single page, without complicated reports or features that many users may never need.
One interesting feature is that Plausible makes the traffic statistics for its own website publicly available. This gives you a real-life example of the information you could see on the Plausible dashboard for your own website.
Search engine
The use of AI in search engines is a controversial development. Many publishers argue that AI-generated summaries can reduce the need for users to click through to websites to find the information they are looking for, potentially affecting publishers' traffic and revenue.
There are also privacy concerns. Some users are uncomfortable with search engines using AI to analyze their queries and search behavior, particularly given that certain search providers have long been criticized for extensive user tracking – even before the rise of generative AI.
For these reasons, if you prefer a more traditional and privacy-focused search experience, it is worth considering a search engine that does not rely on AI.
Top pick: DuckDuckGo No-AI Search
Although DuckDuckGo cannot compete with the largest search engines in terms of market share, it still handles more than 3 billion search queries each month. It recently introduced a separate search page for users who prefer to avoid AI: DuckDuckGo No-AI Search.
The page is both ad-free and AI-free. It does not include AI chat or AI-generated search summaries, and AI-generated images are excluded from the results. This approach provides a more privacy-focused search experience and gives users greater control over how their search queries are processed and what appears in their results.
Alternatives
Startpage
Startpage is a privacy-first search engine that offers several useful features. It blocks price trackers, prevents retargeting ads, provides unprofiled search results, and even allows users to visit websites anonymously. It also does not include AI-powered features, making it a good choice for those who prefer a traditional, privacy-focused search experience.
Mojeek
Mojeek is an alternative search engine that uses its own web crawler and search algorithm to generate results. It explicitly blocks tracking by default and does not use AI to generate or influence its search results. This is why it can provide a significantly different search experience from other search engines.
Email marketing
Despite the rise of instant messaging and video conferencing tools, email remains one of the most effective marketing channels. This is why many businesses continue to rely on email marketing platforms in their day-to-day work. Naturally, many of these platforms have adopted AI for tasks such as content and subject-line generation, email formatting, send-time optimization, data analysis, and more.
While these features can be useful for many users, they can also come with additional costs, produce emails that feel generic or impersonal, and make the overall experience more complicated for those who simply want a straightforward email marketing solution.
Top pick: Listmonk
Listmonk is a modern, self-hosted, open-source application. It is powerful while remaining simple enough for beginners to use. Listmonk supports single and double opt-in mailing lists, as well as multi-threaded, multi-SMTP email queues. Built-in analytics and powerful dynamic templates, which can be edited in a WYSIWYG editor, make it easy to create messages and track campaigns. Listmonk can also be used to send messages through SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and other channels.
Download (Windows, Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD and more)
Alternatives
PhpList
Another open-source application, phpList can be downloaded and installed for free or used as an online service with a fully functional forever-free trial, as well as paid options. It is a good choice if you prefer a long-established email marketing platform. phpList supports double opt-in mailing lists, user aggregation to ensure that subscribers do not receive the same campaign more than once, list segmentation for better targeting and performance, and A/B testing. Another advantage is that members of the core development team often respond directly to support queries.
Keila
Keila is a modern, open-source email marketing platform with a powerful block editor, an easy-to-use form builder, and advanced segmentation. It is available as a Docker image for self-hosting or as a paid online service. Keila takes a privacy-oriented approach and does not collect information that is not strictly necessary for the service. It offers useful automation without relying on AI. For example, contacts can be automatically unsubscribed after a hard bounce or a spam complaint. Keila is a great alternative to popular AI-powered email marketing platforms for users who prefer a simple, privacy-focused solution without AI.
Self-hosted cloud
Cloud storage has become increasingly popular in recent years. It is convenient to access your files from virtually anywhere and on any device without having to rely on physical storage drives. However, privacy is a concern for some users. Popular cloud storage services are operated by large corporations, and some people are uncomfortable with the possibility of third parties accessing their content. Users must also comply with the provider's terms of service, including restrictions on the types of content they can store.
This is where self-hosted cloud applications come in. They can be installed on a virtual server or even on a home computer, effectively turning it into a personal cloud service that gives you greater control over your data and reduces your dependence on large cloud providers.
Top pick: Nextcloud
Nextcloud is one of the most popular personal cloud platforms. Although it offers AI integrations in various forms - including local AI, connections to public models, and an AI assistant - these features must be explicitly enabled. Without them, Nextcloud remains a powerful and flexible platform for managing your data. It offers file storage, sharing and synchronization, personal and group chats, email, calendars, document management, and much more.
Hundreds of additional apps are available through the Nextcloud marketplace, allowing you to expand its functionality even further. Nextcloud server can be self-hosted on your own server, while your files and other data can be accessed through any web browser or the official desktop and mobile clients.
Download | Hosting for Nextcloud
If you want to set up Nextcloud Hub for a small or medium-sized organization, you can explore our high-performance VPS plans. Nextcloud can be installed automatically during the server setup, giving you plenty of system resources for your self-hosted cloud. Your server will remain available 24/7, providing reliable infrastructure for your Nextcloud installation.
Alternatives
ownCloud
Another feature-rich platform, ownCloud allows you to set up your own private cloud. It is similar to Nextcloud in many ways, offering file sharing and synchronization, content collaboration, document management through office integration, email through an additional app, and a calendar.
It is available as a server edition with desktop and mobile apps, allowing users to access and manage their content from virtually any device. In fact, Nextcloud started as a fork of ownCloud in 2016.
ownCloud does not offer built-in chat or video conferencing, however, and its app marketplace is considerably smaller than Nextcloud's. If these features are not important to you, ownCloud remains an excellent choice for a personal cloud. It does not have built-in AI features and offers only a handful of optional AI apps in its marketplace.
Password manager
It can be difficult to keep track of the login credentials for all your accounts, including control panels, website dashboards, and other services. This is where password managers come in. For many users, using a password manager is more secure than storing login credentials in a web browser. These applications can provide encryption, secure sharing, password security audits, alerts, and other useful features.
However, many password managers on the market are increasingly incorporating AI, including all of the most popular ones. AI is used for features such as phishing detection, security recommendations, and other security-related functions. This raises concerns among privacy-conscious users about whether sensitive data, including hashed passwords and other password-related information, could be sent to or processed by AI systems, or potentially exposed unintentionally.
Top pick: Enpass
Enpass is a privacy-focused password manager that does not store your passwords, password hashes or personal information in the cloud. It does not use AI either. It is a traditional, secure, and efficient password manager that allows you to generate, store, and share login credentials using end-to-end encryption.
Enpass does not store your password vault on its own servers, which significantly reduces the risk associated with a breach of the provider's infrastructure. You can, however, synchronize your encrypted data through a cloud storage provider of your choice. The application is available free of charge for desktop users with some limitations, while more extensive use by individuals and businesses is available through subscription plans.
Download (Windows, Linux, MacOS)
Alternatives
KeePassXC
KeePassXC is a cross-platform, feature-rich password manager that simply works. It is free and open source, and allows users to generate and store passwords and SSH keys. Passkeys are also supported through the KeePassXC browser extension. Passwords can be easily imported from many other password managers. For additional security, the KeePassXC database can be configured to require a YubiKey or OnlyKey hardware security key for access.
Download (Windows, Linux, MacOS)
Password Safe
Password Safe is a simple password manager that may look somewhat dated, but it does exactly what it is designed to do: generate and store passwords. In addition to a master password, you can protect the password database with a Yubikey hardware security key.
Password Safe does not support password sharing, but its database can be easily backed up and restored when needed. A portable version is also available, allowing you to carry your encrypted passwords on a USB drive and use it on multiple computers.
Download (Windows, Linux)
Wrap-Up
Artificial intelligence is here to stay. It has already changed the way people write code, manage email and documents, analyze data, and store information. Yet many people still prefer to do things the traditional way, without AI being involved. There are various reasons for this, including concerns about privacy and sharing data with third parties, worries about information stored in the cloud being compromised, and even fear of rapidly evolving technology that many people do not yet fully understand.
Whatever your reasons, we have compiled the list of AI-free software above to give you alternatives and greater control over your web presence. This web stack is by no means exhaustive, and our selections are based on a combination of objective criteria and personal preferences. We hope it provides a useful starting point if you want to manage your web presence without relying on AI and stay out of the AI hype.
