What is the Beta Radar?
Before a new version of an open-source app ships to everyone, it usually spends a few weeks as a beta or release candidate: a test build published on GitHub so that curious users can try the upcoming features early and report bugs. These test builds are easy to miss — they are not announced everywhere, and most news sites only cover the final releases. This page fixes that. We track up to 100 well-known free and open-source projects — browsers, messengers, media tools, self-hosted servers, developer tools and utilities — and show their latest public beta at a glance, newest first, together with the current stable version for comparison.
What counts as a beta?
A beta is any version a project publishes on GitHub and explicitly marks as a
pre-release: tags like beta, rc (release candidate),
alpha, preview, canary or nightly.
Some projects publish a test build every week, others only before a big release. A
beta is feature-complete but not fully polished — expect rough edges, occasional
crashes and settings that move around between builds. Betas older than twelve months
are not shown, so everything on this page is genuinely recent.
Should you install beta versions?
It depends on what the app does for you. Fine for trying: browsers like Brave Beta, editors like Zed or Lapce, media players and desktop utilities — if the app breaks, you can reinstall the stable version. Think twice before: self-hosted servers such as Nextcloud, Gitea or Immich — a beta on a live server can mean broken sync, corrupted databases or a downgrade path that does not exist. And never install a beta of a password manager or messenger on your only device. Two simple rules: keep a backup before upgrading, and read the release notes — every card on this page links straight to the changelog.
How fresh is this data?
The list is collected automatically every morning (around 08:00 in Central European time) when the site rebuilds, and again after every content update. The data arrives as a small ready-made file from our own server — so it loads instantly and is never blocked by GitHub's rate limits. Each card shows the beta tag, when it was published, the project category and the current stable version, so you can see at a glance how far ahead of the stable channel a project currently is.
Reading each card
The bold name links to the beta release page on GitHub, where you will find the
changelog and download files. The tag (for example v1.12.34-rc.1) is the
version identifier, and the date tells you how fresh the beta is. The
Stable line shows the latest full release of the same project — if the beta
and stable tags are close, the new version is nearly ready. Use the category chips to
narrow the list, or search for a specific project.