Web developers are using Dreamweaver for quite a long time. Dreamweaver is a pretty decent application to meet most of the web designing needs. But it also do have some limitations, lack of some features, web developers are looking for open source alternatives for Dreamweaver which has all or most options of it and some additional features.

There are few Dreamweaver alternatives which are good and respected with the features they offer. You may notice that not all the features of Dreamweaver are present in these applications. You can choose an application based on your needs or if you are looking for applications to develop or construct a site. Here are some of the best open source/free application which are close to Dreamweaver in functionality.

Aptana

Web developers with some experience might have come across this application. Aptana leads in web application development and management area. It features Rails IDE, Eclipse plug-in and it a cross-platform open source application which runs on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. You can use Aptana for editing purpose with auto-complete feature save tons of keystrokes. It has support for CSS, HTML, JavaScript and PHP as well.

SeaMonkey

SeaMonkey an application from the house of Mozilla is well known as all-in-one internet application suit. With tons of features built-in and the option to add extra features via plug-in this application makes one of the best choice as a Dreamweaver alternative.

SeaMonkey has got a web-browser, e-mail support, IRC chat, editor and newsgroup and feed client. All these features are more than enough for basic development of site and you can also contribute or download extra plug-in from the SeaMonkey project page. It is an open-source community based internet application suit, everyone can download use this application.

Quanta Plus

This is originally called as Quanta, a web integrated development environment for all major XML-based languages or scripting languages. It is capable of performing handcoding and WYSIWYG design needs. It can be used to fulfill the needs of project management with local and remote projects. It can handle both FTP and KDE KIO slaves file dialog to keep everything transparent so that you can charge your clients according to pages. Hotstuff enables you to transfer templates, toolbars and plug-in effortlessly. Quick preview is possible inside the application using KHTML engine. Add additional features and support via plug-in which is generally KPart plug-in support.

The other tools which are lacking in the above said application are graphic tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. There are many other free alternatives available for these tools as well like Gimp, Inkscape and many more here.