There are around sixty tools listed here. Nobody needs sixty. You need about five.
The tags exist to get you from one number to the other. Here is what each one means, so you can filter with some confidence about what you are excluding.
The categories tell you what a tool is
Categories answer the obvious question. Is this a WordPress plugin, a no-code platform, a boilerplate, a scraper, a research tool.
That is useful once you already know what kind of thing you are looking for. It is not much help before then, because a category cannot tell you whether a tool suits you.
The tags tell you whether it suits you
Two separate groups of tags, doing two different jobs.
Group one: how you build
No Code means you assemble it in an interface. Blocks, settings, dropdowns.
WordPress means it is a WordPress plugin or theme, so it inherits the whole ecosystem and the whole maintenance burden.
Vibe Coding means you describe what you want to an AI and it builds it.
Developer means you will be writing or deploying code.
Group two: what you own at the end
Hosted SaaS means the platform runs it and you pay monthly. Stop paying and it goes away.
Self-Hosted means you install it on your own server. Nobody meters you, and backups are your problem.
Own The Code means the source is yours. You bought it and you can rewrite it.
Open Source means the licence itself lets you fork and go.
There is also a pricing group, which is self-explanatory: Free, FreeTrial, LifetimeDeal, PaidOnly.
The rule that surprises people
A tool gets exactly one tag from group one. A WordPress plugin is tagged WordPress and never also No Code, even though most WordPress directory plugins genuinely require no coding.
That looks wrong the first time you see it. Here is the reasoning.
Those four tags are alternative routes, not overlapping attributes. If No Code meant "does not require code," it would land on nearly every tool on the site, and a filter that matches almost everything filters nothing. By keeping them mutually exclusive, clicking No Code returns the tools where clicking in an interface is the whole experience, which is what you meant when you clicked it.
So read group one as "which route is this," not "which adjectives apply."
Group two can stack, and often should
The second group works differently. A tool can legitimately be Self-Hosted and Open Source and offer a Hosted SaaS plan, and several are tagged all three, because all three are true and each one matters to a different reader.
Two distinctions inside this group are worth knowing, because they get conflated constantly:
Self-hosted is not the same as owning the code. A WordPress plugin runs on your server, but you cannot meaningfully change how it works. A boilerplate you bought, you can rewrite entirely. The first is Self-Hosted. The second is both.
Open source is narrower than the marketing suggests. Some tools described everywhere as open source ship under licences that are not: n8n uses the Sustainable Use License, Meilisearch's enterprise edition uses BSL 1.1. Both are free for you to use commercially. Neither lets you resell them. Only tools with a genuinely open licence carry the Open Source tag here, which is why some obvious candidates do not have it.
What is deliberately not tagged
The second group is only applied to tools you actually build on: platforms, plugins, boilerplates, AI builders, and the infrastructure layer.
Scrapers, research tools and the guides are left out of it on purpose. You do not own or self-host a scraper. You rent access and get data back, so tagging one Hosted SaaS would be technically defensible and practically meaningless.
They do carry group one tags, though, because "can I use this without writing code" is a real question about a scraper.
Using it in practice
Pick your answer from group one. That usually removes about three quarters of the list.
Then apply group two if ownership matters to you, and price if it is tight.
You should be down to a handful. Read those properly.
If you are not sure what your answers are, that is the more useful problem to solve first, and it is what The Two Questions That Decide Which Directory Tool You Need is for.