What this is
Cleanroom reviews projects that describe themselves as open-source, clean-room replacements for a paid application. We read the repository — the README, the source tree, the issue tracker, the roadmap — and write down what is implemented, what is not, and what the project says about itself.
The first subject is the ArtCraft family: WordCraft, GridCraft, DeckCraft and CADCraft, four clean-room rewrites of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and AutoCAD that appeared within days of each other in October 2026, plus SolidCraft, a maturer parametric CAD project from a different team that gets compared to them constantly.
Why these projects
Because they publish their own failure rates. A roadmap that says "≈38% ready for real work, ~1,150–1,850 agent-hours to 95%" is a rare artefact. Most software marketing does not survive that sentence, and the fact that these repositories include it is the most interesting thing about them — more interesting than the star counts, and much more useful than the coverage, which mostly reported the claim and skipped the audit.
There is also a practical reason. Real people are deciding right now whether to open a client's .docx in an alpha. The difference between "the feature exists" and "the feature preserves your file" is the whole decision, and it is buried in documents nobody reads.
What we are not
- Not hands-on testers. We do not compile these applications or run them on our own files. See our method for exactly what that costs us in certainty.
- Not a news site. We are not first, and we do not try to be. We are the page that exists after the announcement, when the question is "should I use this".
- Not endorsed by any project here. The projects are Apache or MIT licensed; some of the people behind them will disagree with our verdicts, which is fine, because the verdicts are traceable to their own files.
How it is paid for
It is not. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate link and no paid placement. If that changes, the affected page will say so above the content.
Corrections
Software in this category ships weekly; pages here are date-stamped and go stale. If a claim is wrong, or a project has moved substantially since we read it, the correction is published on the same page with the date and what changed. We do not silently edit claims.
That a page which tells you what does not work, written by someone who read the code, is worth more than a page that tells you it is revolutionary.