Theoretical results conclude that Direct Position Estimation (DPE)‐based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers can achieve more robust localization than their conventional two‐step counterparts. However, compared to conventional approaches, there is a much smaller body of work for DPE, and DPE receiver implementations are highly experimental. This work surveys DPE techniques from the literature and presents a software‐defined parallelized DPE‐based receiver prototype built on popular DPE techniques. The parallelized receiver software, along with a companion sequential implementation, is made available to the community as an open source. The GPU usage of the parallelized DPE‐based receiver is profiled and compared to the companion sequential implementation and another sequential implementation presented in the literature. Through the literature survey, discussion of the open‐source receiver software, and the performance evaluation of the receiver, resultant insights for design decisions are presented.