AlternativeTo is a site I use quite a bit. Personally I use it when I get fed up with an Android app having too many ads / creepy network behavior or want to find a self-hostable version of a freemium service.
It has filters for free, open source, platform type, etc. From my understanding it’s all crowd sourced, so if you disagree with a rating put in a vote! Sharing this in hopes that others find it as useful as I do.
If you know of similar or better resources I would love to hear about them.
Edit: many people are noting that the comments and reviews are out of date. I agree! Despite that I still find it to he useful. It would be great if this little bit of visibility gets more folks engaged over there to improve it.
It is actually useful?
In my experience it just looked like SEO farm that polluted my search results with irrelvant machine-generated content.
Totally. I often go directly to it to find applications.
It’s how I found kdenlive, it’s how I found audiobookshelf, etc.
I always thought this and all the other sites like it were just SEO bait. The quality of the alternatives is no better than random, though I guess you can discover software you didn’t know existed. One example: I’m always looking for an alternative to Roon. Like Plex for music, plus you can add in tidal or qobuz, so you can essentially listen to anything on your own library, or the streaming services, from anywhere. It also has an incredible metadata system, letting you view for example, all the players on a jazz album, view bios of every one, and easily start to check out some new music that way. It’s unbelievably flawed and poorly run though.
What is alternativeto.net’s suggestion as a replacement? Fucking VLC Media player. The only real contender is PlexAmp, or if you want something similar but only for classical music (and without self hosting your own library), there’s idagio. results like that make me think it’s totally useless
Yeah, I have not once seen anything of value in their “alternatives”, they always show the weirdest shit that has nothing in common with the other. It’s been in my Kagi block list from the very beginning, I don’t miss those results one bit.
It’s mostly that it’s just an older site and the voting/review system goes back by over a decade. Much of the information you’re gonna get on there is just dated, pure and simple, and that reflects in the rankings.
And as you said, the categories aren’t curated well enough. Too many unrelated suggestions.
AlternativeTo is crowdsource, so one individual might find software A as suitable alternative, while others are not.
The same way that some people find GIMP enough to replace Photoshop, while others prefer Affinity Photo, Paint.NET, or Photopea.
I personally find so many cool underrated FOSS software, such as Inochi2D, AB Download Manager, Miria, OpenUTAU, Our Paint, Mihon, and Wick Editor.
Slant.co used to be similarly useful before its company shut it down to focus on Vetted.ai… Less useful though since almost every outgoing link was an affiliate or ad link. Alternativeto.net has been kinda the best option since the late 00s
Awesome Privacy is also great.
Funniest thing is they have a page for alternatives to their own site
Wikipedia can also be useful to find software - e.g.:
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_vector_graphics_editors
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_integrated_development_environments
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_audio_player_software
or look at the Wikipedia page for whatever you want to replace and see if it’s in a category such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Audio_editing_software_for_Linux
You can even do this with things that aren’t software, e.g. Homebase -> UK home improvement stores -> Screwfix.
