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Edit: many people are noting that the comments and reviews are out of date.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.
I really appreciate Open Source Alternative To for this (although their theme seems a little broken atm).
Funniest thing is they have a page for alternatives to their own site
Only issue with alternativeto is the comments and reviews are all dated, some by over 10 years, and often don’t reflect the current state of the software.
A lot of the information on the site just feels very stale in general.
For that, one should test all the software personally.
Of course if you use something with only the old reviews, leave a new one! But the fact is, utility of the service is often dampened due to this fact.
That’s not really how the comments on alternativeto work. They are relative.
If you got to spotifys page, it will list similar services, each with their own comments, and the comments under youtube music, for example, will be about how it compares to spotify.
So, to leave useful comments, you only have to know how a given piece of software compares to what you used before. You don’t comment on how a given thing compares to everything else, only to one thing at a time.
Then, as other people browse the alternatives, they can use those individual comparisons to navigate their way to what they need. Stuff like “this can’t replace that for this use-case, because reason, but it does this other stuff” is extremely useful when looking for something that does what you’re looking for.
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.
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.
