AlternativeTo is a free service that helps you find better alternatives to the products you love and hate. The site is made by Ola and Markus in Sweden, with a lot of help from our friends and colleagues in Italy, Finland, USA, Colombia, Philippines, France and contributors from all over the world. That's right, all the lists of alternatives are crowd-sourced, and that's what makes the data powerful and relevant.

I knew the site a long time ago - they usually show up on search engine results when you're looking for an alternative, but I never knew the lists were crowd-sourced. For some reason, I even got into the habit of avoiding them and always going for Reddit threads when searching for an alternative or some other random sites.

But not long ago I visited them and damn, it's actually pretty great. They publish quite a lot of articles, have a Mastodon account, have a lot of important info near each app - like license, country of origin, some warnings, short descriptions, user comments, features. And you can easily contribute yourself with little effort.

So you should know about this, because I didn't realize how useful it actually is. Beats browsing random sponsored websites that recommend alternatives.

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[–] 39 points 1 month ago (1 child)
  • [–] 14 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    Kinda wish they went with alternative.to then again using random countries TLDs is dumb

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  • [–] 13 points 1 month ago

    Yep, use it regularly. It's not always the best answer, but almost always a solid first stop.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago

    Here's a discussion about such websites as well as open source alternatives.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49410362

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    Oh, I thought this was gonna be about why not to use that site. Glad it's not, cause I have been using that site for ages now. Probably more than a decade.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    I always assumed this was astroturf

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