p/siftery
Share products you use at work,explore what others are using
Kevin William David
Product Alternatives — Find alternatives and actual replacements for B2B software
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The first listing of B2B software alternatives that not only categorizes and ranks products, but goes beyond and actually shows switching and substitution behavior.

We want to answer the question "When a company stops using x, what are they most likely to start using next?"

Replies
Gerry Giacoman Colyer
One of the things I love the most about Siftery is getting to work with an awesome dataset from which we can derive insights into how entire product categories are evolving. Today, we’re taking a major leap to expose that intelligence by launching the first listing of B2B software alternatives that not only categorizes and ranks products but goes beyond and actually shows switching patterns. In other words, when a company stops using a product, which product is most likely to pop up as a replacement? We’re launching our new substitutes data for roughly 1,000 products (growing weekly), including Mandrill, Amazon EC2, Inspectlet, Intercom, WordPress, Lever, Zendesk, and iCIMS. Some sample insights from this data:
    Google Compute Engine is far and away the leading substitute for AWS EC2. (Notably, Snapchat, which you can see on the list, signed a massive $2 billion five-year contract) In the Recruiting/ATS space, Greenhouse and Lever are each other’s most significant competitor. Meanwhile, companies looking to replace iCIMS by far most frequently end up using Oracle Taleo (and vice versa) We generally see company size and employee count is highly predictive of which products they’ll consider and we can see a progression as companies grow out of services catering to SMBs to more fully-featured alternatives. It’s really exciting to share this - hopefully, you’ll have some fun poking around and come up with some insights 📈 of your own!
Kyle Richey
@ggiaco Looks really nice! I’m new to Siftery, so this might not make sense, but I’m curious: Are you planning to allow B2B software companies submit their apps?
Ayan Barua
@ggiaco @imakestrides Hey Kyle, you can submit products through this form - https://siftery.com/submit-product, our team will do a quick review and push the product through if it's legitimate and live. We have 40K+ products in the DB, so you are in good company :)
Vivek Khandelwal
Siftery has one of the most exhaustive datasets when it comes to B2B software. Good to see that data and the insights are being put to good use. Great stuff Kevin and team.
Benjo Libor
I am a big fan of Siftery and their continuous & amazing product updates. Providing alternatives for software products is a unique value proposition. The challenge seems to be that most software products offer multiple use cases which overlap with other products. InVision is a good example. Their products use cases vary from prototyping (Marvel, Adobe XD a.o.), measuring/inspecting (Zeplin a.o.), interface design (Sketch, PS a.o.), collaboration to mood boarding and project mgmt. I think asking for the tool is a viable solution if it comes to small and nichy products. But bigger, more complex tools should be paired with the corresponding use cases to make sure the users gets recommendations he's actually interested in.
Kyle Richey
@bnjmnlbr Great point! That’s the biggest problem with AlternativeTo.net and G2 Crowd, in my opinion. So many pseudo-alternatives listed that it’s hard to tell what will actually be a good option.
Ayan Barua
@bnjmnlbr Great observation Benjo! This can be somewhat solved with very granular (also accurate and articulate) categories and then using that as the context pivot (pairing as you rightly said). We certainly hope to iterate on this.
Gerry Giacoman Colyer
@bnjmnlbr It's a great observation! I was hoping someone would bring it up. We're generally doing our best to account for this by giving products both a primary category as well as 0 to a handful of secondary tags to account for its functionality. This flows through to the substitute calculations by giving different weights to a switch depending on whether the products share a primary category and/or secondary tags. To illustrate, you can see this at play in the Alternatives list and Substitutes calculations for Intercom (https://siftery.com/intercom/alternatives). While Drift is the clearest Direct alternative and has the highest weighting, there's some weight given to other solutions like Zendesk/Zopim, which has some features overlap. Is this perfect? I'm not sure perfection is attainable. But we're certainly aiming for this being the most useful resource of its type.
Benjo Libor
@ggiaco Thanks for sharing these insights into your product. Building the category/tag tree must have been a difficult job and to build even more granular tags must feel like a daring task. If the weights are the key you could influence them with your user's data. You could even ask your users, do you think Canva is a good alternative of InVision? Excited to see your product grow further!
Vamshi Mokshagundam
@bnjmnlbr great idea!
Nathan
I am addicted to sites like this! I can spend hours discovering new software!
Joshua Voydik
This is cool. Like Capterra but with a formalized front-end that does all the sifting for me. I dig it.
Gerry Giacoman Colyer
@joshvoydik If you're looking for an even more directed product Discovery experience, you should check our Recommendation AI! (https://www.producthunt.com/post...)
Abhilash Jain
This is great, with so many product options out there this is a lifesaver.
Rick James! Chatas
Nice! Totally in to this. One of my most frequented Google searches... "Product X alternative..." The compare page is nice as well.
Ken Cucchia
www.alternativeto.net has been around forever .. not exactly a novel concept
Ayan Barua
@kcucchia This dataset enumerates actual switches (company A moving from Product X to Product Y, and potentially attaching a sentiment to it) which is a data set we are exposing for the first time. Other alternatives (hah!) are mostly category alternatives :)
Arpit Mishra
How did I find this today 🤦‍♂️ Brilliant, this is what we all had been looking for on 'Google' forever!
Vishal Nema
For a second I read this as "Product Hunt" alternative, on Product Hunt :D
Ge Rus
Yes very nice and informative guide about product replacement you can see my greasetrapguy website project its a new idea for me and trying it for the first time
Juan Visbal

We've been looking into product alternatives for the company recently, and this can tremendously speed up the process.

Pros:

Detailed and comprehensive list, easy to use.

Cons:

Missing pricing info.