About What is my alternative

What is my alternative is an index of SaaS products and the tools that can replace them. Type the software you use today and you get a ranked list of products that do the same job, with prices, free plans and open-source options side by side.

We built it because "alternatives to X" lists are usually either a dozen near-identical affiliate posts or a raw directory with no sense of fit. We wanted something in between: a large index, ranked by how well each tool actually replaces the one you have.

Where the listings come from

Every listing starts from the product's own website. Our crawler reads a handful of public pages, usually the homepage, pricing, features, integrations, security and about pages. It then extracts the facts into a fixed format: what the product does, who it is for, pricing tiers, whether there is a free plan or trial, and whether it is open source or self-hostable.

A language model does the extraction, and a set of checks in code catches the obvious mistakes, for example by recomputing the starting price from the tiers it found. Listings we aren't confident about go to a review queue instead of the site. Our editors check them before they are published.

We find products through public sources such as app marketplaces, startup directories, open-source lists and launch sites, and through suggestions from readers and vendors.

How alternatives are ranked

For every product, we score each candidate alternative from 0 to 100 using six signals:

• Feature overlap: how many of the original's features the alternative also has. This carries the most weight.
• Category match: whether both tools sit in the same category.
• Audience fit: whether both are built for the same size of team, from individuals to enterprises.
• Popularity: how widely the tool is used, based on public signals.
• Price: similar or lower starting price, with a bonus for a free plan.
• Description similarity: how closely the two products describe what they do.

A tool has to share real features with the original to be listed at all, so a popular product never shows up just for being popular. Our editors can then pin, reorder, hide or annotate any alternative. The order you see is: editor's picks first, then any manual order, then the automatic score.

Buying guides and top picks

Our articles are buying guides for specific situations, such as choosing a help desk for a small online store. Each one names a few top picks. We research them against the vendors' own websites and date every guide, so you can see how fresh the prices are.

How we work with software companies

We have commercial relationships with some of the software companies we cover. That can influence which products our buying guides feature as top picks, and we only feature a product where it genuinely fits the reader the guide is written for.

It doesn't buy a place in the index. No company can pay to be pinned on a software page, to raise its match score or to have a competitor hidden. If you think a ranking is wrong, tell us.

For software companies

If your product is listed with outdated details, use Update a listing and write from your company email address. If it is missing, suggest it. Corrections are free and we don't sell placement.

Our crawler

Our crawler identifies itself as WIMABot in its user agent. It:

• follows robots.txt, including Crawl-delay
• waits at least 1.5 seconds between requests to the same site
• reads only a few public pages per product and never logs in or submits forms
• doesn't try to get around bot protection or CAPTCHAs

To stop it from reading your site, add this to your robots.txt:

User-agent: WIMABot
Disallow: /

If you block the crawler, we may still list your product using descriptions from public directories, and that listing always goes through editor review. To have it removed entirely, contact us.

Contact

Questions, corrections or ideas: use the contact form or email us. We read every message.