We're doing a couple of things here that this community might find interesting:
A) Actually tracking when companies start and stop using a piece of software
B) Using this "switch" data to calculate a probability that the switches are a true substitution and then rank the top substitutes for reach product - based on actual switching behavior. We use a weighted average where the switches are weighted according to how much the product’s categories overlap (every product is tagged with 1-5 tags). For example, Intercom and Drift are closely related so when a company stops using Intercom and starts using Drift that's heavily weighted. However, a percentage of the companies who stop using Intercom and then start using Zendesk are effectively substituting Intercom with Zendesk.
- You can use search to find a product, or start with the ones below:
https://siftery.com/intercom/alternatives https://siftery.com/mandrill/alternatives https://siftery.com/shopify/alternatives https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives https://siftery.com/lever/alternatives https://siftery.com/icims/alternatives
Note: There's switch data for roughly 1k products (out of a total of 40k)