Comment by ayanb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ayanb | Hacker News Reader

Search for the top alternatives for over 40k B2B software products.

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 each 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)

>"When companies stop using WordPress, its most frequent substitutes are HubSpot Website Platform (32.6% of the time), followed by Drupal (21.9%), and by EPi Ektron CMS (6.9%)" (https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives) //

I don't understand why the first listing Craft CMS isn't one of the hot alternatives that people switch to as mentioned in the prose? Why is it even in there? Why is the third hot substitute not even in the list below of alternatives?

I'm clearly missing something major here?

What we're doing with Substitutes is to complement the NPS ranking with a mapping of actual switch behavior. It's entirely possible that a lower-rated product is a much more popular substitute for a product if it's a better fit (e.g. targeting SMBs or Enterprise).

An example: 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.

I tried https://siftery.com/aws-lambda/alternatives and it pulled up the serverless framework .

Why does it say that the serverless framework is something that runs on top of AWS lambda not a replacement? Or does it mean to use straight AWS lambda without a framework?

I like the idea of the site and I have used similar sites in the past.

A great use case where we can increase the granularity of categorization/tagging and potentially separate the infrastructure provider and the implementation layer on top of it.

I am wondering: How exactly are you getting this data? How do you make sure the data is accurate?

Source of data:

0) We analyze products that have a public footprint.

1) We analyze products that don't have a public footprint.

2) For 0), we crawl the internet periodically and create a time series curves of B2B product usage for companies.

3) For both 0) and 1), our verified community has trained our algorithms with tens of thousands of data points on usage and sentiment, thereby reinforcing or nullifying these deductions.

4) If you have stopped using Angular and started using React (or vice-versa now that Angular 5 has better server-side rendering), it is deductible at a global context.

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