Versus – Find alternatives to a product or service | Hacker News Reader

Versus – Find alternatives to a product or service

versusutil.com

78 pointsURfejk25 comments

http://alternativeto.net/ exists for a really long time. It's very sophisticated and has a huge database. I used for years every time I'm searching for an alternative.

You can search directly with duckduckgo.

'Alternative to Chrome' - https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=alternative+to+chrome

Just click the software tab at the top.

That's pretty good.

For another option, you can also use the 'related:' on Runnaroo - https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=related%3Achrome

Results sourced from SaaSHub.

I like Runnaroo. The results are good. Have used it occasionally for the past few weeks.

If you don't mind me asking, is the money through the 'promoted' sections sustainable enough for a search engine?

> If you don't mind me asking, is the money through the 'promoted' sections sustainable enough for a search engine?

Sustainable to cover the cost of the service? Absolutely, it will do that, but it is not scalable that it would support the needed revenue to be the next Google (or even DDG for that matter).

Committing to privacy and user-center features eliminates a lot of scalable monetization strategies, and I am completely OK with that. I started and continue to work on Runnaroo because I love trying to solve the problem of building a better alternative search engine option.

Also, thank you for the kind words!

Somehow, when I search for comparisons, I never want such an automated site, but an human written article.

It’s a good site for getting an overview of possible alternatives to software, and I don’t even know to what extent I’d agree that calling it automated.

I most often use it to get a list of open source alternatives to proprietary software.

For example:

https://alternativeto.net/software/clip-studio-paint/?licens...

And notice importantly that the user written comments for each of the alternatives are specifically for the context of the comparison in question.

Not to mention that the alternatives are suggested and ranked by the community. It's no more automated than a Reddit sub sorted by Top posts.

Is there a comparison tool for comparison tools?

It didn't work for me, it returned:

  Error fetching alternatives
  ...
  <h1>We're sorry...</h1><p>... but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.</p></div><div style=\"margin-left: 4em;\">See <a href=\"https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/86640\">Google Help</a> for more information.
   ...

Nice interface and idea on how you do this : "When I am exploring alternatives to a product or service, I often to go Google, type "[product] vs ", and just see what it autocompletes. That usually tells me the most popular competitors. If I want to be thorough I'll do the same for the competitors, etc. This tool just does that automatically for you."[0]

I've been using https://alternativeto.net/ for a few years and have been happy with the crowd-sourced approach,too.

[0]http://versusutil.com/about

I miss google doing this for us by aggregating collections of useful blogs and articles written by people thoughtfully comparing things, but now google is too busy giving sites like this and all the others ranking, starving actually useful resources of oxygen.

For smartphones, this site has a cool "similar phone finder" that finds similar phones based on their euclidean distance over the specs:

https://www.productchart.com/smartphones/similar

The charts for other product types like laptops, monitors etc are also cool to discover similar products based on specs:

https://www.productchart.com/laptops/

https://www.productchart.com/monitors/

Google provides a REST API for its Suggest feature [1] which can be used for product vs style searches. I use it in a CLI script specifically for this use case.

[1] https://developers.google.com/cloud-search/docs/reference/re...

An example "hacker news vs" Google Suggest Query [1] with XML output designed for toolbar integration.

[1] https://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=too...

I built something very similar recently but with a visual output.

https://vsgraphs.ritza.co

I don't see the utility of a tool like this that doesn't have editorial input. A list of alternative tools doesn't really tell me what tool would be better for my needs.

Ableton is an alternative to Logic Pro. But only a pro can tell me that Ableton works best as a performance + production tool while Logic is mostly only for production

It might not tell you which is the best for your needs, but it does look to provide a good starting point for research.

Nice, does this use word2vec or some such word embedding model?

A cool feature update would be to map the multiple layers of related suggestions on a force-directed graph.

Seems like it also contains topic names, diet names and other names that are not products or services.

Similar:

• https://www.osalt.com/

• https://alternativeto.net/

my current preferred tool for this is https://slant.co

wordpress alternatives: no link to ghost?

IPhone alternatives include LG dishwashers. Good job guys.

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