AlternativeTo: a resource I wish I would have had when I started using Linux

sunstoned@lemmus.org to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 294 points –
alternativeto.net

AlternativeTo is a site I use quite a bit. Personally I use it when I get fed up with an Android app having too many ads / creepy network behavior or want to find a self-hostable version of a freemium service.

It has filters for free, open source, platform type, etc. From my understanding it's all crowd sourced, so if you disagree with a rating put in a vote! Sharing this in hopes that others find it as useful as I do.

If you know of similar or better resources I would love to hear about them.

Edit: many people are noting that the comments and reviews are out of date. I agree! Despite that I still find it to he useful. It would be great if this little bit of visibility gets more folks engaged over there to improve it.

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Funniest thing is they have a page for alternatives to their own site

I figured OSalt would have been near the top of the recommendations. I didn't realize how unpopular it was I guess. It's a little more selective in it's recommendations (and perhaps a tad dated).

Happy to see it get love and spread the word. alternativeto.net is my go to. Worthy of muscle memory. I've also found great options in the awesome lists on github. Especially awesome self-hosted if we're talking software. I thought I remember an alternativeto-like site geared towards cli, but I couldn't find it last time I looked. LMK if that rings a bell for anyone.

I always thought this and all the other sites like it were just SEO bait. The quality of the alternatives is no better than random, though I guess you can discover software you didn't know existed. One example: I'm always looking for an alternative to Roon. Like Plex for music, plus you can add in tidal or qobuz, so you can essentially listen to anything on your own library, or the streaming services, from anywhere. It also has an incredible metadata system, letting you view for example, all the players on a jazz album, view bios of every one, and easily start to check out some new music that way. It's unbelievably flawed and poorly run though.

What is alternativeto.net's suggestion as a replacement? Fucking VLC Media player. The only real contender is PlexAmp, or if you want something similar but only for classical music (and without self hosting your own library), there's idagio. results like that make me think it's totally useless

AlternativeTo is crowdsource, so one individual might find software A as suitable alternative, while others are not.

The same way that some people find GIMP enough to replace Photoshop, while others prefer Affinity Photo, Paint.NET, or Photopea.

I personally find so many cool underrated FOSS software, such as Inochi2D, AB Download Manager, Miria, OpenUTAU, Our Paint, Mihon, and Wick Editor.

Yeah it seems mostly SEO bait whenever I get results for it. I mostly rely on "awesome" lists on GitHub to find actual alternatives.

This is also my experience. The results are usually very vaguely related with what I search. I had better luck with Wikipedia comparison tables, but often they are incomplete.

Yeah, I have not once seen anything of value in their "alternatives", they always show the weirdest shit that has nothing in common with the other. It's been in my Kagi block list from the very beginning, I don't miss those results one bit.

It's mostly that it's just an older site and the voting/review system goes back by over a decade. Much of the information you're gonna get on there is just dated, pure and simple, and that reflects in the rankings.

And as you said, the categories aren't curated well enough. Too many unrelated suggestions.

Only issue with alternativeto is the comments and reviews are all dated, some by over 10 years, and often don't reflect the current state of the software.

A lot of the information on the site just feels very stale in general.

So leave a new one.

For that, one should test all the software personally.

Of course if you use something with only the old reviews, leave a new one! But the fact is, utility of the service is often dampened due to this fact.

That's not really how the comments on alternativeto work. They are relative.

If you got to spotifys page, it will list similar services, each with their own comments, and the comments under youtube music, for example, will be about how it compares to spotify.

So, to leave useful comments, you only have to know how a given piece of software compares to what you used before. You don't comment on how a given thing compares to everything else, only to one thing at a time.

Then, as other people browse the alternatives, they can use those individual comparisons to navigate their way to what they need. Stuff like "this can't replace that for this use-case, because reason, but it does this other stuff" is extremely useful when looking for something that does what you're looking for.

Wikipedia can also be useful to find software - e.g.:

or look at the Wikipedia page for whatever you want to replace and see if it's in a category such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Audio_editing_software_for_Linux

You can even do this with things that aren't software, e.g. Homebase -> UK home improvement stores -> Screwfix.

Slant.co used to be similarly useful before its company shut it down to focus on Vetted.ai... Less useful though since almost every outgoing link was an affiliate or ad link. Alternativeto.net has been kinda the best option since the late 00s

The best thing I have found on there:

How to navigate F-Droid and the huge number of apps.

https://alternativeto.net/list/28655/the-ultimate-f-droid-setup/

*disclaimer: I am not the author of this list

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/android/obtaining-apps/?h=droid#f-droid

https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/

Thanks for the links, something I have not really thought about. I pretty much assume very low security/privacy on all modern smartphones anyway(commercial or FLOSS ecosystems).

F-Droid is a handy way to find and support devs who are sharing their expertise.

Certainly, use the download-channels that you are comfortable with.

As mentioned on that page, F-Droid and IzzyOnDroid can link you to many decent FLOSS apps. It's an easy way to be exposed to a large amount of free software.

It is actually useful?

In my experience it just looked like SEO farm that polluted my search results with irrelvant machine-generated content.