
Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing - ayanb
https://siftery.com/alternatives?src=hn
======
troydavis
Siftery has repeatedly engaged in Twitter spam. Here’s one example account,
@SifteryHello that exists solely to mention other companies and individuals:
[https://twitter.com/SifteryHello](https://twitter.com/SifteryHello)

Check out the tweet history to see what I mean. They sent thousands of tweets
from this account (and very possibly others), solely to get visibility for
Siftery from the customers/others who search for the company's Twitter handle.

They take the same approach to other mediums. Regarding mholt’s comment,
here’s another one:
[https://twitter.com/guusdk/status/909773952561696769](https://twitter.com/guusdk/status/909773952561696769)

I can’t imagine ever trusting a company or person/team who does this.

Update: Here's another medium that Siftery spams, albeit at a lower volume -
HN itself:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ggiaco](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=ggiaco).
ggiaco, an employee, submitted ~100 low-value Siftery pages about companies
(rather than, say, the companies themselves, or sites he actually liked).

Update 2: Here's a second Twitter account, @SifteryFeed, which does the same
thing as @SifteryHello:
[https://twitter.com/sifteryfeed](https://twitter.com/sifteryfeed). Example
tweet:

> "Are you using Apache Hive (@TheASF) and recommend them? You can do it here
> [http://siftery.com/some-landing-page](http://siftery.com/some-landing-page)
> … "

~~~
ggiaco
The posts to HN that you're mentioning are interviews with founders/creators
of the products. They're actually similar in nature to interviews posted from
other sources (e.g. Indie Hackers). Here's an example:
[https://siftery.com/stories/monitor-online-mentions-of-
your-...](https://siftery.com/stories/monitor-online-mentions-of-your-brand-
in-real-time)

I know when we post new ones, so I can add them here first. It's not the only
type of content I post, and the HN community can decide if they're worthy of
attention or not.

~~~
troydavis
Okay. That addresses one update; how about the main focus of my comment, the
thousands of low-value tweets that @ mention companies and people?

~~~
ggiaco
Troy, We don't believe we're running afoul of TOS and have good reason to
believe this. We want to add value by mentioning _product_ handles once to
generate awareness about their profile and their ability to curate their
presence in front of a large buyer community.

Of course, Twitter is free to change its mind and decide we're treading on the
wrong side of the line and then ban the account or ask us to stop; we would
immediately comply.

FWIW - we were already thinking of cutting back since it doesn't convert that
well anyway. Feel free to report the account though. I kind of wish you'd done
that instead of letting the mob loose. It's probably for the best that you're
not actually a journalist.

~~~
kaoD
Strawman. He's not accusing Siftery of violating the ToS. He's accusing your
company of spamming (even if within Twitter's ToS) low-value tweets.

~~~
troydavis
I'd even generalize it to "Doing anything you can to get attention, even when
the overall impact is obviously negative."

A ToS is the absolute minimum (well, other than the penal code). That someone
needs to consider whether or not something violates policies is a strong sign
that it's probably not helping people. A malware/adware company may not mind
that, but if Siftery's goal is actually to help product consumers and
creators, their bar should be way higher than whether it can slide past a ToS.
Find positive-sum ways to get attention.

------
ayanb
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/intercom/alternatives)
[https://siftery.com/mandrill/alternatives](https://siftery.com/mandrill/alternatives)
[https://siftery.com/shopify/alternatives](https://siftery.com/shopify/alternatives)
[https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives](https://siftery.com/wordpress/alternatives)
[https://siftery.com/lever/alternatives](https://siftery.com/lever/alternatives)
[https://siftery.com/icims/alternatives
](https://siftery.com/icims/alternatives  )

Note: There’s switch data for roughly 1k products (out of a total of 40k)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>"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](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?

~~~
ggiaco
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.

------
thisisit
One of my pet peeves on the new products launched on HN has been a missing
"About" page. If people are asking for personally identifiable information
like emails etc, they should be open about who they are and what their
competencies are in storing this kind of data.

Secondly, I don't see an explanation for what exactly the promoter score is?

Lastly, the source of data. While I am sure that is the secret sauce here,
some of my personal fields have thrown up results which are far off the mark.

~~~
teej
Net promoter score is a extremely common and very valuable gauge of customer
loyalty to a product. It sounds dumb when you look into it but sometimes the
simplest thing works and this is one such case.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter)

~~~
thisisit
Yes I found the wikipedia page later but it was confusing the first time
around. The second data point on customers is intuitive though.

I just wish there was a "what is this?" explanation somewhere. Maybe a hover
over text like the one showing - promoters vs detractors.

------
holtalanm
did a search on React.js, got some results that I expected, and some that I
did not.

did a search on Vue.js, and the top 'alternative' is Bootstrap......

Yeah. Bootstrap isn't an alternative to Vue.js. They aren't even in the same
wheel-house.

[https://siftery.com/vuejs/alternatives](https://siftery.com/vuejs/alternatives)

~~~
cyberferret
That was one of the first thing I noticed about this too - the 'alternative'
pool is just too broad and in some cases nonsensical.

For example - I searched for replacements for 'Intercom' because it is of
particular interest to me, having gone through several support chat tools over
the past 2 years.

Most of the suggested alternatives were NOT in fact, replacements for
Intercom. Some were product walk through demo apps (not really in app support
chat and knowledgebase at all). Other suggestions, while being great front end
web chat systems, were nowhere near the functionality of Intercom as far as
back end app support chat systems and shared help desk features go.

I know this from personal experience jumping from system to system over the
past 24 months, looking for a viable alternative.

(BTW - No affiliation with Intercom, apart from being a paying user 2 years
ago, then a period of not using them, then back to using Intercom a couple of
months ago due to not being able to find a good alternative).

~~~
ayanb
In this case, the primary category for Intercom is `User onboarding and
Engagement` which can be broken down separately to `User Onboarding` and `In-
app Support` or `In-app Chat`. That will suddenly spike up the sanity of both
categories (maybe we can even normalize further - siftery has more than 700
categories/tags, a first for any such platform).

Categorisation of a data set like this can be non-trivial and will false
positives. We can cherry-pick such a false positive and ignore all the actual
positives. That said, thanks for this feedback - this is exactly what is
needed to improve status quo. We are on it and will report back in a few hours
with the category split I suggested in the previous paragraph. Do let me know
if you think it can be broken down into a different type of granularity?

------
mholt
Siftery kind of annoyingly added my OSS project to it and started emailing me
about it without me signing up for it... (months ago)

~~~
ayanb
Inclusions usually come from the community - users tend to add products to
their stack, a lot of them obviously being OSS. We have tried to reach out to
creators/admins in the past to understand if they'd like to represent
themselves in the right way in front of a large buyer group.

Apologies Matt - we'd love it if you gave the platform a try, but will not
include you in any future email-campaign, going forward.

~~~
dawnerd
How about not emailing like that from the start without an opt-in?

~~~
hobofan
Yup, it's not just a dick move, but is also illegal in some countries (e.g.
Germany) and can get you sued.

~~~
yorwba
IANAL, but I think cold emails are still legal in Germany, provided they're
not just advertisements (e.g. "someone added you as maintainer of [super
awesome project]" is probably OK) and you offer a clearly visible option to
unsubscribe (i.e. it shouldn't require posting on a random internet forum to
get the attention of a company representative).

In essence, the law prohibits business practices that are an "unacceptable
nuisance". While advertising via email spam is clearly called out as such, not
all cases are so clear cut and will depend on the judge's opinion of
acceptable behavior.

[http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/uwg_2004/__7.html](http://www.gesetze-im-
internet.de/uwg_2004/__7.html)

EDIT:

English translation of the law: [http://www.gesetze-im-
internet.de/englisch_uwg/englisch_uwg....](http://www.gesetze-im-
internet.de/englisch_uwg/englisch_uwg.html#p0100)

------
jessriedel
This strikes me as the business version of AlternativeTo.net, a stupendous
website to help find alternative (consumer) software.

[https://alternativeto.net/](https://alternativeto.net/)

~~~
ayanb
Alternativeto is great. _Siftery_Product_Substitutes_ is an attempt to analyze
the migration of one product to another, across companies to begin with, and
later across several other segments and industries. Where we don't have any
switch data, we are only showing vanilla alternatives (sorted by NPS).

This is merely v1 and we intend to iterate quickly on this dataset and provide
more intelligence/decision support for buyers when they are looking for
alternatives to switch to for a specific product or across a category.

------
EliRivers
_Microsoft Word’s primary category is PDF Readers and Editors_

I did not expect MS Word to be listed as a PDF Reader (and editor).

Does this mean that (according to your data) when a company switches away from
MS Word, it's because they just wanted a PDF Reader? Perhaps that implies that
those who don't switch away from it simply find that there is no substitute
software for their principal use case.

~~~
misnome
I can believe this to a certain extent; certainly the only reason most at our
labs use Word on a week-to-week basis is to download and print forms
distributed by the HR department, which should just be PDF.

Where this data would come from/how this categorisation would be made, I have
no idea.

------
flipp3r
Websites like this are completely useless once you know where to get real
comparisons.

Just go to Google and type in "<product> vs " and let Google's autocomplete
suggest the top competitors.

No need for sites like these.

~~~
sharemywin
except how do you think google mines that data. if those sites go away so does
google's free loading....

~~~
hobofan
Google mines that data by other people searching for that, not (only) by
scraping it off sites. Yes, they also do that, but AFAIK search trends have a
higher relevance than scraped suggestions.

As long as people want to know how their existing product stacks up against
another product they have heard of before, "<existing product> vs <other
products>", will be searched and appear in the autocomplete.

This approach breaks down tough for newer products, ot if you want to find the
best product by quality, not just popularity.

------
LanceJones
How does a new entrant into a category get listed?

~~~
ayanb
You can submit products through this form - [https://siftery.com/submit-
product](https://siftery.com/submit-product), our team will do a quick review,
and push the product through if it's legitimate and live.

We have 40K+ products in the DB, so you are in good company :)

------
mariaesther111
This is so cool, thanks guys :)!

------
uyoakaoma
Is this similar to stackshare?

~~~
ggiaco
Does Stackshare programmatically track when companies start and stop using
software products and run some calculations on top of that to predict the most
likely substitutes?

