Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing

by ayanb • 9 years ago

103 50 9 years ago

ayanb11• 9 years ago

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)

zitterbewegung• 9 years ago

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.

ayanb11• 9 years ago

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.

pbhjpbhj• 9 years ago

"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?

ggiaco8• 9 years ago

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.

ma2rten• 9 years ago

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

ayanb11• 9 years ago

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.

holtalanm• 9 years ago

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

leeoniya• 9 years ago

yeah....

https://siftery.com/jquery/alternatives

ayanb11• 9 years ago

Agree, need more granularity than just "Javascript MVC framework". Thank you, we are on it.

ayanb11• 9 years ago

Tagged it to Javascript Frameworks and the alternatives are much better now.

Agree, we do need to split developer tools more granularly.

cyberferret• 9 years ago

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).

ayanb11• 9 years ago

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?

ggiaco8• 9 years ago

We use Intercom quite a lot at Siftery. What would you say are the top alternatives/substitutes if not what's listed?

Here's what we have for the "substitues" calculation: "When companies stop using Intercom, its most frequent substitutes are Drift (44.9% of the time), followed by Zendesk (9%), and by Zendesk Chat (Formerly Zopim) (7%)"

(Drift as the closest substitute closely matches my experience investigating options in this space; other products are more like partial or imperfect substitutes)

The alternatives ranked by NPS include Appcues, Chameleon, Clickhelp, Tawk.to, Olark, Freshdesk. Intercom is multi-faceted and difficult product to categorize, but all of those products are alternatives for some of its functionality.

Are there other products you think definitely belong here and were missed? Not trying to come off as defensive by the way, just trying to really understand where's the opportunity for improvement here.

EliRivers• 9 years ago

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.

ayanb11• 9 years ago

Apologies, this is data we will clean up soon.

misnome• 9 years ago

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.

uyoakaoma• 9 years ago

Is this similar to stackshare?

ggiaco8• 9 years ago

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?

jessriedel• 9 years ago

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

https://alternativeto.net/

ayanb11• 9 years ago

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.

LanceJones• 9 years ago

How does a new entrant into a category get listed?

ayanb11• 9 years ago

You can submit products through this form - 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 :)

thisisit3• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

ayanb11• 9 years ago

Yeah, NPS is a good way to understand how actual customers feel about a product. We have collected tens of thousands of sentiment over the last six months on a wide range of products, and at scale, this sentiment data set can be quite valuable.

thisisit3• 9 years ago

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.

krishmv• 9 years ago

there's an about us on the footer? the landing page seems to be missing one though.

ggiaco8• 9 years ago

Yeah, we decided to de-clutter the LP (would you say we overdid it?), but the About Us link is on close to 1M pages throughout the site. Not hiding :) https://siftery.com/about-us

mholt• 9 years ago

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

ayanb11• 9 years ago

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• 9 years ago

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

troydavis4• 9 years ago

You’re far from the only person who has had this experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=15549380

mariaesther111• 9 years ago

This is so cool, thanks guys :)!

troydavis4• 9 years ago

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

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

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. 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. Example tweet:

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

ggiaco8• 9 years ago

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-...

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.

troydavis4• 9 years ago

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

Xunxi• 9 years ago

The product itself is garbage. I really dont know why Google will use Histats https://siftery.com/company/google and this https://siftery.com/company/microsoft

flipp3r• 9 years ago

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.

switchstance• 9 years ago

I have been going to Crunchbase, looking up a company, and scrolling down to see their "competitors." Though, they're often not listed.

But, I like your suggestion and will give it a try in the future.

sharemywin• 9 years ago

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

hobofan2• 9 years ago

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.

ggiaco8• 9 years ago

A Google search will generally turn up sites like Siftery, among others ('A vs B' is one of our very top organic search traffic drivers).

Hope you'll take a look at the substitutes data specifically though. We're showing companies that are actually switching from one product to another, and then rolling that up to showcase some trends and insights.

Show HN: Product Substitutes – what software top companies are replacing

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