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.
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:
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.
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:
>"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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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?
[+] [-] troydavis|8 years ago|reply
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 … "
[+] [-] Xunxi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggiaco|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ayanb|8 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|8 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ma2rten|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thisisit|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter
[+] [-] krishmv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] holtalanm|8 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] cyberferret|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
Agree, we do need to split developer tools more granularly.
[+] [-] leeoniya|8 years ago|reply
https://siftery.com/jquery/alternatives
[+] [-] mholt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ayanb|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] troydavis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessriedel|8 years ago|reply
https://alternativeto.net/
[+] [-] ayanb|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
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|8 years ago|reply
Where this data would come from/how this categorisation would be made, I have no idea.
[+] [-] ayanb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flipp3r|8 years ago|reply
Just go to Google and type in "<product> vs " and let Google's autocomplete suggest the top competitors.
No need for sites like these.
[+] [-] ggiaco|8 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] switchstance|8 years ago|reply
But, I like your suggestion and will give it a try in the future.
[+] [-] sharemywin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LanceJones|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ayanb|8 years ago|reply
We have 40K+ products in the DB, so you are in good company :)
[+] [-] mariaesther111|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uyoakaoma|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ggiaco|8 years ago|reply