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

siftery.com

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

#11

Post by ayanb »

jessriedel wrote: post #10

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

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.

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

#12

Post by ayanb »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #3
ayanb wrote: post #2

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…

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.

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.

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

#13

Post by ayanb »

EliRivers wrote: post #8

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.

Apologies, this is data we will clean up soon.

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

#14

Post by [deleted] »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #7
ayanb wrote: post #2

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…

>"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 no…

[deleted]

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

#15

Post by ayanb »

leeoniya wrote: post #5
holtalanm wrote: post #4

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

yeah.... https://siftery.com/jquery/alternatives

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

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

#16

Post by ma2rten »

ayanb wrote: post #2

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…

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

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

#17

Post by ayanb »

ma2rten wrote: post #16
ayanb wrote: post #2

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…

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

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.

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

#18

Post by ggiaco »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #7
ayanb wrote: post #2

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…

>"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 no…

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.

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