I was collecting nice open-source companies for quite some time now. Mostly to take some inspiration and learn from their code.
Last week, I though it would be fun to learn this Astro thing everyone's talking about. So I thought building a directory website out of this collection was pretty good idea.
After 2 days of building, OpenAlternative was born. It's a community driven list of open source alternatives to proprietary software and applications.
Enjoy and thank you for your support!
I love it that they updated with pro-contra comments. As software are usually not drop-in replacements to one another, you can learn a lot about the differences before switching. I like it that they also include descriptions, general comments, license and screenshots.
If I'm at a page listing the alternatives, such as https://alternativeto.net/software/mtr
It doesn't have direct links to the alternatives, if you hover over an alternative it shows a "copy link" icon, but that just goes to the same page you are already on, instead you have to press into the alternative's page and scroll until you see a "official links" section
More ads.
I've tried to mostly curate the projects that are actively maintained, and have some sort of hosted, paid alternative. This gives you more confidence, that the app will be maintained as they're making money out of it.
The thing both projects do that I don't think is useful is state that the project is open source in each description and push out the actual description of what the project does.
In general if I'm looking for open source alternatives I'm mostly interested in projects that are well maintained and are big enough to stay that way. If there is a website that is able to somewhat make this distinction it can have real value.
As pre your comment about descriptions, I took them directly from the repositories where most of them brag about being "open source". That could be a good idea to modify that to me more informative.
I collect and recommend catalogues like this to clients because an angle some people miss is how alternatives help security. They fall at the first hurdle by thinking that Microsoft, Google or whatever are the only solutions. Or thinking that popularity tracks security. But lack of maneuverability is a key weakness in any defensive position and diversity is a hugely overlooked factor in resilience and security engineering.
Could probably do with being the default view, aye
Note: paid and open is very much encouraged.
I would suggest Nextcloud for google drive slash microsoft onedrive alternative.
I have been using in production for years, and it has been awesome.
Note sure about licensing.
Another is Proxmox. It is freemium, yet solid.
If what you want to submit doesn't fit the fixed values in there, you are blocked.
