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 … "
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.
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)
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.
I just wish there was a "what is this?" explanation somewhere. Maybe a hover over text like the one showing - promoters vs detractors.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where this data would come from/how this categorisation would be made, I have no idea.
Just go to Google and type in "<product> vs " and let Google's autocomplete suggest the top competitors.
No need for sites like these.
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.
But, I like your suggestion and will give it a try in the future.
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.
We have 40K+ products in the DB, so you are in good company :)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
Agree, we do need to split developer tools more granularly.
Additionally, the point was on whether I could trust you guys with my work email id, which in my opinion is more sensitive than my personal id. I can create a throwaway personal id but not business email id.
Our approach is to minimize the need to sign up at all - a lot of Siftery, including all of these alternatives/substitues pages, is fully accessible without logging in.
We only suggest that you sign up (with a non-personal email), where we think we can meaningfully improve the experience by personalizing the experience to your company, and this also allows you to contribute verified data.
We stopped supporting personal email signups because there's not very much we can do to improve the experience in that case, so why bother? We can spare you a meaningless drip campaign.
You can see this philosophy at work clearly in our Product Recommenations AI (https://siftery.com/personalized-recommendations) where you can choose your own adventure by signing up or not.
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
EDIT:
English translation of the law: http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_uwg/englisch_uwg....
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.
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.