Most extensions do work that way, but if privacy or resource-draining background processes are a concern you should check out sitestacks.com - the crawl is only run on command and from the SiteStacks servers.
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.
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.
Troy,
We don't believe we're running afoul of TOS and have good reason to believe this. We want to add value by mentioning product handles once to generate awareness about their profile and their ability to curate their presence in front of a large buyer community.
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.
I'd even generalize it to "Doing anything you can to get attention, even when the overall impact is obviously negative."
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.
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
I am sorry but I never implied anything about hiding. But it was difficult for me to find the exact page.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 reach 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.
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You can use search to find a product, or start with the ones below:
Thanks for the feedback. Sounds like NameCheap should be picked up as a registrar; we'll take a look!
On the second point, we should clarify that the data is meant to be domain-wide (except for the real-time mapper for domains not already in our universe - there we only look at the first page so we can return data quickly).
