Use Siftery to find product alternatives and real substitutes
One of the coolest parts about Siftery is getting to work with an awesome dataset from which we can derive insights into how entire product categories are evolving.
Today, we’re taking a major leap to expose that intelligence by launching our Product Alternatives the first listing of B2B software alternatives that not only categorizes and ranks products, but goes beyond and actually shows switching patterns.
In other words, when a company stops using a product, which product are they most likely to start using to replace it?
We’re launching our new switch data for roughly 1,000 products (growing weekly), including Mandrill, Amazon EC2, Inspectlet, Intercom, WordPress, Lever, Zendesk, and iCIMS.
Some sample insights from this data:
- Google Compute Engine is far and away the leading substitute for AWS EC2. (Notably Snapchat, which you can see on the list, signed a massive $2 billion five-year contract)
- 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).
- In many categories, including Recruiting/ATS, 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.
It’s really exciting to be sharing this — hopefully you’ll have some fun with it and come up with some insights of your own!
Go to Siftery’s Product Alternatives
Some caveats: For us, this is a starting point.
Your feedback is super valuable and will help us keep getting better.
Some of the challenging questions we’ve had to deal with include:
- “Where do we draw the line for what counts as a viable competitor/substitute?”
- “What counts as a true instance of product substitution?”
- “Should we add another category?” (we’re currently at roughly 750)
