Let’s be honest: Some apps and services are absolutely worth paying for—but sooner or later, we all reach our limit.
With everything from productivity tools to weather apps and even wallpapers shifting to a subscription-style setup, stuff sure can add up fast. (And we won’t even get into the whole streaming arena!) At a certain point, you’re bound to stumble onto something worthwhile and say to yourself, “Meh, enough’s enough.”
When that happens, remember today’s tool. It’s a community-run website that makes it laughably easy to uncover free, cheap, or sometimes just flat-out better alternatives to popular apps and services.
And—oh, yes—you’d better believe it’s free to use.
Unearth all sorts of little-known tech treasures with my free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. A spiffy new discovery in your inbox every Wednesday!
Your road map to endless app awesomeness
My fellow eager earthling, allow me to introduce you to a handy little somethin’ called AlternativeTo. An appropriate name, no?
➜ AlternativeTo does one thing and does it extraordinarily well: It collects and compiles crowdsourced info on the best alternatives (get it?!) to popular apps and services.
⌚ It’ll take you 20 seconds to start using.
✅ There’s really nothing to it: You just open up the AlternativeTo website in whatever browser you like, on whatever device is in front of you, and you type in the name of the app or service you’re thinking about in the box at the top of the screen.
AlternativeTo will then pull up a detailed dossier of recommendations for exceptional alternatives, based on other folks’ votes and submissions. And lemme tell ya: You’re bound to discover some genuinely interesting, off-the-beaten-path options you wouldn’t have otherwise encountered.
Lots of AlternativeTo’s recommendations are both free and open source. You can see all that info up front—and you can filter by that and a bunch of other variables, too, to limit the results by platform, features, or properties like “privacy-focused.”
It’s an incredibly useful resource for finding incredibly useful stuff—and for saving yourself from paying for things you might not actually need.
- AlternativeTo is completely web-based—no downloads or installations needed.
- It’s free to use, with some very light and reasonable ads sprinkled in throughout the interface.
- The site doesn’t require any sign-ins or personal data sharing. (You can create an account if you want to submit, vote, and comment on apps, but it isn’t at all necessary for looking stuff up and using the site in general.)
Discover all sorts of exceptional productivity-boosting tools with my free Cool Tools newsletter—a single standout gem in your inbox every Wednesday!
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