🔀 AlternativeTo Scraper

🚀 Export software alternatives, likes, platforms, and license data from AlternativeTo in seconds. No API key required.

The AlternativeTo Scraper lets you extract the full list of software alternatives from alternativeto.net for any software product. Search by software name (e.g. "slack", "notion", "figma") and get structured data on every alternative including likes, supported platforms, license types, and whether the tool is free or open source.

AlternativeTo is the web's largest crowd-sourced software comparison database, listing over 300,000 software alternatives across every category. This actor delivers that data in clean, structured JSON - ready for analysis, comparison, or integration into your own tools.

Coverage: Alternatives to 300,000+ software products - 16 data fields per record - Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone, Web-based, Self-Hosted, and more - open source and commercial tools alike.

Target Audience / Use Cases

Who	What They Build
Product managers	Competitive landscape maps for any tool
Developers	Open-source alternative discovery pipelines
Researchers	Software ecosystem analysis and category mapping
Marketers	Positioning benchmarks and feature comparison tables
Venture capitalists	Market sizing and competitive density analysis
Enterprise buyers	Vendor shortlist generation by platform and license

📋 What the AlternativeTo Scraper does

• Searches AlternativeTo for all alternatives to any named software product
• Returns each alternative's name, slug, description, and canonical URL
• Extracts the number of likes (crowd-sourced ranking signal)
• Lists all supported platforms: Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone, Web, Self-Hosted, etc.
• Lists license/pricing types: Free, Freemium, Open Source, Paid, Proprietary, etc.
• Detects whether each alternative is open source or has a free tier
• Exports the official website link where available
• Paginates automatically to collect all alternatives up to your requested limit
• Returns data in JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML

💡 Why it matters: Most software evaluation happens through expensive analyst reports or manual research. AlternativeTo aggregates real user votes across 300,000+ software products. This actor gives you programmatic access to that intelligence at scale.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: alternativeTo, category, comments, description, imageUrl, isFree, isOpenSource, licenses, likes, name, platforms, results, scrapedAt, slug, url, website. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free account on Apify (includes $5 free credit)
2. Open the AlternativeTo Scraper actor page
3. Enter the software name you want alternatives for (e.g. slack, notion, figma)
4. Set maxItems to control how many results you need
5. Click Start and wait for the run to complete
6. Download results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or XML from the dataset tab

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection on the Apify Store for more data extraction tools across every category.

Disclaimer: This actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with AlternativeTo or its parent company. Data is scraped from publicly available web pages. Use responsibly and in accordance with AlternativeTo's Terms of Service.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

For faster answers, join our Discord. It's the best place to get support and suggest new actors.