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An application is an alternative to another application if its main “task” and “focus” is the same. For example iTunes is an alternative to Windows Media Player because their main task and focus is to consume and organize media. Spotify is not an alternative to iTunes and Windows Media Player cause it’s main focus is to stream music and that’s what its famous for. Even though Spotify have the capabilities to play local files and it’s a music player.

The main rule is to try to imagine what a person searching for “alternatives to X” is really looking for. If you’re searching for an alternative to Notepad you’re probably on the hunt for a simple text editor and not a full-fledged word processing app like Microsoft Word. We are aware that in some cases it can be hard to make the distinction but keeping this in mind really helps a lot.

Why is not X an alternative to Y when X can do things that Y can?

Some programs like Outlook, iTunes and Opera have huge feature sets and can do a lot of different things. You could argue that Opera should be an alternative to µTorrent and other torrent application because Opera have a perfectly fine torrent-client. The problem is that a lot of people might like Opera but the reason most of them like it is not because of its capabilities to download torrent files. They like it because it is a good web browser that happens to have a torrent client built-in and people who are searching for “alternatives To Opera” is definitely not looking for a new torrent client.

The fact that an application is bad or doesn’t work on platform X is not a reason to remove it as an alternative.

Even if you consider an application to be bad, and therefor not a good alternative to another application, it still is an alternative. Other people might disagree with your opinion and as long as the two applications share the same main functionality and focus they are alternatives to each other.

One of the main ideas with AlternativeTo is to help people find alternatives cross-platform so applications on different platform can be alternatives to each other. You can filter by platform to avoid applications on platforms you’re not interested in.

If an applications is discontinued or malicious we have systems to handle that. You can report these applications as not being alternatives and our admins will flag them with a warning or as discontinued. It is still important to list other applications as alternatives to them but they should not be listed as alternatives.