Happy Birthday AlternativeTo! We’re turning 5 years today.

Five years ago today we made AlternativeTo available to the public for the first time, so we consider March 11 to be our birthday. It has been five very fun, interesting and special years to us and we’re happy that we’ve made it this far.

During the Summer of 2008 we came up with an idea to build a different kind of software site. We wanted to go further than just listing applications in different categories, but instead focus on providing relevant alternatives to software, based on input from the community. We think that we have succeeded pretty well with the task. Here are some stats about the first five years of the site:

• We have alternatives listed for 30.000 apps, tools, games, websites, online services and other stuff.
• Our users have clicked the like-button about 300.000 times on these applications.
• More than 15.000 forum posts, reviews and comments have been posted to the site.
• AlternativeTo have had about 67,000,00 visitors and 186,000,000 page views over the years.

Statistics is nice, but more importantly we have received an overwhelming amount of praise, press coverage and nice feedback from you users. The fact that people use and enjoy AlternativeTo has been a great inspiration to keep improving the site.

We want to thank all our visitors for these fantastic years. Especially all of you who have helped people all over the world to find better software by contributing with your knowledge and time by helping us build up our powerful database.

Happy Birthday to the whole AlternativeTo community and please continue to spread the word!

/Ola & Markus