What are competitive alternatives?

When you ask a maintainer, or a founder, what the competitors to a project/product are, he or she will almost always rattle off a list of technology options.

Whether you have an open source project or an enterprise software that costs millions of dollars a year, your competitive alternatives are not all technologies. Almost all B2B software, open source or not, is first and foremost competing against the status quo. And that status quo is, in most cases, not about using a competitive product, but some combination of:

  • Taking longer to get things done

  • Accepting a certain amount of business risk (legal risk, reputation risk, revenue risk)

  • Hiring additional people

  • Using a general purpose software (ie creating a service catalog using Google Sheets)

Even if you are competing with AWS, the status quo is your biggest competitor. It is the competitor that will beat you in deals. Whether you’re positioning an open source project, a commercial product or both, position against the status quo.

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And check out my ebook about positioning open source projects here.

Emily Omier