9 Product Hunt alternatives that still work
Product Hunt is one day and one audience. These are the places worth the other launches, and what each of them is genuinely good at.
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- SpacerrApps
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People look for Product Hunt alternatives for three different reasons, and the right answer is different for each.
Either you launched and it went nowhere, or you have looked at the front page and worked out that your product would be buried by three AI tools and a Notion template, or you already had your day and want the next one. This is a list for all three, sorted by what the audience is there for rather than by size.
First, be honest about why Product Hunt failed
If you already launched and it went flat, moving to a different platform will not fix it. Four things account for almost every quiet launch, and none of them are the platform.
- The product needed a paragraph of explanation before anybody could tell what it did
- The thumbnail was a screenshot of a dashboard
- There was no first comment, so the page had nothing to read
- It launched on a Friday, or into a week with a big-name launch on it
Fix those and relaunch somewhere else. Do not relaunch the same page on the same site.
1. Uneed
The closest thing to Product Hunt in shape: a daily leaderboard, upvotes, a friendly indie audience. The difference is competition. Ten to twenty products a day instead of sixty, so finishing in the top three is something you can actually plan for.
Best for: a first launch when you know the product is good but not loud.
2. Hacker News, as a Show HN
The highest ceiling and the lowest floor on this list. A Show HN that lands sends more qualified traffic than a top-five Product Hunt finish. Most do not land.
The rules are unwritten and strictly enforced. No marketing voice, no launch video, no "excited to announce". Title it plainly, describe what it does in the first sentence, say what it costs, and stay in the comments all day.
Best for: developer tools, anything technically interesting, anything self-hosted.
3. Indie Hackers
A forum rather than a launch platform, which is exactly why it works. Nobody upvotes a listing here. They reply to a story, and the replies are the value: the people who tell you why they would not pay are worth more than the ones who sign up.
Post the number. Revenue, time spent, money lost, users churned. A post with a real figure in the title gets read; one without gets scrolled.
Best for: bootstrapped products, second launches, anything with a story behind it.
4. DevHunt
Product Hunt for developer tools, and small enough that a decent tool gets seen. Free, and the listing carries a followed link.
Best for: CLIs, libraries, APIs, anything whose audience reads a changelog for fun.
5. BetaList
Only for products that are not finished yet. Its whole audience is there to be early, so submitting a mature product is a mismatch that shows.
Best for: pre-launch, private beta, waitlists.
6. AlternativeTo
Not a launch at all. It is a permanent page that catches people searching for a way out of a tool they already use, which is the highest-intent traffic in this entire category.
You will get nothing on day one. You will still be getting visits in two years.
Best for: anything with a well-known incumbent you can honestly be listed against.
7. SaaSHub
Same idea, smaller, easier to get listed on, and its comparison pages pick up "X vs Y" queries. Fifteen minutes of work for a page that keeps working.
Best for: B2B software with obvious competitors.
8. Reddit, in the one subreddit that fits
Not r/SideProject, where everyone is posting and nobody is reading. Find the subreddit where your actual users already complain about the problem you solved, read its rules twice, and post something that would be useful even if you had built nothing.
This is the highest-variance channel on the list. It also converts better than every directory here when it works.
Best for: consumer apps, niche tools, anything with a community around the problem.
9. A directory that writes about you
The gap in everything above is that a leaderboard entry stops existing when the day ends. A page with real prose about your product does not, and prose is the only thing a search engine can match against a query that is not your product's name.
That is what this site does. Submit an app, a person reviews it, and it gets a directory page plus a full write-up. Free, two followed links, no launch day to schedule around. See what a listing includes, or submit yours.
Launch on more than one of them, on different days
For the ranked version of this, with what each one returns, see the 10 best directories to submit your app. For the whole four week schedule, see where to launch your app.
The mistake is treating launching as one event. It is a sequence, and the sequence has an order that works:
| Week | Where | For |
|---|---|---|
| Minus two | BetaList | Early bug reports |
| Launch day | Product Hunt, Uneed | The spike |
| Day two | Show HN, DevHunt | Developers |
| Launch week | Indie Hackers, one subreddit | Conversations |
| After | AlternativeTo, SaaSHub | Pages that last |
The first four rows are the fun part and they are over in ten days. The last row is the one that is still sending you visitors next year.