I've actually spent some time working on a Stackshare derivate focused on Marketing SaaS product for a friend of mine (tough that never ended up launching). For a pure generic SaaS & OSS tools site like Stackshare is, I'm not sure if there is a good business model that doesn't compromise the product.
A few possible improvements over Stackshare:
- Honest & in-depth long-form reviews. Quality matters so much more than quantity. Even a single in-depth blog post every few weeks would provide more value than the crowdsourced ones you currently find on the site
- Openly accessible, and no social/gameification features that nobody needs
- Better categories and making it possible for a tool to be in multiple ones (and being able to see it). The structure of the current ones is a mess. E.g. CMake is in "Java Build Tools" but the "C/C++ build tools" category is basically empty with 2 tools.
- Better searching/filtering. Kind of connected to the previous point. They have the data (don't know of which quality) of "Tool1 works with Tool2", so you could possibly have a more generic "Build tools" category and then filter by "works with Python".
- I don't care much for automatic comparison features, as they often don't yield good results. E.g. Jira often looks good in such comparisions, but you'll still want to bang your head against a wall every time you have to wait for it to load one of it's pages. A good alternative would be a quick overview of key metrics and category-dependent badges, which you can use to form your own opinions. RubyToolbox[0] does a fairly good job of that.
Thank you for the detailed comment and for the ruby-toolbox link.
All good ideas. Though keeping the reviews up-to-date might become a full time job in itself, as software changes often. I use a service called clickup, they add features constantly and quickly.
How does ruby toolbox do the categories? All other data they show can be automated, but I wonder how they do categorization. They probably use the topics feature from github, I still think it is hard to automate it fully.
A few possible improvements over Stackshare:
- Honest & in-depth long-form reviews. Quality matters so much more than quantity. Even a single in-depth blog post every few weeks would provide more value than the crowdsourced ones you currently find on the site
- Openly accessible, and no social/gameification features that nobody needs
- Better categories and making it possible for a tool to be in multiple ones (and being able to see it). The structure of the current ones is a mess. E.g. CMake is in "Java Build Tools" but the "C/C++ build tools" category is basically empty with 2 tools.
- Better searching/filtering. Kind of connected to the previous point. They have the data (don't know of which quality) of "Tool1 works with Tool2", so you could possibly have a more generic "Build tools" category and then filter by "works with Python".
- I don't care much for automatic comparison features, as they often don't yield good results. E.g. Jira often looks good in such comparisions, but you'll still want to bang your head against a wall every time you have to wait for it to load one of it's pages. A good alternative would be a quick overview of key metrics and category-dependent badges, which you can use to form your own opinions. RubyToolbox[0] does a fairly good job of that.
[0]: https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/categories/pagination