Alternative tools for websites, design, and online
Stressed about finding the perfect replacement for your favorite, soon-to-be-gutted online tools? Take a peek at a few possibilities.
The recent Airtable buyout has small business owners taking a close look at their tech stack, and not just to find Airtable alternatives--they're seeking alternatives for other favorite apps, too, in case their functionalities get gutted by future tech buyouts.
If you haven’t thought about looking for open source options or tools that offer perpetual licenses, now’s the time to do it. To get you started, let’s take a spin through a few tools that I’ve either tried myself, or had highly recommended from multiple trusted sources.
Graphic design and image editing: Affinity
When I decided to divest from Adobe Creative Cloud, an illustrator friend turned me onto Affinity. I was pleasantly surprised that they used a Pay Once, Use It Forever model, just like Adobe did back in my college days. Affinity also had very similar design capabilities–it was mainly a matter of finding where the functions I needed lived in Affinity, and I can knock out designs in the same amount of time as before.
One note: I discovered that Affinity is now owned by Canva while looking it up for this writing–as if I needed a reminder that tech buyouts can happen at any time! However, you can now download the latest version of Affinity for free with your Canva login... which I did! The new Affinity does boast a few features that my perpetual licensed copy of V2 doesn't have--most notably, a vector image trace functionality that's comparable to what's offered by Adobe Illustrator.
Suffice it to say, my experience with Affinity Designer may look different from yours in a few weeks’ or months’ time, as Canva settles into running the show with this newly-acquired brand. I certainly wouldn't plan on the new Affinity staying free, but if you're seeking a non-Adobe design tool, I do recommend trying it out while you can.
Online appointment booking: TidyCal
TidyCal is an online booking platform that makes it easy to set up booking calendars, and also includes features like recurring subscriptions and the ability to sell multi-session packages. They do have a monthly pricing model for their highest tier, but they also offer a Free tier, and more notably, Lifetime licenses for the middle tiers as a one-time payment.
TidyCal is owned by SumoGroup, which has a few other small business productivity tools under its umbrella. TidyCal’s website apparently also features a directory of service providers, which you can list in for free if you have an account. The vibe from this company is, from what I can tell, pretty wholesome and earnest, which is a big motivator for me to try their tools.
Websites and blogging: Wordpress
Wordpress is probably one of the highest-profile open-source tools out there, and it’s worth considering for one very big reason: downloading the Wordpress core platform is free, and you can take your website anywhere. You can export your data anytime, and even import it into a different tool. Hate your webhost? Grab a backup and move to a different webhost. You’re not beholden to anyone if you don’t want to be.
As an openly-biased Wordpress booster, I do acknowledge that the learning curve is higher in Wordpress than it is on other website builders. They have been actively working to shorten that learning curve with their block builder, though. In their most recent core update, they’ve added in-editor responsive styling, for better control over how your site looks on mobile. They’ve also added the ability to tag teammates on specific parts of a page, for better collaborative editing.
The real win with their block builder improvements? They've vastly reduced the dependency on third-party builders like Elementor or Divi--which are, frankly, unwieldy and expensive tools in and of themselves. If you haven’t tangled with a basic Wordpress install in the past few years, it’s worth giving it another try.
What other tools are you seeking alternatives for? I’m in the midst of test-driving an open-source alternative to Airtable, which I’ll be sharing in the coming weeks, but if there’s another mission-critical tool on your list, let me know what it is, and I can dig into it.
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