alternatives

Open-source or self-hosted replacements for a hosted product, with the licence and the reviewer's answer.

alternatives answers "what can I run myself instead of this". It reads verdicts of kind alternatives, and it renders differently from the other verdict tools: a list of named candidates with their licences, then the reviewer's prose, then the provenance line.

Arguments

Name	Type	Limits	Required	Default
`to`	string	1 to 80 characters	yes	none
`kind`	enum	`open_source`, `self_hosted`, or `any`	no	`any`

kind is part of the search text, not a filter: self_hosted adds the words "self hosted" to the query and any adds nothing. It nudges the match, it does not guarantee that every row you get back is self-hostable. The licence in each row is the fact to read.

Request

tools/call params

{
  "name": "alternatives",
  "arguments": { "to": "Google Analytics", "kind": "open_source" }
}

Response

ALTERNATIVES to Google Analytics
  Umami (MIT): Self-hosted, cookie-free web analytics on Node and Postgres, with a tracker script under 2 KB.
Umami v3.3.1 if you want to self-host: MIT, one Node process against Postgres 12.14 or newer, and the script is under 2 KB. Plausible Community Edition is AGPLv3 and the calmer product, but it ships as a long term release twice a year and holds funnels, user journeys, ecommerce revenue goals, SSO and the Sites API back for the paid cloud. PostHog gives you far more than page views and says self-hosted deployments are officially unsupported.
VERIFIED 2026-09-08 · recheck 2027-01-06 · sources 4 · https://wellworn.dev/verdicts/analytics-without-cookies
remaining: 53

The indented rows are the verdict's pick followed by its component nodes, five at most, each printed as name (licence): summary. A verdict that names only one replacement, as this one does, lists one row and puts the rest of the comparison in the prose. Products the verdict marks as the alternative or the thing to avoid are not listed here; they are on the verdict page the last line links to.

This block has no character cap and no [RECHECK] word of its own: a verdict flagged for recheck prints [RECHECK] after the product name in the first line.

When there is no verdict

no verified alternatives list yet for "Datadog". Browse https://wellworn.dev/verdicts or request one at https://wellworn.dev/request
remaining: 52

The open-source catalog behind wellworn.dev/alternatives is much larger than the set of written verdicts, so a product with no verdict often still has candidates on the site. The catalog page explains where those rows come from and what they are not.

Limit and error lines

Line	Cause
`MCP error -32602: Input validation error: …`	`to` missing, empty, over 80 characters, or `kind` outside the three allowed values.
`limit reached: …`	The window is spent. Limits.
`internal error (ref …); try again in a moment`	Server side.

What to do with the answer

Check the licence before the feature list: AGPL and MIT put different obligations on what you are building. The prose usually says what the self-hosted edition holds back from the cloud product, and that gap is the part a feature comparison table hides. When the list has one row, the answer is "one thing is worth running yourself", not "one thing exists".