Tools for building ambitious startups

Countly is a privacy-focused digital and product analytics platform that captures user behavior across mobile, web, and desktop apps, with engagement tools like push notifications, A/B testing, and surveys. It can be deployed in the cloud or self-hosted for full data ownership.

Alternative toAmplitude|GAGoogle Analytics|Heap

Coverr offers a library of free stock videos that can be used for homepage backgrounds, b-roll, and social media, royalty-free and without attribution. It also offers paid AI creation plans with credits for generating images, videos, and music.

Craft.io is an AI-powered product management platform that connects strategy, roadmapping, prioritization, and feedback management in one collaborative workspace. It gives product teams a single source of truth for planning and execution.

Alternative toAha!|Productboard|AAirfocus

Crisp is a customer messaging platform that bundles live chat, chatbots, a shared inbox, and a help desk with knowledge base tools. It supports multi-channel messaging across email, WhatsApp, Instagram, SMS, and more.

Alternative toTidio|LiveChat|Zendesk

Freshsales is Freshworks' AI-powered sales CRM that combines calling, emailing, and lead tracking in one workspace. Its Freddy AI assistant scores leads, suggests next steps, and flags deals likely to stall.

Cronhub is a cron monitoring tool that lets you schedule and monitor recurring jobs without managing servers or infrastructure. It delivers instant alerts via email, SMS, Slack, webhooks, or PagerDuty when jobs fail or miss their schedule.

Crowdfire was a social media management tool for scheduling posts, curating content, and monitoring brand mentions across networks like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. It officially shut down on May 15, 2025, and the crowdfireapp.com domain now hosts an unrelated media site.

Alternative toBuffer|Hootsuite|SSocialBee

Crowdsignal is a survey, poll, and quiz tool by Automattic that lets you build branded forms and distribute them across WordPress, social media, email, and the web while collecting and analyzing responses.

Alternative toSurveyMonkey|Typeform|Google Forms

Crunchbase is a private market intelligence platform with data on companies, funding rounds, investors, and market trends. Users search organizations, track funding activity, and surface growth predictions for sales, investing, and research.

Alternative toPitchBook|CICB Insights|Tracxn

Customer.io is a customer engagement platform that unifies first-party data, messaging, and AI to automate personalized lifecycle campaigns across email, push, SMS, in-app, and other channels.

Alternative toHubSpot|BBraze|IIterable

Cyfe is an all-in-one business dashboard tool that pulls data from 100+ sources to monitor and visualize marketing, sales, social media, analytics, and support metrics in real time on a single screen.

Datadog is a cloud monitoring and observability platform that unifies infrastructure metrics, application performance, logs, and security across cloud, container, and serverless environments for full-stack visibility.

Alternative toNew Relic|DDynatrace|SSplunk

Google's interactive dashboard and reporting tool (now branded Looker Studio) that turns data from many sources into shareable, customizable visualizations and reports. Free to use with connectors to Google and third-party data.

Cloud invoicing and basic accounting software for freelancers, sole traders, and small businesses, covering invoices, expenses, and financial reporting. Debitoor was acquired by SumUp and rebranded as SumUp Invoices in 2021, and the standalone Debitoor product has been retired.

Alternative toFreshBooks|QOQuickBooks Online|ZBZoho Books

AI-powered sales platform that records, transcribes, and analyzes sales conversations across video, phone, and in-person channels. Automates note-taking, CRM updates, and follow-ups while providing real-time coaching and pipeline insights.

Alternative toGong|CChorus|FFireflies

Deployment automation tool that connects code repositories to servers for automatic or manual releases, with build pipelines, zero-downtime deploys, instant rollbacks, and AI-assisted error diagnosis.

AI design platform that provides unified access to 30+ AI design engines across categories like image generation, video, graphic design, UI/UX, and illustration through a single interface.

Alternative toCanva|AFAdobe Firefly|MMidjourney

Browser-based drag-and-drop Bootstrap builder (the Startup app) for creating responsive websites, landing pages, and prototypes without coding, using 300+ pre-designed and pre-coded blocks.

Alternative toWebflow|Carrd|UUnbounce

Dexi.io is a web data extraction and intelligence platform with a point-and-click editor for building scraper robots, plus ETL tools to transform, aggregate, and combine the extracted data. The product is reportedly being sunset.

DigitalOcean is a cloud infrastructure provider offering virtual servers (Droplets), storage, managed databases, and other services through a simple control panel and API. It targets developers and startups who want affordable, easy-to-use cloud compute.

Discord is a communication platform for voice, video, and text chat, organized into customizable servers. It is widely used by gamers, friend groups, and online communities, with a paid Nitro subscription that adds perks.

Alternative toSlack|GGuilded|TTeamSpeak

Discourse is a free, open-source forum and community discussion platform that can be self-hosted or run on Discourse's managed hosting. It offers modern threaded discussions, trust levels, and a RESTful JSON API.

Alternative toFlarum|NNodeBB|PphpBB

Disqus is a hosted commenting and community engagement platform that website owners and publishers embed to host discussions, moderate comments, and engage their audience. It has an ad-supported free tier and paid plans.

Dissolve is a stock media marketplace offering premium royalty-free stock footage and photos, with a large library including exclusive clips. It uses a la carte licensing rather than subscriptions, with volume discounts.