How Enlisted works. Where the data comes from, and how lists are ranked.

A directory for finding software by the job you need done or the app you want to replace. Open-source and SaaS tools are listed side by side, so you can put a paid product next to the open-source projects that replace it and compare licence, self-hosting, pricing and GitHub activity.

Search, filters, tool pages and alternatives pages are public, with no sign-in. Accounts only exist for makers who want to submit a tool or claim a listing, on app.enlisted.directory.

Enlisted is run by the team behind TrackRev, TrackMedia and Contant. Those products are listed here too, and they fill some hand-picked spots on the site (see Featured and pinned tools).

Open-source tools

Every week, Enlisted searches GitHub for self-hosted apps, projects that describe themselves as an alternative to a known product, and the most-starred projects in each category. New finds are imported as drafts. Drafts that clear this bar are published, and the rest wait in a review queue:

• at least 200 GitHub stars
• a project website, not just the GitHub page
• a clear category

Some well-known projects come from a hand-picked list, sorted by category, instead of from search. They are added by the team and skip the bar above.

Submitted by makers

Makers can submit a tool for free once signed in. Every submission is reviewed by a person before it’s listed. If a product is already listed, its maker can claim the listing: an email at the product’s domain, a DNS record or a meta tag proves they run it, and the listing gets a verified-owner badge. Claiming a listing doesn’t change its rank.

What gets left out

Forks and archived repositories. Awesome-lists and other link collections, tutorials, courses, books, interview prep, roadmaps and cheat sheets. Boilerplates, starters and templates. SDKs, bindings, wrappers and API clients. Offensive-security tooling, such as exploit kits and command-and-control frameworks, is out of scope. After import, listings are classified again, and code libraries and things that aren’t software are taken out.

SaaS products

SaaS products come from a researched list of popular products in each category. A product is only added if its website answers, which weeds out dead or made-up entries. Products that open-source projects name as the thing they replace are added too. Each SaaS product is then linked to the open-source tools that replace it, where any are listed.

Lists are ordered by a score built from public GitHub data. It has three parts:

• Popularity

  GitHub stars

  Counted on a log scale, so big projects don’t drown out the rest. 1,000 stars is worth 30 points, 10,000 is worth 40.

• Momentum

  30-day growth

  Stars gained in the last 30 days, as a share of the total. Up to 20 points, reached at 10% growth. Counts once a tool has 30 days of star history.

• Maintenance

  Recent activity

  The latest commit or release. Within 30 days adds 10 points, within 90 days 6, within a year 2. Nothing for over a year takes 10 off.

The score is recalculated each time GitHub data syncs, once a day. Category pages, alternatives pages and the main tool list all use it. You can also sort the tool list by stars, 30-day growth, newest or name.

Searches rank by how well a tool matches your words first: the product it replaces, its category, its name and its description. GitHub stars give popular projects a boost.

SaaS products have no public repository to measure, so they get a fixed baseline score. Among themselves they aren’t ranked by popularity, and active open-source projects usually rank above them in mixed lists.

Nobody can pay to move up. The one place the order is set by hand is the start of the homepage directory, described next.

A few spots are filled by hand rather than by score:

• The homepage directory’s default view (all categories, no search) starts with pinned tools. They carry no badge. Pick a category or type a search and the list goes back to the ranked order.
• The “Featured projects” box on tool pages starts with hand-picked tools, then fills up with top-ranked tools that have a logo.
• A small card marked “Ad” on public pages takes turns showing hand-picked products. Its links are marked as sponsored. Close it and it stays closed for the rest of your visit.
• Blog guides about a category where the team makes a product list that product first, and say so in the guide.

Right now every hand-picked spot shows a product made by the team behind Enlisted: TrackMedia, TrackRev and Contant.

These picks never change the order of search results, category pages, alternatives pages or the main tool list.

• GitHub. Stars, forks, open issues, latest commit and latest release, read from GitHub’s API. Licence, language and topics come from the repository too. A daily star count is kept for the 30-day growth figure.
• Project and vendor websites. Logos, screenshots, page details and pricing. Page text, screenshots and logos are only collected where the site’s robots.txt allows it. Screenshots hide cookie banners; they never click “accept”.
• Pricing. Read from the vendor’s own pricing page. A price is only shown if that number appears on the page, and the date it was checked is shown with it.
• Tool descriptions. Written by Muzahid Maruf, founder of NQM Studio LTD. Categories and “alternative to” links are checked against real listings before they’re published.

Every day

GitHub stats and scores are synced. New finds are imported as drafts. A batch of websites is checked for logos and page details.

Every week

GitHub is searched for new open-source projects.

In batches

Screenshots, written descriptions, categories and full pricing are produced in larger batch runs, not on a fixed schedule.

Every tool page shows when its data was last refreshed.

A tool is listed as an alternative to a product when it does the same core job, so you could switch to it. The link usually comes from the project itself: its README or GitHub description says so (“an open-source alternative to Notion”). Links are also added when a tool’s features are matched against the products in its category.

Each alternatives page lists the tools linked to that product, ranked by the score above. If nothing is linked to a product yet, its page shows open-source tools from the same category instead, and says so.

An alternative does the same job; it rarely matches every feature. Check each project’s own docs before you switch.

Spotted a wrong detail, want a listing removed, or have a question about how Enlisted works? Email maruf@trackrev.io. This is how listings change:

• GitHub numbers follow the repository. New stars, commits and releases show up after the next daily sync.
• Details taken from websites, such as screenshots, descriptions and pricing, aren’t live. They’re updated when those batches are run again, so they can lag behind a vendor’s site. Pricing shows the date it was checked.
• Listings that turn out to be code libraries, or not software at all, are taken out of the directory.

Makers of a listed product can also claim it for a verified-owner badge. Corrections to a claimed listing still go through the email above.

Page URLs are stable: /tools/<slug>, /alternatives/<slug> and /categories/<slug>. When a tool is renamed, its old URL redirects to the new one.

For AI tools and feed readers there’s a plain-text llms.txt, the full catalogue as text, an RSS feed of new listings and a sitemap.