Find Alternatives on GitHub

Given one reference project, produce a shortlist of projects solving the same problem — competitors, forks that took a different direction, or adjacent tools covering the same use case.

When to use

Trigger phrases include:

• "What are the alternatives to X?"
• "Is there something similar to X but [smaller / in Go / maintained]?"
• "I'm using X but it feels abandoned — what else is out there?"
• "Show me competitors to X"

Procedure

1. Inspect the reference project first

Start by pulling metadata on the reference so you know what to search for:

gh api repos/<owner>/<repo> --jq '{full_name, description, language, topics, homepage, stars: .stargazers_count, pushed_at}'

From this, extract:

• The topics (GitHub's own tags) —

  .topics

• Keywords in the description
• The primary language (if the user wants same-language alternatives)

2. Search using the reference's topics

Topics are the cleanest signal for "same category":

gh api -X GET search/repositories \
  -f q='topic:<topic1> topic:<topic2> -repo:<owner>/<repo> archived:false' \
  -f sort=stars -f order=desc --jq '.items[:20] | .[] | {full_name, stars: .stargazers_count, pushed_at, language, description, url: .html_url}'

Exclude the reference repo itself with

-repo:<owner>/<repo>

.

3. Keyword fallback

If topics are sparse, build a keyword query from the reference description:

gh search repos "<keywords from description>" \
  --sort stars --limit 20 \
  --json name,owner,description,stargazersCount,pushedAt,language,url

4. Find hard forks that became their own thing

Sometimes the best alternative is a fork that diverged:

gh api "repos/<owner>/<repo>/forks?sort=stargazers&per_page=20" --jq '.[] | select(.stargazers_count > 10) | {full_name, stars: .stargazers_count, pushed_at, description}'

A fork with meaningful stars and ongoing commits usually indicates a serious divergence worth surfacing.

5. Present a comparison

Include the reference project at the top for calibration, then list alternatives ranked by a composite of stars + recency. For each alternative:

• Full name, stars, last push
• Primary language
• One-sentence description
• A short "vs reference" note — how it differs (smaller scope, different language, more active maintenance, different license, etc.)

6. Offer next steps

Typical follow-ups:

• Deeper dive on 2–3 of the alternatives via

  evaluate-candidates

• Documenting the landscape via

  document-findings

Guidance

• Don't just list — differentiate. The whole point of this skill is helping the user see why they might pick a different option.
• Watch for forks-of-forks confusion — sometimes the community has migrated to a descendant fork while the original repo sits abandoned.
• Include language-native alternatives if the user is looking to switch ecosystems (e.g. Go rewrite of a Python tool).
• Do not invent projects. Report only what the CLI returned.