How Liners chooses product alternatives

Alternatives are products with useful overlap

Liners suggests alternatives when products share enough purpose, features, market fit, or audience to help a reader compare options.

The method can consider:

• Product category and use case.
• Features and platform support.
• Countries or markets served.
• The strength of the available product information.

Payment and verified status

Paid listing status does not change alternatives similarity. Verified status also does not change the similarity score.

Other public signals may help order products that have similar fit, but they do not make an unrelated product an alternative.

Read how Liners ranks products for order rules on other pages.

When Liners calculates alternatives

Liners calculates alternatives after a product becomes public and may refresh them when product facts or the wider directory change.

This process does not rewrite the product's review rating or comparison scores.

Curated pages for popular global products

Liners also publishes pages that list African-built alternatives to well-known global products, at addresses like /african-alternatives/paypal. These work differently from the calculated alternatives above.

• The links are curated by people, with editorial review, not produced by the similarity method.
• The global product itself is not listed on Liners and has no product page here.
• A page only exists while at least two published African products are linked to it. If products are removed or unpublished and the count drops below two, the page comes down.

Paid and verified status do not affect which products appear on these pages either.

Alternatives and comparisons

Liners may use the alternatives relationship to check whether products belong in the same comparison. The comparison then scores its own visible criteria.

Read how product comparisons work for that separate method.

Limits

Two products can share a category and still serve different customers. Product websites may also leave out features, markets, or platform support.

Use alternatives as a starting point. Check each product's current website, pricing, availability, and terms.

You can suggest a correction if a product has the wrong category, feature, country, or other fact. You can also use Liners search to narrow products by your own terms.