You can now log in to AlternativeTo with an email adress and password

We have always believed that smaller websites have more important things to think about than handling their users logins. We also believe that users should be careful about entering their email address and password into random forms on the internet. We think that as few websites as possible should store your passwords in their database and that centralised (preferably two-step) login systems are great. That is why we always have had support for third party logins and not provided one of our own.

But, there is always a but. We have now decided to implement our own email/password login option now for a few reasons:

• OpenID didn’t really take off as we thought it would. We still think OpenID is great but unfortunately it has become a niche product that not many people support or use. The reasons for this can be discussed, but not in this blog post.
• A lot of people have asked for a email/password login method over the years.
• We now have great resources to store your password in a way that is as safe as we want our own passwords to be stored.

If you always wanted to log in to AlternativeTo with your email and a password then it is now possible to do so. You can still, of course, log in with a third-party provider, and it is also possible to connect multiple login methods to your AlternativeTo account.

Please remember folks: Never use the same combination of password and email adress on multiple sites, and use a password manager to store your (hopefully) unique passwords. There are many awesome password managers available today and they help you staying safe and organised.