Stop guessing which one. Put them side by side.

The grid says what these tools are. This says what builders did about it — one decision per person, changeable whenever you change your mind.

# Tool comparison — Better-T-Stack vs AlternativeTo vs Anthropic Academy (incl. Claude Code in Action)

Source: Kbaise, a directory of tools that work with Lovable projects.
Pick one and tell me why before writing any integration code.

## Better-T-Stack (better-t-stack)
- URL: https://better-t-stack.dev
- Category: Learning, communities & starter kits
- Cost: free — Free and open source (MIT)
- What it is: CLI plus browser stack builder that scaffolds end-to-end typesafe TypeScript projects from parts you choose: Hono or Elysia, tRPC or oRPC, Drizzle or Prisma, Turso, Neon or Convex, Better Auth, Turborepo monorepos and web or native frontends. 5,600+ stars, MIT, actively developed.
- Why builders pick it: The maintained answer to create-t3-app's drift: same typesafe philosophy, current dependencies, and you pick the pieces rather than accept one opinion. Preview a stack in the web builder before generating anything.
- Trap: Essentially one maintainer (Aman Varshney) with sponsor backing. The large option matrix means less common combinations are far less battle-tested than the defaults.
- Wiring: bun create better-t-stack@latest
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/better-t-stack

## AlternativeTo (alternativeto)
- URL: https://alternativeto.net
- Category: Learning, communities & starter kits
- Cost: free — Free · no paid tier · funded by partnerships and optional donations
- What it is: Crowdsourced database of 150,000+ apps and services ranked by more than two million user opinions, filterable by platform, licence, self-hosted and open source. Community rankings sit alongside staff-curated Crew Picks, and anyone can submit apps or reviews.
- Why builders pick it: The honest counterweight to paid AI directories: when a tool doubles its price or kills its free tier, this is where you find the cheaper or self-hostable replacement in one search.
- Trap: Rankings reward long-standing vote counts, so established tools outrank newer ones and coverage of 2026-era agent tooling lags specialist directories.
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/alternativeto

## Anthropic Academy (incl. Claude Code in Action) (anthropic-academy)
- URL: https://www.anthropic.com/learn
- Category: Learning, communities & starter kits
- Cost: free — Free · every course and certificate, no credit card · account required
- What it is: Anthropic's own course catalog, hosted on Skilljar. Tracks cover Claude 101, Claude Code 101, Cowork, Agent Skills, MCP and the Claude API. Claude Code in Action is the deepest: plan mode, compaction, the rewind menu, hooks, permission modes, headless runs, GitHub Actions review and packaging plugins.
- Why builders pick it: Free, current, and written by the people who ship the tool, so it is right about defaults that blog posts get wrong. Best first stop once you are past single prompts and want longer unsupervised runs.
- Trap: Vendor training: it teaches the Anthropic way and never compares Claude Code with Cursor, Codex or Gemini CLI. Courses change as the product ships, so bookmarked lessons go stale.
- Wiring: https://anthropic.skilljar.com
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/anthropic-academy

## Rules
1. Prefer the free tier when no budget was stated, and say what the ceiling is.
2. Read the full dossier before integrating.
3. Fetch /api/public/models before writing any AI model ID.

Agents can fetch the same thing: GET /api/public/compare?slugs=better-t-stack,alternativeto,anthropic-academy