About

What Iranian Alternatives is, what we list, and how to contribute a service to the directory.

What is Iranian Alternatives?

Iranian Alternatives is a community-maintained, open-source directory of digital services that can replace international tools for users and businesses in Iran. It covers everything from cloud infrastructure and CDNs to messaging apps and project management tools, organized into categories so you can quickly find the local equivalent of a product you already know.

Many international services block signups from Iran, cannot accept Iranian payments, or may suspend accounts without notice. The services listed here work reliably inside Iran, bill in Iranian Rial, offer Persian-language support, and keep data on local infrastructure.

What we include

The directory lists services that are built and operated by Iranian companies and available to users in Iran. Generic open-source software is out of scope, even when it is self-hostable in Iran; directories like awesome-selfhosted already cover that ground, and our purpose is to showcase the Iranian digital ecosystem. An Iranian company offering a managed, hosted version of an open-source product does qualify, because in that case the service itself is Iranian.

A listing is not an endorsement. We do not test or audit the services; evaluate them against your own requirements before committing to one.

How to contribute

The whole directory lives in one GitHub repository, and every category is a single YAML file under content/5.categories/. To add a service, edit the category file and append an entry like this:

- name: Service Name
  description: One or two sentences about what the service does.
  logo: /logo/service-name.svg
  website: https://example.ir
  location: Iran
  flag: /flag/iran.svg
  tags:
    - Tag One
    - Tag Two

Put the logo file in public/logo/ (SVG preferred, or a PNG around 400px wide) rather than hotlinking it from the service's website, since hotlinked images break when the site changes. Then open a pull request, or simply open an issue with the service details and we will add it for you.

To propose a whole new category, create a new YAML file in content/5.categories/ with a title, description, icon, and services list; routing and navigation pick it up automatically.

Corrections and removals

If a listing is outdated, incorrect, or should be removed, open an issue describing the problem and we will fix it.