Is it legal to use "alternative to" marketing? Is it effective?

Its very common to set up Their Product vs My Product landing pages for your major competitors.

Be honest about the pros and cons; rather than shamelessly pushing your product, use the opportunity to niche down and explain why My Product is better for this use-case by these people, and Their Product might be better for that use-case by those people.

Remember these are landing pages, know who you are talking to and speak to their concerns and needs specifically.

Why wouldn’t it be legal? Pepsi is an alternative to coke. That’s the entire universe of competitive positioning and yes, based on your product you absolutely should build content that highlights the differences between you and your competitors. “Why should I use you instead of them” is a question every potential user should be asking. If you don’t have that answer you’re going to lose that user.

It's legal and highly effective. Follow the advice of @Freeboots in the comments and then, if you've got the budget, drive paid traffic to these pages.

We do that with our Mailchimp alternative page – PPC ads on Google are targeting the keyword "alternative to mailchimp" and direct visitors to this page. It converts better than the homepage in this case.

It's 100% common practice in analytics. For example:

https://heap.io/compare/heap-vs-mixpanel
https://mixpanel.com/compare-to/heap/

I imagine it's similar in other spaces.

You're in the right direction. Customers have to right to know what are the alternative out there. So your job is to deliver your promising.

A good example to check out on this would be Savvycal. They specifically have a Savvycal as an alternative to Calendly page.

You can see it here:

https://savvycal.com/calendly-alternative

Alternatively, you can also do a comparison table like Mailerlite here:

https://www.mailerlite.com/compare

So definitely legal.

Derrick Reimer explains a bit of his logic behind comparison pages at the end of this episode if you'd like to check it out:

https://podcastaddict.com/episode/116357003

Personally, I believe it would be effective if you are entering a space with an incumbent who has lots of dissatisfied customers or if its a competitive product where people are looking for an overview of how features compare across various platforms before purchasing.

Having such a page will allow you to display more of that killer feature that people are looking for.

Just my $0.02 - in this case, the best way is to go for it and find out.

Hope that helps!

Yeah most of my growth comes from comparing with gumroad. It's so much easier talking to users who already kind of understand the problem

It think it’s perfectly fine. There is no rule saying you can’t. I think it’s a bit of a middle finger to other product/offering though, but nothing stopping you!🙏🏻🔥

It is legal if you are honest and don't use false data about your competitors.

From my perspective, it mostly works for SEO purposes - for a couple of businesses we managed to get some traffic which was comparing tools.