What is Unicorns and what are its top alternatives?
Unicorns are a term used to describe privately held startup companies valued at over $1 billion. These companies are typically technology-based and are known for their rapid growth and disruptive innovation. However, while unicorns can achieve great success, they also face challenges such as maintaining high valuations, managing rapid growth, and achieving profitability.
- Decacorns: Decacorns are companies valued at over $10 billion, representing an even higher level of success compared to unicorns. These companies have typically proven their market viability and scalability, making them attractive investment opportunities. However, they may face increased pressure to sustain their growth trajectory.
- Blue-chip companies: Blue-chip companies are established, financially stable companies with a long history of success. They offer investors a sense of security and stability compared to high-growth startups like unicorns. However, blue-chip companies may have slower growth rates and limited potential for explosive returns.
- Startups with sustainable growth: While unicorns focus on rapid growth and market disruption, some startups prioritize sustainable growth and profitability. These companies may have a more stable business model and a lower risk profile compared to unicorns. However, they may not attract as much attention from investors seeking high-growth opportunities.
- Potential Unicorns: Potential unicorns are startups that show promise and have the potential to reach unicorn status in the future. These companies are often in early stages of growth and may offer high-risk, high-reward investment opportunities. However, investing in potential unicorns carries greater uncertainty compared to established unicorns.
- Tech conglomerates: Tech conglomerates are large, diversified technology companies that own multiple subsidiaries and operate in various sectors. These companies offer investors exposure to a wide range of tech-related businesses and may provide stability and growth potential. However, tech conglomerates may have complex corporate structures and face challenges in managing diverse business interests.
- Scale-ups: Scale-ups are fast-growing companies that have moved beyond the startup phase and are focused on scaling their operations. These companies may offer investors a balance of growth potential and market maturity compared to unicorns. However, scale-ups may face challenges in scaling efficiently and maintaining their growth trajectory.
- Emerging technology companies: Emerging technology companies are startups operating in cutting-edge industries such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and biotech. These companies offer investors exposure to innovative technologies and disruptive trends. However, investing in emerging technology companies carries higher risk due to the uncertainty of new markets and technologies.
- Global market leaders: Global market leaders are established companies that dominate their respective industries on a global scale. These companies offer investors stability, brand recognition, and global reach compared to unicorns. However, global market leaders may face challenges in maintaining their competitive edge and adapting to market changes.
- **Profitable ventures]: Profitable ventures are companies that prioritize profitability and sustainable growth over rapid expansion. These ventures offer investors a sense of security and financial stability compared to high-growth startups like unicorns. However, profitable ventures may have lower growth potential and may not attract as much attention from venture capital firms.
- Tech IPOs: Tech IPOs are initial public offerings of technology companies on stock exchanges. These companies offer investors the opportunity to invest in established tech firms with proven track records and market valuations. However, investing in tech IPOs carries market risk and may not offer the same potential for explosive returns as investing in unicorns.
Top Alternatives to Unicorns
- Unicorn
Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients. ...
- Puma
Unlike other Ruby Webservers, Puma was built for speed and parallelism. Puma is a small library that provides a very fast and concurrent HTTP 1.1 server for Ruby web applications. ...
- Slack
Imagine all your team communication in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go. That’s Slack. All your messages. All your files. And everything from Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, GitHub and dozens of other services. All together. ...
- Jira
Jira's secret sauce is the way it simplifies the complexities of software development into manageable units of work. Jira comes out-of-the-box with everything agile teams need to ship value to customers faster. ...
- Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process. ...
- G Suite
An integrated suite of secure, cloud-native collaboration and productivity apps. It includes Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Meet and more. ...
- Confluence
Capture the knowledge that's too often lost in email inboxes and shared network drives in Confluence instead – where it's easy to find, use, and update. ...
- Skype
Skype’s text, voice and video make it simple to share experiences with the people that matter to you, wherever they are. ...
Unicorns alternatives & related posts
- Fast81
- Performance59
- Web server36
- Very light30
- Open Source30
- Rack http server27
- Load balancing18
- Great process management14
- Not multithreaded4
related Unicorn posts
In 2012 we made the very difficult decision to entirely re-engineer our existing monolithic LAMP application from the ground up in order to address some growing concerns about it's long term viability as a platform.
Full application re-write is almost always never the answer, because of the risks involved. However the situation warranted drastic action as it was clear that the existing product was going to face severe scaling issues. We felt it better address these sooner rather than later and also take the opportunity to improve the international architecture and also to refactor the database in. order that it better matched the changes in core functionality.
PostgreSQL was chosen for its reputation as being solid ACID compliant database backend, it was available as an offering AWS RDS service which reduced the management overhead of us having to configure it ourselves. In order to reduce read load on the primary database we implemented an Elasticsearch layer for fast and scalable search operations. Synchronisation of these indexes was to be achieved through the use of Sidekiq's Redis based background workers on Amazon ElastiCache. Again the AWS solution here looked to be an easy way to keep our involvement in managing this part of the platform at a minimum. Allowing us to focus on our core business.
Rails ls was chosen for its ability to quickly get core functionality up and running, its MVC architecture and also its focus on Test Driven Development using RSpec and Selenium with Travis CI providing continual integration. We also liked Ruby for its terse, clean and elegant syntax. Though YMMV on that one!
Unicorn was chosen for its continual deployment and reputation as a reliable application server, nginx for its reputation as a fast and stable reverse-proxy. We also took advantage of the Amazon CloudFront CDN here to further improve performance by caching static assets globally.
We tried to strike a balance between having control over management and configuration of our core application with the convenience of being able to leverage AWS hosted services for ancillary functions (Amazon SES , Amazon SQS Amazon Route 53 all hosted securely inside Amazon VPC of course!).
Whilst there is some compromise here with potential vendor lock in, the tasks being performed by these ancillary services are no particularly specialised which should mitigate this risk. Furthermore we have already containerised the stack in our development using Docker environment, and looking to how best to bring this into production - potentially using Amazon EC2 Container Service
We switched from Unicorn (process model) to Puma (threaded model) to decrease the memory footprint of our Rails production web server. Memory indeed dropped from 6GB to only 1GB!
We just had to decrease our worker count and increase our thread count instead. Performance (response time and throughput) remained the same, if not slightly better. We had no thread-safety errors, which was good.
Free bonus points are:
- Requests are blazing fast on our dev and staging environments!
- Puma has first-class support for WebSockets, so we know for sure that Rails ActionCable or GraphQL subscriptions will work great.
- Being on Puma makes us even more "default Rails"-compliant since it is the default Rails web server these days.
- Free4
- Convenient3
- Easy3
- Multithreaded2
- Consumes less memory than Unicorn2
- Default Rails server2
- First-class support for WebSockets2
- Lightweight1
- Fast1
- Uses `select` (limited client count)0
related Puma posts
We switched from Unicorn (process model) to Puma (threaded model) to decrease the memory footprint of our Rails production web server. Memory indeed dropped from 6GB to only 1GB!
We just had to decrease our worker count and increase our thread count instead. Performance (response time and throughput) remained the same, if not slightly better. We had no thread-safety errors, which was good.
Free bonus points are:
- Requests are blazing fast on our dev and staging environments!
- Puma has first-class support for WebSockets, so we know for sure that Rails ActionCable or GraphQL subscriptions will work great.
- Being on Puma makes us even more "default Rails"-compliant since it is the default Rails web server these days.
I have an integration service that pulls data from third party systems saves it and returns it to the user of the service. We can pull large data sets with the service and response JSON can go up to 5MB with gzip compression. I currently use Rails 6 and Ruby 2.7.2 and Puma web server. Slow clients tend to prevent other users from accessing the system. Am considering a switch to Unicorn.
- Easy to integrate with1.2K
- Excellent interface on multiple platforms876
- Free849
- Mobile friendly694
- People really enjoy using it690
- Great integrations331
- Flexible notification preferences315
- Unlimited users198
- Strong search and data archiving184
- Multi domain switching support155
- Easy to use82
- Beautiful40
- Hubot support27
- Unread/read control22
- Slackbot21
- Permalink for each messages19
- Text snippet with highlighting17
- Quote message easily15
- Per-room notification14
- Awesome integration support13
- Star for each message / attached files12
- IRC gateway12
- Good communication within a team11
- Dropbox Integration11
- Slick, search is great10
- Jira Integration10
- New Relic Integration9
- Great communication tool8
- Combine All Services Quickly8
- Asana Integration8
- This tool understands developers7
- XMPP gateway7
- Google Drive Integration7
- Awesomeness7
- Replaces email6
- Twitter Integration6
- Google Docs Integration6
- BitBucket integration6
- Jenkins Integration5
- GREAT Customer Support / Quick Response to Feedback5
- Guest and Restricted user control5
- Clean UI4
- Excellent multi platform internal communication tool4
- GitHub integration4
- Mention list view4
- Gathers all my communications in one place4
- Perfect implementation of chat + integrations3
- Easy3
- Easy to add a reaction3
- Timely while non intrusive3
- Great on-boarding3
- Threaded chat3
- Visual Studio Integration3
- Easy to start working with3
- Android app3
- Simplicity2
- Message Actions2
- It's basically an improved (although closed) IRC2
- So much better than email2
- Eases collaboration for geographically dispersed teams2
- Great interface2
- Great Channel Customization2
- Markdown2
- Intuitive, easy to use, great integrations2
- Great Support Team1
- Watch1
- Multi work-space support1
- Flexible and Accessible1
- Better User Experience1
- Archive Importing1
- Travis CI integration1
- It's the coolest IM ever1
- Community1
- Great API1
- Easy remote communication1
- Get less busy1
- API1
- Zapier integration1
- Targetprocess integration1
- Finally with terrible "threading"—I miss Flowdock1
- Complete with plenty of Electron BLOAT1
- I was 666 star :D1
- Dev communication Made Easy1
- Integrates with just about everything1
- Very customizable1
- Platforms0
- Easy to useL0
- Can be distracting depending on how you use it13
- Requires some management for large teams6
- Limit messages history6
- Too expensive5
- You don't really own your messages5
- Too many notifications by default4
related Slack posts
Sentry has been essential to our development approach. Nobody likes errors or apps that crash. We use Sentry heavily during Node.js and React development. Our developers are able to see error reports, crashes, user's browsers, and more, all in one place. Sentry also seamlessly integrates with Asana, Slack, and GitHub.
Last time we shared there information about our decision about using YouTrack over Jira actually we found much better solution that our team have loved. Linear is a minimalistic issue tracker that integrates well with Sentry, GitHub, Slack and Figma which are our basic tools. I would like to recommend checking out Linear as a potential alternative to "heavy" issue trackers, maybe at enterprises that may not work but when we're a startup that works awesome!
Jira
- Powerful310
- Flexible254
- Easy separation of projects149
- Run in the cloud113
- Code integration105
- Easy to use58
- Run on your own53
- Great customization39
- Easy Workflow Configuration39
- REST API27
- Great Agile Management tool12
- Integrates with virtually everything7
- Confluence6
- Complicated6
- Sentry Issues Integration3
- It's awesome2
- Rather expensive8
- Large memory requirement5
- Slow2
- Cloud or Datacenter only1
related Jira posts
So I am a huge fan of JIRA like #massive I used it for many many years, and really loved it, used it personally and at work. I would suggest every new workplace that I worked at to switch to JIRA instead of what I was using.
When I started at #StackShare we were using a Trello #Kanban board and I was so shocked at how easy the workflow was to follow, create new tasks and get tasks QA'd and deployed. What was so great about this was it didn't come with all the complexity of JIRA. Like setting up a project, user rules etc. You are able to hit the ground running with Trello and get tasks started right away without being overwhelmed with the complexity of options in JIRA
With a few TrelloPowerUps we were easily able to add GitHub integration and storyPoints to our cards and thats all we needed to get a really nice agile workflow going.
I'm not saying that JIRA is not useful, I can see larger companies being able to use the JIRA features and have the time to go through all the complex setup to get a really good workflow going. But for smaller #Startups that want to hit the ground running Trello for me is the way to go.
In saying that what I would love Trello to implement is to allow me to create custom fields. Right now we just have a Description
field. So I am adding User Stories
& How To Test
in the Markdown of the Description
if I could have these as custom fields then my #Agile workflow would be complete.
#StackDecisionsLaunch
Last time we shared there information about our decision about using YouTrack over Jira actually we found much better solution that our team have loved. Linear is a minimalistic issue tracker that integrates well with Sentry, GitHub, Slack and Figma which are our basic tools. I would like to recommend checking out Linear as a potential alternative to "heavy" issue trackers, maybe at enterprises that may not work but when we're a startup that works awesome!
- Great for collaboration715
- Easy to use628
- Free573
- Fast375
- Realtime347
- Intuitive237
- Visualizing215
- Flexible169
- Fun user interface126
- Snappy and blazing fast83
- Simple, intuitive UI that gets out of your way30
- Kanban27
- Clean Interface21
- Easy setup18
- Card Structure18
- Drag and drop attachments17
- Simple11
- Markdown commentary on cards10
- Lists9
- Integration with other work collaborative apps9
- Satisfying User Experience8
- Cross-Platform Integration8
- Recognizes GitHub commit links7
- Easy to learn6
- Great5
- Better than email4
- Versatile Team & Project Management4
- and lots of integrations3
- Trello’s Developmental Transparency3
- Effective3
- Easy2
- Powerful2
- Agile2
- Easy to have an overview of the project status2
- flexible and fast2
- Simple and intuitive2
- Name rolls of the tongue1
- Customizable1
- Email integration1
- Personal organisation1
- Nice1
- Great organizing (of events/tasks)1
- Easiest way to visually express the scope of projects0
- No concept of velocity or points5
- Very light native integrations4
- A little too flexible2
related Trello posts
So I am a huge fan of JIRA like #massive I used it for many many years, and really loved it, used it personally and at work. I would suggest every new workplace that I worked at to switch to JIRA instead of what I was using.
When I started at #StackShare we were using a Trello #Kanban board and I was so shocked at how easy the workflow was to follow, create new tasks and get tasks QA'd and deployed. What was so great about this was it didn't come with all the complexity of JIRA. Like setting up a project, user rules etc. You are able to hit the ground running with Trello and get tasks started right away without being overwhelmed with the complexity of options in JIRA
With a few TrelloPowerUps we were easily able to add GitHub integration and storyPoints to our cards and thats all we needed to get a really nice agile workflow going.
I'm not saying that JIRA is not useful, I can see larger companies being able to use the JIRA features and have the time to go through all the complex setup to get a really good workflow going. But for smaller #Startups that want to hit the ground running Trello for me is the way to go.
In saying that what I would love Trello to implement is to allow me to create custom fields. Right now we just have a Description
field. So I am adding User Stories
& How To Test
in the Markdown of the Description
if I could have these as custom fields then my #Agile workflow would be complete.
#StackDecisionsLaunch
For Etom, a side project. We wanted to test an idea for a future and bigger project.
What Etom does is searching places. Right now, it leverages the Google Maps API. For that, we found a React component that makes this integration easy because using Google Maps API is not possible via normal API requests.
You kind of need a map to work as a proxy between the software and Google Maps API.
We hate configuration(coming from Rails world) so also decided to use Create React App because setting up a React app, with all the toys, it's a hard job.
Thanks to all the people behind Create React App it's easier to start any React application.
We also chose a module called Reactstrap which is Bootstrap UI in React components.
An important thing in this side project(and in the bigger project plan) is to measure visitor through out the app. For that we researched and found that Keen was a good choice(very good free tier limits) and also it is very simple to setup and real simple to send data to
Slack and Trello are our defaults tools to comunicate ideas and discuss topics, so, no brainer using them as well for this project.
- Gmail609
- Google docs447
- Calendar365
- Great for startups284
- Easy to work230
- Document management & workflow115
- Very easy to share110
- No brainer80
- Google groups59
- Google scripts & api59
- Google drive22
- Popular16
- No spam, phishing protection13
- Google Spreadsheets12
- Easy12
- Cloud based and collaboration10
- Simple and fast document creation collaboration7
- Best Cloud environment ever6
- Google maps api5
- Awesome Collaboration Tools3
- Google-powered Search in Gmail3
- Geolocation3
- 도메인 단위로 어플을 관리할 수 있고, 클라우드지만 강력한 보안기능과 기기관리 기능을 제공1
- music1
- Single sign-on1
- Simple1
- Starting to get pricey6
- Good luck changing domains4
- Lesser fonts and styling available in mail compose1
- Long emails get truncated1
related G Suite posts
Using Screenhero via Slack was getting to be pretty horrible. Video and sound quality was often times pretty bad and worst of all the service just wasn't reliable. We all had high hopes when the acquisition went through but ultimately, the product just didn't live up to expectations. We ended up trying Zoom after I had heard about it from some friends at other companies. We noticed the video/sound quality was better, and more importantly it was super reliable. The Slack integration was awesome (just type /zoom and it starts a call)
You can schedule recurring calls which is helpful. There's a G Suite (Google Calendar) integration which lets you add a Zoom call (w/dial in info + link to web/mobile) with the click of a button.
Meeting recordings (video and audio) are really nice, you get recordings stored in the cloud on the higher tier plans. One of our engineers, Jerome, actually built a cool little Slack integration using the Slack API and Zoom API so that every time a recording is processed, a link gets posted to the "event-recordings" channel. The iOS app is great too!
#WebAndVideoConferencing #videochat
We are highly dependent on G Suite for all our collaboration and productivity needs, from Gmail and Calendar to Sheets and Docs. While it may not be as robust as Microsoft's offerings in those areas, it's totally cloud-based, we've never had any downtime issues and it integrates well with our other tools like Slack. We write and collaborate on all our specs/PRDs in Docs, share analyses via Sheets and handle our meetings via Calendar. #StackDecisionsLaunch #ProductivitySuite #Collaboration #DocumentCollaboration
- Wiki search power94
- WYSIWYG editor62
- Full featured, works well with embedded docs43
- Expensive licenses3
- Expensive license3
related Confluence posts
We knew how we wanted to build our Design System, now it was time to choose the tools to get us there. The essence of Scrum is a small team of people. The team is highly flexible and adaptive. Perfect, so we'll work in 2 week sprints where each sprint can be a mix of new R&D stories, a presentation of decisions made, and showcasing key development milestones.
We are also able to run content stories in parallel, focusing development efforts around key areas of the site that our authors need first. Our stories would exist in a Jira backlog, documentation would be hosted in Confluence , and GitHub would host our codebase. If developers identify technical improvements during the sprint, they can be added as GitHub issues and transferred to Jira if we decide to represent them as stories for the Backlog. For Sprint Retrospectives, @groupmap proved to be a great way to include our remote members of the dev team.
This worked well for our team and allowed us to be flexible in what we wanted to build and how we wanted to build it. As we further defined our Backlog and estimated each story, we could accurately measure the team's capacity (velocity) and confidently estimate a launch date.
As a new company we could early adopt and bet on #RemoteTeam setup without cultural baggage derailing us. Our building blocks for developing remote working culture are:
- Hiring people who are self sufficient, self-disciplined and excel at video and written communication to work remotely
- Set up periodic ceremonies ( #DailyStandup, #Grooming, Release calls and chats etc) to keep the company rhythm / heartbeat going across remote cells
- Regularly train your leaders to take into account remote working aspects of organizing f2f calls, events, meetups, parties etc. when communicating and organizing workflows
- And last, but not least - select the right tools to support effective communication and collaboration:
- All feeds and conversations come together in Slack
- #Agile workflows in Jira
- InProductCommunication and #CustomerSupportChat in Intercom
- #Notes, #Documentation and #Requirements in Confluence
- #SourceCode and ContinuousDelivery in Bitbucket
- Persistent video streams between locations, demos, meetings run on appear.in
- #Logging and Alerts in Papertrail
- Free, widespread258
- Desktop and mobile apps147
- Because i have to :(110
- Low cost international calling57
- Good for international calls56
- Best call quality anywhere, generally10
- Beautiful emojis5
- Chat bots4
- Translator2
- Skype for business integration with Outlook2
- United kingdom1
- Not the Best, but get the job done1
- Really high CPU utilization during video/screenshare5
- Not always reliable3
- Outdated UI3
- Birthday notifications are annoying3
- The worst indicator noises of any app ever3
- Finding/adding people isn't easy2
related Skype posts
Uploadcare is mostly remote team and we're using video conferencing all the time both for internal team meetings and for external sales, support, interview, etc. calls. I think we've tried every solution there is on the market before we've decided to stop with Zoom.
Tools just plainly don't work (Skype), are painful to install for external participants (Webex and other "enterprise" solutions) can't properly handle 10+ participants calls (Google Hangouts Chat).
Zoom just works. It has all required features and even handles bad connections very graciously. One of the best tool decisions we've ever made :)
I use Slack because it offers the best experience, even on the free tier (which we're still using). As a comparison, I have had in depth experience with HipChat, Stride, Skype, Google Chat (the new service), Google Hangouts (the old service). For self hosted, Mattermost is open source and claims to support most Slack integrations, but I have not extensively investigated this claim.