Sourcing note
The directory lists more than nineteen hundred tools. A small number carry a quiet i marker. This page explains exactly what that marker means, and what it does not.
The marker means one thing: we have listed alternatives for that tool below. It is a signpost, not a verdict.
Cocoon is founded and run by one person, and like anyone spending money I make choices about which companies I would rather build a business on. Where I have made that choice, I would rather say so openly than quietly leave a tool out and pretend the directory is neutral. It is not neutral. No curated list is.
So the tools stay listed. The directory is a glossary, and leaving something out would make it less useful to you and would not change anything. But where I would personally reach for something else, the marker tells you that and points at the alternatives.
It is not an accusation against the company it sits beside. It does not claim that company has done anything wrong, and it should not be read that way. Many of the tools carrying the marker are ordinary software businesses — a database, a podcast recorder, a food-trends tool.
It is a note about my sourcing preferences, published so you can see them and disagree with them. If you think a tool is the right one for your work, use it. You are not being told otherwise.
I try to avoid building on companies where I believe money flows toward harming civilians. That is a judgement I apply to my own spending, informed by where a company is based, who funds it and who it sells to. Other people weigh this differently, and reasonable people land in different places. It is my call for my business, not a standard I am holding you to.
If you think I have marked something unfairly, or missed something that should be marked, tell me and I will look at it properly.
Every one of these is already in the directory. They are listed because they do a comparable job — not because they are better, and not as a judgement on the tool they sit beside.
Valkey · Dragonfly · KeyDBValkey is the Linux Foundation fork of Redis, API-compatible.
CrowdStrike · Wazuh · Elastic SecurityWazuh is open source and self-hostable.
CodeRabbit · Ellipsis · GraphiteSame company under two names; both listed.
Adobe Firefly · Recraft · IdeogramFirefly is also trained on licensed data.
Gleamer · Annalise.ai · Lunit
Nosto · Constructor · Vue.ai
Spate · see Food & BeverageA thin category — genuinely few comparable tools.
Wayve · Nvidia DRIVEAutomotive hardware — not a like-for-like swap.
Every tool in the directory was fetched and checked. Two signals were used: the address a company publishes in its own footer, and publicly known company origins. Both are imperfect — a company with no address on its site and no public profile will be missed, and a company can be headquartered somewhere different from where it was founded.
So this list is best effort, not exhaustive, and it will have both gaps and mistakes in it. That is another reason the marker points at alternatives rather than making a claim.
The same audit removed four entries whose domains had lapsed and were listed for sale, and corrected one description that undersold what the tool actually is. The directory is a glossary, not a recommendation list — listing has never implied endorsement, and that has not changed.