Software Alternatives & Reviews

Hacker News VS Roll20

Compare Hacker News VS Roll20 and see what are their differences

Hacker News logo Hacker News

Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham's investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator.

Roll20 logo Roll20

Roll20 is a suite of easy-to-use digital tools that expand pen-and-paper gameplay.
  • Hacker News Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-23
  • Roll20 Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20

Hacker News videos

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Roll20 videos

Roll20 Overview 2019 (Play 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Online)

More videos:

  • Review - Why I Quit Roll20
  • Review - Roll20 Vs Fantasy Grounds | Which is REALLY the Cheapest?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Hacker News and Roll20)
Social Networks
100 100%
0% 0
Gaming
0 0%
100% 100
Social News
100 100%
0% 0
Game Engine
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Hacker News and Roll20

Hacker News Reviews

Great Products for Finding Startup Jobs
Hacker News—Not a job board, per se, but the HN Who’s Hiring post at the start of every month has dozens of engineering-focused job posts. HN also regularly pushes select YC jobs to the front page.
Source: medium.com
18 Best Sites for Finding a Startup Job
Hacker News has a job board that lists jobs exclusively at various startups. Obviously, as Hackers News is associated with Y Combinator, most of the listed startup jobs are at companies that have gone through the accelerator’s program.
Source: tech.co

Roll20 Reviews

  1. When it works, its mediocre

    As a DM for homebrew games, I used Roll20 for 2+ years. When it works, its OK. When it doesn't, its frustrating. I use a lot of custom rules and they are simply not supported due to a lack of modularity within the system. A simple variant of Proficiency Dice in 5e is outlined in the rules, and even it is hacky and not well supported on Roll20.

    The format feels like it was made two decades ago, and the web console spits out warnings and errors left and right. There has even been some conspiracies / drama with some of the higher-ups at Roll20, showing a lack of leadership.

    Please, let's let Roll20 die. Support another system.

    👍 Pros:    Can purchase modules like curse of strahd and tomb of annihilation|Free for dms and players|Use with a variaty of systems|Many features
    👎 Cons:    Not modular enough for me|Hacky programming|Ugly|Features feel clunky and slow|Some features do not work well at all|Buggy
  2. Not very easy to learn

    Not easy to learn, not friendly controls

    🏁 Competitors: digitald20.com Digital d20
    👍 Pros:    The most famous
    👎 Cons:    User experiance|Design|Costly pro plan

10 Best Sites Like Roll20 Alternatives For Tabletop Gaming
These tools aide gamers during online games. Both Roll20 and the Roll20 alternatives can be best described as table-top games. Launched in 2012, Roll20 has received a lot of positive feedback.
Roll20 Alternatives, Similar Games, Apps 2020
Roll20 is a set of easy-to-use digital tools that extend the pencil and paper set. It is the easiest and free way to play board games (such as paper and pencil role-playing games) online with others. Roll20 is completely online, so it runs directly in your browser.
7 Best Roll20 alternatives 2020
Programs like Roll20 and Best Roll20 alternatives are quite similar. So you can play and try one of them and easily download from play store, app store and Roll20 official Website.

Social recommendations and mentions

Hacker News might be a bit more popular than Roll20. We know about 500 links to it since March 2021 and only 334 links to Roll20. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Hacker News mentions (500)

  • Show HN: Hacker Search – A semantic search engine for Hacker News
    Thanks for the feedback! One big distinction with the "site:https://news.ycombinator.com" hack is that the search on Hacker Search directly runs against the underlying link's contents, rather than whatever happens to be on HN. We also more directly leverage HN's curation by factoring in scores. Appreciate your suggestions; will look into building those! - Source: Hacker News / 5 days ago
  • Show HN: Hacker Search – A semantic search engine for Hacker News
    Nice work! I'm sure you know that you can also search Google with site:https://news.ycombinator.com. If I were you I would probably think of a niche where one can get better results by searching HN and other relevant data sources. Another suggestion is not about the search so much but about the UI. One of the worse things about sites like HN is that it's really hard to... - Source: Hacker News / 5 days ago
  • I want to create IMDB for Open source projects
    I'm not sure how much value making something "not fugly" really matters. Design should be based on functionality, not anti-fugliness. In my experience, design considerations should come after building a successful growth "feedback loop." (Or whatever you want to call it.) At that point, you may decide making your website look "polished" isn't even necessary. IMDB was certainly quite ugly for a long time.... - Source: Hacker News / 22 days ago
  • Ask HN: What is the ideal format to structure AI prompts?
    User input does not need to be sanitized if it is programmatically inserted into the document as the value of a key in a regular dict section. To work, I assume the target model needs to be trained on Braq documents with emphasis on the fact that only the top unnamed section contains root instructions (equivalent to the "system" role in ChatML). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988748 [3]... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Show HN: Skyvern – open-source browser automation tool
    This can definitely be used for front end testing. Just tell it to do something like a user and monitor whether it's successful or not Here's a prompt example to try out { "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com", "navigation_goal": "goal is met if you see a post from basiep2. Terminate if you don't" }. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
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Roll20 mentions (334)

  • Friend screwed 3/4 of the table out of 1/2 the game.
    There are other options: https://roll20.net/. Source: 5 months ago
  • Looking for a DND/TTRPG group
    I've used roll20.net up until now. They have a find group feature and a virtual table top with character sheets and dice roller included, so everything you need to play virtually is all on the one site. Source: 5 months ago
  • I’m here to giveaway $1,500 in RPG goodies to celebrate 1 Year of Roll20 x DriveThruRPG! [Mod Approved]
    1 Year Roll20 Pro Subscription ($109 value!) – use it yourself or give it to your GM! Source: 6 months ago
  • Looking for advice on running DnD game on stream!
    There are plenty of D&D software programs out there that are free and paid versions. Many of them with the ability to have friends join and interact with the table. As basic as Tabletop Simulator to Fantasy Grounds (both on steam that I have experience with, not an endorsement). roll20.net being a popular browser based version. Source: 6 months ago
  • I'm looking for someone to teach me how to Play DnD
    I have made a character on roll20.net that maybe border line iffy/OP, so I may have to make one that's not. My free time can be a bit unusual at times(it's 12:24AM as I write this)so someone who has similar free times as I do(if your interested let me know and we can talk times), basicly I've been listening to a DnD podcast and I think it sounds fun and I want to try it out Edit: I'm in PST timezone in... Source: 6 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Hacker News and Roll20, you can also consider the following products

Reddit - Reddit gives you the best of the internet in one place. Get a constantly updating feed of breaking news, fun stories, pics, memes, and videos just for you.

Foundry Virtual Tabletop - A self-hosted, modern, and developer-friendly roleplaying platform.

Lobsters - Lobsters is a technology-focused link-aggregation site. The site is driven by ...

Astral Tabletop - Create, host, and manage your tabletop role-playing games — online or in person

Lemmy - Federated link aggregator and Reddit alternative built with Rust

D&D Beyond - Official online toolset for Dungeons & Dragons tabletop gaming