There's no free alternatives, because AMD doesn't document the bitstream format (i.e. what you need to push to the FPGA to program it to do wha you want).
Xilinx has the best silicon. Everyone else is behind. Altera is basically dead thanks Intel. Lattice is nice for low power but performance-wise they are behind. Don't know much about Microchip, but from the little I've heard their tooling is a disaster even by the standards of FPGA tooling. Then there are Gowin (not bad, but Chinglish docs and everything), Gatemate (pretty innovative and vendor-backed nextpnr support - but only one low-mid FPGA with a promise to release chiplet assemblies of it latter). And Effinix - don't know much about them, do anyone have experience?
There's no free alternatives, because AMD doesn't document the bitstream format (i.e. what you need to push to the FPGA to program it to do wha you want).
This isn't why there are no free alternatives: there are for 7 Series chips. Free alternatives have terrible QoR.
I'm fairly sure the FPGA space is big enough there are alternate products for most of the offerings
Xilinx has the best silicon. Everyone else is behind. Altera is basically dead thanks Intel. Lattice is nice for low power but performance-wise they are behind. Don't know much about Microchip, but from the little I've heard their tooling is a disaster even by the standards of FPGA tooling. Then there are Gowin (not bad, but Chinglish docs and everything), Gatemate (pretty innovative and vendor-backed nextpnr support - but only one low-mid FPGA with a promise to release chiplet assemblies of it latter). And Effinix - don't know much about them, do anyone have experience?