FYI - if you own any Novation gear and have it registered on their site Trash 2 is free now through October 2019.
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The best I’ve tried is Acustica Audio’s Crimson.
I like Contemporary Color…
Blockfish.
Trash 2 is pretty rad. Picked it up while it was on sale but would’ve been happy to pay full price. That free deal would’ve been even better!
The Scream distortion in Reason deserves a shout-out too. That thing’s gnarly.
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I wanna revisit this
So basically I find myself using the scheps omni channel for nearly every element of my mixes and the first thing I do is turn up that saturation/preamp knob. Sometimes I don’t even do it to audible levels but I just do it anyway. But you can certainly make it Crunch if you want to and I like how it crunches. Driving it a bit more on guitar and drums is real fun.
The thing is usually $29 USD (cause waves is always on sale) and it’s a great channel strip period.
I’ve also been using the Fab Filter Saturn on bass and here’s why: Multiband saturation is PERFECT for bass. A common technique is to duplicate a bass track and distort just the mids to high mids, leaving the low end in tact and less muddy. This brings the bass to life in a mix. I’m sure there are way more uses for this thing I can find.
Lastly I mentioned the retro color and I also find myself using that a lot, but my situation is kind of unique. I’ve been making music/sounds for an audio drama and one of the series is very old school radio sounding, like 30s and 40s. So the music I make I end up wanting vinyl crackle, distortion and a solid LPF to get a very old time kinda sound–retro color works perfect. This being said, I also find myself trying it out on random guitar tracks, drum tracks, etc. to pleasing results.
I like them all and I’m done buying saturator plug-ins lol. And reverb and delays and synths… Frankly I don’t think I need any plug-ins whatsoever haha. Well maybe a REALLY good flanger like one that sounds like the 1960s–still haven’t found a convincing one.
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I scoffed at the hyperbole surrounding Kush’s marketing for SILIKA but gave it a listen anyway cause their stuff has been excellent.
Sounds excellent. Very impressive.
Yes yes for Decapitator and Saturn. Devil Deluxe from Soundtoys works really well on kicks at lower settings. Radiator (Soundtoys too) is excellent for gentle saturation.
From Plugin Alliance I use Vertigo quite a bit and Dent 2 is the best VST I’ve come across for recreating AR’s negative distortion - that mad krushed, chopped and bitey clipping style.
Took me ages to find a plug that did that. It’s great for extreme stuff and the bitcrusher parameter works exceptionally well for sculpting the distortion sound. Tip!
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Analog Heat. Expensive, though.
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*Plugin
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Overbridge plug-in.
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I guess my point is that this thread is about VSTs, not hardware, when discussing distortion/saturation. The OP asked for "itb analog heat alternative"s.
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I guess I didn’t read it all. I’m guilty. Sorry. Won’t do it again.
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Distortion comes in so different flavours, and there’s no one size fits all.
Ones I use the most are decapitator, blackbox, any 1176 emulation, Selig colouring EQ, and the good old scream 4 distortion…
Sometimes just the one in the filterfreak gets great results as well…
Sometimes tape emulations like the Kramer tape or that j something from abbey roads and waves…
There’s too many options and a combination of all of them yield good results for me 
Elysia Karakter,
VSM-3,
Trash 2,
Blackbox,
Phils Cascade,
Dent.
All amazing. Scream 4 is still pretty good, they must have updated it.
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Softube Harmonics is also a fairly decent option to consider, regarding (good) value for money.
And indeed Kazrog True Iron, Soundtoys Decapitator, Fabfilter Saturn 2 and practically everything by Kush Audio as poeple already mentioned before me.
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Soundtoys remain the best I think.
Not really saturation, but for drums I like ACME Opticom XLA-3. It’s a compressor that add harmonics.
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Trash 2 and all the preset xpacs is free with any purchase (£2ish) at Plugin Boutique this month btw. It has loads of impluses of weird stuff you can add mid chain, well worth a couple of quid. That was about £300 worth of software a couple of years back.
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What do you guys think about acustica tape vs ik tapes ?