Quicksand Fans

Those who have followed the threads elsewhere mentioning a program called Twine will know it is a system for writing branching stories. Basically, it provides a fairly intuitive system for defining the text and branches of a story and then generates the html code that can be displayed in a browser. In searching through repositories of open-source software to find and obtain Twine, I noted that there seem to be several other programs for more or less the same thing. I am posting this to inquire if anyone here has tried any of the alternatives and can give feedback about these alternatives, particularly about their features and general usefulness. It is unlikely I will be able to afford to use any commercial alternatives, if such exist, but feedback about those would be of interest at least.