

I used to love Calf, but plugin version seems be have its GUI broken on some plugins for quite some time and it seems to be rather hard to fix judging from what I read online. LSP is more feature completely for most usecases anyway.
Also I read sometime ago that calf has some serious phasing problems? Sounds good to me but I’m not an expert.
Some calf plugins I haven’t been able to replace yet, like the stereo tools, and the psychoacoustic clipper.
Analogue simulation: Surge FX’s tape Calf Vinyl
Compressors, gates and equalisers: Anything by LSP
Limiter: x42 seems to be a clean and save limiter LSP seems to be more tunable and a bit dirtier and potentially louder.
Saturation and distortion: Several good options on surge fx
Guitar sim: Guitarix.vst (also includes a Neural Amp Sim host)
Synths: Surge Zynaddsubfx Odin2
Sampler: Liquidsfz DrumGizmo (very resource intensive)
There’s ofc tons of stuff I haven’t tried, but these work very well for me