They do rather different things, and they can be used together.
A more direct competitor w/ Alpine (although I view it more as a replacement for jQuery, since there is no reactive aspect to it) is https://hyperscript.org. It's a much more speculative project though, for the brave and/or slightly crazy only.
Phoenix
Elixir
TailwindCSS
Alpine.js
LiveView
I imagine that Alpine is going to get big largely because there us so much excitement around LiveView.