The best BuiltWith alternatives are Wappalyzer for cheaper technology lead lists (free plan, then $250 a month), Bloomberry for the backend and SaaS tools a website scan can't see, and Store Leads if you sell to online stores. TheirStack, PublicWWW and HG Insights cover the jobs the first three don't.
The complaints I found about BuiltWith are mostly about price and missing technologies. A consultant asking Hacker News for an alternative in 2025 put it plainly: "I find Builtwith a bit too expensive for my needs as it's $299 for 2 technologies, and I have 10+ I want find businesses for." I compared six alternatives on 4 November 2026 on price, where their data comes from and what users say about them, and below is who each one suits and where it falls short.
In short
- Wappalyzer: Best for technology-based lead lists at a lower price than BuiltWith
- Bloomberry: Best for finding companies that pay for backend and SaaS tools
- Store Leads: Best for e-commerce prospecting by platform and installed app
- TheirStack: Best for spotting tech stacks and hiring signals in job postings
- PublicWWW: Best for niche technologies BuiltWith doesn't track, through source-code search
- HG Insights: Best for enterprise teams that sell into IT budgets
Why look for BuiltWith alternatives?
BuiltWith does a lot well. Single-site lookups are free forever, its plans page says it tracks 128,209 technologies across 491.9 million domains, and every paid plan exports contact names, emails and titles along with the tech data. That's a large index for anyone selling a front-end tool. A G2 reviewer summed up the upside: "It's great for uncovering what technologies different companies use." (G2)
"Too expensive for my needs": BuiltWith Basic costs $295 a month and covers 2 technologies. Unlimited technologies start at $495 a month on Pro. For a consultant or a small team tracking 10 tools, that's $5,940 a year before anyone gets contacted. The quote above comes from the Ask HN thread (September 2025, so over a year old; the price was $299 then).
Backend tools are hard to see from a website: BuiltWith's FAQ says it indexes the web the way Google does, so it sees what a site loads. In the same HN thread, Bloomberry's founder (a competitor, and he said so) wrote: "I think builtwith only focuses on front end facing technologies not backend." Internal tools like GitHub, Grafana or a CRM rarely show up in a page's code.
Niche technologies are missing: the same consultant added: "And BuiltWith doesn't seem to have a lot of technologies I'm looking for either." If your product competes with a small vendor, check BuiltWith's coverage of it before paying.
Big exports need cleanup: the G2 reviewer above titled their review "Great for Tech Stack Insights, but Hard to Work with at Scale", and G2's summary of it points to large exports and manual cleanup. There's also an r/OSINT thread, BuiltWith alternative?, that ranks for this search and is worth reading.
How I compared the BuiltWith alternatives
I didn't run the same search in all six tools, so this isn't a hands-on test. On 4 November 2026 I read every vendor's pricing page, their data and product pages, their G2 pros-and-cons pages where they have one, and the Hacker News thread above. For each tool I looked at three things: where the technology data comes from, what a first useful list costs, and what users complain about. The same-search test (one technology, counted in every tool) is on my list.
Which BuiltWith alternative should you choose?
- Choose Wappalyzer if you want BuiltWith's job (lists of websites by technology) for less: $250 a month for 2 technologies, or $450 for unlimited with 5 users.
- Choose Bloomberry if your buyers are companies that use a specific SaaS or backend product (GitHub, Grafana, Salesforce) that doesn't show on their website.
- Choose Store Leads if you sell to online stores and care about the platform, the apps they've installed and when.
- Choose TheirStack if you want to know what a company is hiring for and which tools it names in its job ads.
- Choose PublicWWW if the technology you're after leaves a code footprint (a script, a tag, a CSS class) but isn't in anyone's database.
- Choose HG Insights if you sell enterprise software and need installs and IT spend inside large companies.
- Stick with BuiltWith if you need front-end technology lists across many tools, years of adoption trends and contact names in one export. At $495 a month for unlimited technologies, it's still cheaper than stitching three tools together.
BuiltWith alternatives at a glance
| Tool | Best for | Starting price | Free plan |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wappalyzer | Tech-based lead lists | $250/month | Yes, 50 lookups a month |
| Bloomberry | Backend and SaaS users | $199/month | Trial |
| Store Leads | E-commerce stores | $75/month (no exports) | Limited preview |
| TheirStack | Job-post tech signals | $109 one-time (1,000 companies) | Yes |
| PublicWWW | Source-code search | $109/month | Yes, top 3M sites |
| HG Insights | Enterprise IT spend | $22,000/year | No |
Prices checked on 4 November 2026 on each vendor's pricing page. For reference, BuiltWith starts at $295 a month.
The 6 best BuiltWith alternatives
1. Wappalyzer: Best for technology-based lead lists at a lower price
Wappalyzer is the closest swap for BuiltWith: a browser extension for single lookups, plus paid lead lists of websites that use a given technology. Paid plans add email verification, CRM enrichment and an API on top of the lists.
Where it beats BuiltWith: it costs $45 a month less at each step ($250 vs $295 for 2 technologies, $450 vs $495 for unlimited), and Business includes 5 users where BuiltWith Pro has 1 login.
Key features
- Lead lists by technology or keyword: build a list of sites running, say, a specific checkout app or analytics tag.
- Email verification: 5,000 verifications on Pro and 20,000 on Business, so you can clean a list before sending.
- Website alerts: get told when a tracked site adds or drops a technology.
Pros
- ✅ A real free plan: 50 lookups and 50 email verifications a month, plus sample lists
- ✅ You can pause a plan for up to three months, and included API credits don't expire while it's paused
Cons
- ❌ Pro covers only 2 technologies, the same limit as BuiltWith Basic
- ❌ API credits included in plans expire after 60 days
What users say: "Wappalyzer has the best UX for technographic lead generation." (Nickel S., G2) And the most common complaint: "What I dislike about Wappalyzer is that the technology data is sometimes incomplete or outdated, so it requires additional validation." (Prajwal R., G2)
Best for
- Agencies and SaaS teams that sell to users of a specific front-end tool
- Small teams that want BuiltWith's core job for less
Pricing: Free; Pro $250 a month; Business $450 a month; Enterprise from $850 a month. Annual billing saves 17% (wappalyzer.com/pricing).
Bottom line: pick it if you want BuiltWith's lists for less and more seats; skip it if you need backend tools or niche vendors, where it has the same blind spots.
2. Bloomberry: Best for finding companies that pay for backend and SaaS tools
Bloomberry tracks the paid products a company uses behind its website, from GitHub organizations to self-hosted GitLab instances, and flags new purchases, churn and renewals. On its G2 listing, Bloomberry says it covers 1,700+ B2B products by reading infrastructure signals such as new subdomains, DNS records and certificate transparency entries, and that signals usually appear 3 to 7 days after a company adopts a tool.
Where it beats BuiltWith: it sees back-office and developer tools that a page scan misses. The HN user who started the thread above tried it and wrote: "Was able to find businesses that use Github, Gitlab and Grafana rather easily!" (Hacker News, September 2025)
Key features
- Vendor-based search: pick a product (Slack, Salesforce, GitHub) and get the companies that use it, with unlimited exports.
- Purchase, churn and renewal signals: see who just started or stopped using a vendor.
- An API: for teams that want the data inside their own tools, sold as a separate plan.
Pros
- ✅ Covers backend and SaaS products BuiltWith and Wappalyzer can't detect
- ✅ Up to 20 users on the app plans
Cons
- ❌ You pay per vendor: 2 vendors on Starter, 5 on Pro
- ❌ Thin on front-end frameworks: its founder said in the same thread that it doesn't cover some JavaScript frameworks such as Next.js and React
What users say: apart from the HN thread quoted above, I couldn't find public reviews to quote; its G2 page has no reviews yet.
Best for
- Sellers whose buyers use a specific SaaS product (a competitor, a complementary tool)
- Teams that want churn and renewal timing as well as the list
Pricing: App Starter $199 a month (2 vendors), App Pro $299 a month (5 vendors), Enterprise custom; API plans from $199 a month for 6,633 credits (bloomberry.com/pricing).
Bottom line: pick it if your target is "companies that pay for X" and X lives behind the login; skip it if you need broad front-end coverage.
3. Store Leads: Best for e-commerce prospecting by platform and installed app
Store Leads is a database of online stores: 14.3 million active stores across 417 platforms, with the apps each one has installed and when. It's narrower than BuiltWith on purpose, and deeper inside its niche.
Where it beats BuiltWith: e-commerce detail. You can search for "all Apparel stores using Shopify in the US selling at least 10 products" (Store Leads' own example), filter by app installation date or social following, and see about 135,000 new active stores a week, according to storeleads.app.
Key features
- 8,911 tracked apps and 1,006 technologies with install dates
- Historical data to find trending stores, apps and technologies
- A free Chrome extension for single-store lookups
Pros
- ✅ Deep platform coverage: WooCommerce (4.3 million stores) and Shopify (3.2 million) lead the list
- ✅ Extra users cost $35 a month each on any plan
Cons
- ❌ Only covers online stores
- ❌ The $75 Premium plan has no CSV export; exports start at $250 a month
What users say: "I tested the data many times by contacting site owners. It's always right." (verified small-business user, G2) The only con in that review: "There are too many columns that aren't relevant to me, I just filtered them out and it was fine."
Best for
- Shopify and WooCommerce app developers, agencies and payment or shipping vendors
Pricing: Premium $75 a month (2 platforms, no exports); Pro $250 a month (exports); Elite $450 a month (all platforms); Enterprise $950 a month; 15% off on yearly billing.
Bottom line: pick it if your customers are online stores; skip it for anything outside e-commerce.
4. TheirStack: Best for spotting tech stacks and hiring signals in job postings
TheirStack reads job postings to work out which technologies a company uses and what it's hiring for. A job ad for a senior data engineer that names Snowflake and dbt tells you about the stack and the budget at the same time.
Where it beats BuiltWith: it sees internal tools that appear in job ads but never on a website, plus the timing signal of a team that's hiring. That fits what the HN consultant was after: businesses starting or expanding an engineering team.
Key features
- Company search by technology and by job title, with exports to CSV or Excel
- 225 million job postings back to 2021 across 195 countries, with 305,000 new ones a day
- Daily or weekly email alerts for new matching jobs and companies
Pros
- ✅ A free account to start, and one-time credit packs that roll over for 12 months
- ✅ No limit on team members
Cons
- ❌ It only sees what companies put in job ads, so a company that isn't hiring looks empty
- ❌ Two kinds of credits (app and API) take a minute to understand
What users say: "TheirStack has been great to work with, mainly because their communication is really strong." (Sindhu N., G2) One reviewer's only complaint: "Needed to have cheaper tiers for customers" (Muddassar S., G2)
Best for
- Dev-tool, data and staffing companies that sell to teams in growth mode
Pricing: Free to start; app credits from $109 one-time for 1,000 companies; API from $49 a month for 1,500 credits (theirstack.com/pricing).
Bottom line: pick it if hiring is your buying signal; skip it if your buyers are small companies that rarely post jobs.
5. PublicWWW: Best for niche technologies BuiltWith doesn't track
PublicWWW is a search engine for website source code: you search for a snippet (a script name, a tracking ID, a CSS class) and get every site in its index whose page code contains it. It indexes over a billion pages.
Where it beats BuiltWith: you aren't limited to a vendor's list of 128,209 technologies. If a niche tool leaves any code footprint, you can find its users yourself.
Key features
- Free search across the top 3 million sites, with up to 1,000 rows
- Full-index search on paid plans, with up to 100,000 to 1 million rows per search
- Day and week passes for one-off research
Pros
- ✅ Finds technologies nobody else tracks
- ✅ $49 for a day pass is cheap for a one-off list
Cons
- ❌ You have to know the code signature you're looking for
- ❌ Results are websites and code snippets, with no company or contact data
What users say: I couldn't find a public review of PublicWWW that I could read and quote, so I'm leaving this one blank.
Best for
- Technical marketers and founders hunting users of a niche or brand-new tool
Pricing: Free (top 3M sites); Pro $109 a month or $1,090 a year (also $49 a day or $79 a week); Business $199 a month; Enterprise $499 a month (publicwww.com/prices).
Bottom line: pick it when BuiltWith says "no data" for your target technology; skip it if you want a ready-made lead list.
6. HG Insights: Best for enterprise teams that sell into IT budgets
HG Insights sells technology install, IT spend and intent data on large companies, packaged as AI "Copilots" for strategy, scoring and sales. Its homepage says it covers firmographic, technographic, spend, intent and contact data across 70M+ companies.
Where it beats BuiltWith: it estimates what a company spends on technology and what it runs internally, which helps when you sell six-figure software to IT departments.
Key features
- Market Analyzer: ICP design, market sizing and whitespace analysis
- Data Studio: account and lead scoring that mixes your CRM data with HG's
- Sales Copilot: signal-based account prioritization for reps
Pros
- ✅ Spend and install data that front-end scanners can't produce
- ✅ Published starting prices, so you know the floor before a demo
Cons
- ❌ Starts at $22,000 a year, out of reach for small teams
- ❌ G2 reviewers' top complaint is price for individuals and small businesses
What users say: "The breadth of information available is quite significant." (verified enterprise user, G2)
Best for
- Enterprise software and IT services vendors with a RevOps team
Pricing: Starter from $22,000 a year (5 seats, 8,000 credits); Growth from $45,000 a year (10 seats); Enterprise custom (hginsights.com pricing guide).
Bottom line: pick it if you sell into enterprise IT budgets; skip it if your whole tooling budget is smaller than its entry price.
How to turn a technology list into accounts worth contacting
A technographic list answers one question: who runs a given tool. Store Leads alone counts 3.2 million Shopify stores, and most of any list that size won't fit the rest of your ICP (size, market, what they sell) or come with anyone you can name. The HN consultant hit this the day he tried Bloomberry: "I like the company info you return but you lack contact details right?"
So the step after choosing a tool is narrowing the list by fit and finding the right people. Filter the export by headcount and country first, then check the remaining companies against what your best customers have in common.
If describing that fit is the hard part, I built Openlead for it: you describe your ideal customer in a sentence and it returns up to 25 companies that match, with 1 to 3 relevant people at each and their profile links. It doesn't detect tech stacks, import lists or give email addresses, so it works next to the tools above: they answer who runs the technology, and Openlead answers which companies fit the rest of your description and who to talk to there.
How to evaluate BuiltWith alternatives
Where the data comes from: website scans (BuiltWith, Wappalyzer, PublicWWW) see what a page loads; DNS and traffic data (Bloomberry) and job ads (TheirStack) see what runs behind the login. Pick the source that can see your competitor's product.
Price per technology: BuiltWith Basic and Wappalyzer Pro both cap you at 2 technologies; Bloomberry charges per vendor. Count how many technologies you need to track before comparing monthly prices.
Freshness: BuiltWith says its data updates weekly; TheirStack adds 305,000 jobs a day; Store Leads adds about 135,000 stores a week. Ask how quickly a newly installed tool shows up.
Seats and exports: BuiltWith Pro has 1 login; Wappalyzer Business has 5; Bloomberry allows 20; TheirStack has no limit. Check whether CSV export is included (Store Leads Premium leaves it out).
Contact data: BuiltWith exports contact names and emails; most alternatives here give you companies only. If you need emails and phones, you'll add a contact-data tool, and my cognism alternatives, rocketreach alternatives and seamless ai alternatives roundups compare those. For enrichment workflows that combine technographics with other sources, see clay alternatives, and for company research by funding and firmographics, crunchbase alternatives.
The right BuiltWith alternative depends on where the signal lives
BuiltWith reads websites, and so do Wappalyzer and PublicWWW. That's perfect when your buyers' choice shows up in their page code, like a CMS, a checkout app or an analytics tag. When it doesn't, the signal lives somewhere else: in DNS and traffic data for SaaS tools (Bloomberry), in job ads for internal stacks (TheirStack), in app installs for stores (Store Leads) or in spend data for enterprise IT (HG Insights).
So start from the technology you care about and ask where it leaves a trace. The tool that can see that trace is your BuiltWith alternative, and for many teams that means one cheaper website scanner plus one specialist.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best free alternative to BuiltWith?
Wappalyzer has the most useful free plan: 50 technology lookups and 50 email verifications a month, plus sample lead lists. WhatRuns is a free browser extension for single sites, and PublicWWW lets you search the source code of the top 3 million sites for free.
Is BuiltWith free?
BuiltWith is free for looking up one website at a time, with no time limit. Lists of websites by technology start at $295 a month on the Basic plan, which covers 2 technologies.
Is Wappalyzer better than BuiltWith?
Wappalyzer is cheaper ($250 vs $295 a month for 2 technologies) and includes 5 users on its $450 Business plan. BuiltWith tracks more technologies (128,209 by its own count), has adoption trends going back years and exports contact names with its lists.
What is WhatRuns?
WhatRuns is a free browser extension that shows the technologies on the website you're visiting and alerts you when a site you follow starts or stops using one. It doesn't build lead lists.
How do I find out what technology a website uses?
Paste the URL into BuiltWith's free lookup or open the site with the Wappalyzer or WhatRuns extension installed. For backend tools that don't show in the page, check the company's job ads, or use a tool such as Bloomberry or TheirStack.
About the author
Julian KrethFounder, Openlead
