Ask HN: Any Recommended Alternative to Wappalyzer? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Any Recommended Alternative to Wappalyzer?

1 pointKuraptka6 comments

Is there a tool (open source preferably or inexpensive) that can show me the entire tech stack of a company?

Wappalyzer works great for finding what javascript or css frameworks a company uses (i used to depend on it a lot when i owned a web agency) but it doesnt do a good a job at detecting the infrastructure a company uses. Like if they use Grafana or Snowflake or ChatGPT APIs.

Has anyone here built such a tool before? Again, something preferably open source :)

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It doesn't fit your criteria of being open-source/free, but I built Bloomberry (bloomberry.com) as an alternative to Wappalyzer for exactly this use case. It analyzes DNS records, subprocessor lists, DNS traffic data to find the real technologies a company uses. So stuff like you mentioned like Snowflake, and even the enterprise LLMs like ChatGPT/Claude.

If you're looking for something truly free/open-source, you probably have to stitch together various sources. You can analyze job postings to see what technologies they mention on job ads (although this can give u some false postives too as companies love to spam long lists of technologies). You could look at what appears when they search for their domain in subdomain tools, which can often give you a clue if they host stuff like CI/CD internally. And just good old-fashioned snooping around the Linkedin profiles of engineers who work there.

Thanks, I just signed up for Bloomberry and it definitely fits the bill on what I was looking for. Was even able to find companies that use chatgpt, which wappalyzer missed.

Job postings was another thing i was thinking of. U are right that it can be flawed and you gotta do a bit of discerning but if a company keeps mentioning the same stack in all their postings, it probably means they use it.

Oh and one thing your tool is missing is a browser extension. That is what makes Wappalyzer so much easy to use (and its alternatives like SimilarTech, etc)

It would make my workflow so much more convenient. Instead of logging into an app every single time. Have you thought about building one? I imagine with ChatGPT you can just vibe code one these days!

I have looked into it but it is hard to build one that works in real-time like Wappalyzer’s. But I will definitely look into it. My only concern is it might reveal my code and the way I detect frontend technologies.

Take a look at WhatRuns though if you are looking for a browser extension. It is also another decent alternative to Wappalyzer

True, you pretty much have to open source your code if you are gonna build a browser extension.

I have tried WhatRuns and it is pretty bare bones. Not useful at all. Wappalyzer’s browser extension is free as well and much better data. It just is missing a lot of data on companies that use backend tools like ChatGPT and Claude, but so far Bloomberry has been pretty useful in that area.

Thanks! And just so you know that I am not biased, Bloomberry isnt the only alternative out there :) https://bloomberry.com/blog/i-tried-6-wappalyzer-alternative...

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