BuiltWith profiles websites. It indexes the public internet and reports which of the technologies in its catalogue each site runs, now and in the past. Its home page states coverage of more than 127,000 internet technologies, and it is built for looking up any website and for listing the websites that run a given tool.
This guide is for the reader whose question is about companies and not websites: which identified companies run a tool, when each one adopted and dropped it, and what else those companies are doing. It compares what BuiltWith and Fokals each publish about scope, method, delivery and licence, names other sources of technographic data, and works through a query that joins technology changes to hiring and intent on one company key.
What BuiltWith covers
BuiltWith's about page describes a platform for website profiling, lead generation, competitive analysis and business intelligence. Its page on data coverage says it collects and processes all website technology data in-house and respects robots.txt directives, and its diagram of the crawl shows pages, headers, scripts, DNS and TLS data being retrieved. The FAQ adds that it tries to index the whole internet by registered domain.
Technology is the core, and more is attached to it. The plans page lists keyword reports, technology spend figures for websites, estimated sales revenue for ecommerce sites, business locations, usage alerts and exportable contact names, emails and titles of individuals publicly listed with businesses. The API page lists a Domain API for the current and historical technologies of a website, a Change API for additions and removals, a Lists API for the websites using a technology, a Trends API and a live feed of detections over WebSocket. The same page says its datasets cover technology usage from 2000 to today.
Delivery takes several forms. Reports export to CSV and Excel, the APIs return JSON, and BuiltWith offers browser extensions, MCP tools for AI agents and a command-line client. Its integrations page lists Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Pipedrive and Zapier, and Parquet or flat CSV files for Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, BigQuery and Databricks.
You can buy a plan on the site. The plans page publishes monthly and yearly prices for Basic, Pro and Team plans, and individual site lookups are free. The terms of use, last updated on 6 March 2026, grant customers a licence to use the service for internal business purposes and prohibit reselling, redistributing or sublicensing the data.
What BuiltWith is built for
- Website lookup at internet scale. BuiltWith aims at every registered domain, so any website can be profiled, whoever owns it.
- A long catalogue. Its home page states more than 127,000 internet technologies, which suits a search for a niche tool.
- Past usage. Its API page says its datasets cover technology usage from 2000 to today.
- Ecommerce and spend estimates. Product lists, technology spend figures and ecommerce revenue estimates are part of its plans.
- Self-serve lists. You can sign up for a plan on the site, export a list of websites and connect one of the CRM integrations it lists.
- Contacts and a live feed. Its plans export publicly listed contacts, and its API offers a live feed of detections.
Why teams look for an alternative
None of these reasons is a fault in BuiltWith. Each is a different question.
- The unit is the company. A fund or a data platform works with companies it can identify. Fokals gives each company one stable company ID. A listed company carries its ticker, MIC, ISIN, LEI and share-class FIGI, and a brand carries the identifiers of its listed parent.
- More than technology. The same key joins technology changes to job postings, intent scores, announcements and headcount, and the weekly Market Series are aggregated from those datasets.
- Point-in-time use. Every change is a dated event, a first observation sets a baseline and is never counted as a change, and daily and weekly datasets are written once and never revised.
- Licence fit. BuiltWith's terms describe internal business use. A team that will embed data in a product, or redistribute it, needs terms written for that from whichever vendor it chooses.
BuiltWith and Fokals side by side
The BuiltWith column restates the pages linked above, as read on 4 October 2026. The Fokals column follows the methodology.
| Aspect | BuiltWith | Fokals |
|---|---|---|
| Unit of coverage | Websites: it says it tries to index the whole internet by registered domain | Companies: listed companies worldwide, the brands they own and verified private companies, each resolved to one company ID |
| Technology catalogue | More than 127,000 internet technologies, as its home page states | A curated catalogue across 68 categories, from advertising and analytics to commerce, CRM and infrastructure |
| How technology is found | Its own crawl of pages, headers, scripts, DNS and TLS data, processed in-house | Its own detection across page content, scripts, network requests, response headers and DNS records, processed in-house |
| Changes over time | Current and historical technologies per domain; a Change API of additions and removals | First-seen and last-seen dates for every technology; one dated event for every adoption and removal in Technology Changes |
| Beside technology | Keyword and ecommerce product lists, technology spend and ecommerce revenue estimates, relationships between websites, publicly listed contact names, emails and titles | Hiring, intent scores, announcements, headcount and web traffic on the same company ID; weekly Market Series aggregated from them |
| Delivery | Web reports with CSV and Excel export, JSON APIs, a WebSocket live feed, MCP tools, a command-line client, browser extensions, CRM integrations, Parquet or CSV files for cloud warehouses | REST API and bulk files as JSON, JSON Lines or CSV, with a manifest; a signed-in dashboard for browsing |
| Licensing | Published monthly and yearly plans; terms of use that license internal business use and prohibit resale and redistribution | Written agreement for internal use, embedding in a product or redistribution |
Fokals is delivered direct, by REST API and as bulk files. A first load comes from a bulk export, and the API keeps it current. The delivery page describes both routes.
A question that needs one company key
Take this question: which companies adopted a given tool in the last 30 days, and which of them are hiring or surging on a related intent topic? The adoptions are in Technology Changes, part of the marketing stack dataset. Hiring Activity and Intent Scores join to it on the company ID.
select
e.company_id,
e.company,
e.observed_at as added_seen_at,
h.open_postings,
h.new_postings,
i.topic_label,
i.score
from company_tech_events e
left join company_hiring_daily h
on h.company_id = e.company_id
and h.day = :yesterday
left join company_intent_weekly i
on i.company_id = e.company_id
and i.week_start = :last_closed_week
and i.surge
where e.category = 'technology'
and e.key = :technology
and e.change = 'added'
and e.observed_at >= :thirty_days_ago
order by e.observed_at desc;A row for Acme Robotics, an invented company, might read: seen added on 30 September 2026, 128 open postings, six of them new, topic CRM at 71.5. The figures are illustrative. Four properties of the record decide how to read real rows.
- An adoption is its own kind of event. The query selects tools adopted on a site. A new account under a tool already in place is recorded separately, so it is never counted as an adoption.
- Every event carries its observation time. The time is when the change was observed, which makes the feed safe to use point-in-time: a query as of any past day returns what was known that day.
- A removal is confirmed before it is written. Tags that come and go with consent banners and tests stay out of the record.
- A first observation is a baseline. A tool already in place when a website is first observed appears in Technology Stack with its first-seen date and writes no event, so the record never mistakes an existing tool for a new adoption.
For a market size, count and do not list. Market Series states technology prevalence as websites per 100 in a stated cohort, by industry and country. The guide to sizing a market with technographic counts works through the denominators, and the guide to measuring an installed base covers weekly adoptions and removals.
Other alternatives worth weighing
Each line describes a vendor from its own website, as read on 4 October 2026.
- Wappalyzer. Wappalyzer looks up the technologies behind a website you submit and builds lead lists from them, with company and contact details, through its website, APIs, browser extensions and CRM integrations; see the guide to Wappalyzer alternatives.
- HG Insights. HG Insights describes technology install data that reaches behind the firewall, drawn from job postings, contracts and other sources, with IT spend and buyer intent data; see the guide to HG Insights alternatives.
- TheirStack. TheirStack infers the technologies a company uses from job postings and offers them with job data through an app, an API, webhooks and datasets; see the guide to TheirStack alternatives.
- PredictLeads. PredictLeads publishes technology data that it says is sourced from job postings, website script tags and DNS records, beside news, job and financing datasets, through APIs, webhooks, flat files and an MCP server.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best alternative to BuiltWith?
It depends on the question. For looking up or listing websites by technology, Wappalyzer offers lookups and lead lists of the same kind. For technology that does not show on a website, HG Insights and TheirStack use other sources, job postings among them. For dated technology changes on identified companies, joined to hiring, intent and announcements on one company ID, Fokals fits.
How many technologies does BuiltWith track?
BuiltWith's home page states that it covers more than 127,000 internet technologies, and its FAQ says it tries to index the whole internet by registered domain. The length of a catalogue matters most for niche tools. Before you compare vendors, list the specific technologies your work depends on and ask each vendor for its coverage of that list across the companies you track.
Can BuiltWith data be used inside another product?
BuiltWith's terms of use, last updated on 6 March 2026, license its service for internal business purposes and prohibit reselling, redistributing or sublicensing its data. Ask BuiltWith what its datasets product permits before you plan a product on it. Fokals is licensed by written agreement, and embedding in a product and redistribution are two of the three uses an agreement can cover.
Does BuiltWith have historical technology data?
Yes. Its API page says its datasets cover technology usage from 2000 to today, and its Domain API returns current and historical technologies for a website. Fokals records every adoption and removal as a dated event and writes its daily and weekly datasets once, so the record can be read point-in-time, exactly as it stood on any day it covers.
How do you size a market with technographic data?
Count the websites or companies that run a tool, state the count as a rate over a known cohort, and split it by industry and country. In Fokals data, Market Series gives technology prevalence as websites per 100 in a stated cohort, and Technology Stack gives the companies behind the rate. The result measures presence on websites, which is the basis for an installed-base estimate.
Does technographic data show the software a company uses internally?
Website detection shows the customer-facing stack: advertising, analytics, commerce and marketing tools, and the services a domain's records reveal, such as a mail provider. Back-office systems are the field of sources built on job postings and contracts, such as the install data HG Insights describes. Fokals adds the tools named in each company's job postings, so both views sit on one company ID.
The queries and code on this page are examples to adapt. Test them in your own environment before you rely on them.
What this page says about the products it names was checked against their public documentation on 4 October 2026. Product and company names are trademarks of their owners. Fokals is not affiliated with them or endorsed by them.