45 ms·

Whatruns: Identify technologies used on any website

430 points by mcone 9y ago

bognition 9y ago
Looks to be very similar to https://builtwith.com/ https://builtwith.com/
- myth_drannon 9y ago
  or https://stackshare.io/ https://stackshare.io/
  - nmbr213 9y ago
    or https://wappalyzer.com/ https://wappalyzer.com/
    - mkagenius 9y ago
      or for android apps : https://android.fallible.co/builtwith/zendesk/1 https://android.fallible.co/builtwith/zendesk/1
  - michaelmior 9y ago
    My understanding is that StackShare doesn't detect the technologies that are used but simply displays information that has been manually recorded. Edit: Looks like I'm probably wrong since I see they have a tool named "Stack Scanner"
- jijosunny 9y ago
  True. Comparing with Wappalyzer and BuiltWith, here's why we think we have something different (and maybe better): 1. WhatRuns detects fonts, Wordpress plugins and themes (tens of thousands of them). 2. Ability to follow sites (and know what techs websites started using/ditched). 3. Very lightweight compared to our counterparts, and arguably better UI ;) 4. More accurate data. BuiltWith can be very inaccurate as you might've already noticed. Wappalyzer is fairly accurate, but limited in technologies. WhatRuns is trying to be the best of both worlds.
  - trjordan 9y ago
    How is WhatRuns more accurate? Are you doing something different to get your information?
    - jijosunny 9y ago
      We are using a deep learning algorithm to improve the detection. We also have a built-in module that automatically detects new web patterns – which we then manually curate to ensure accuracy.
      - korzun 9y ago
        > We are using a deep learning algorithm to improve the detection. No, you are not.
        jijosunny 9y ago
        @korzun I'll explain. We use several signals like code snippets, filename, directory name, header info and several others to accurately identify technologies. However, there are many possibilities where this can go wrong even with few signals correct. Every time we detect a technology, we calculate a probability of its accuracy and filter out the rest. This system self-learns and improves the identification over time. Hope this helps.
        MrQuincle 9y ago
        What is self-learning? What kind of algorithms if I may ask?
        korzun 9y ago
        I like your website but what you are describing is not a deep learning algorithm. I'm not a big fan of people who do something well and then start going overboard with buzz words. You are most likely have a system that consumes content, compares that content against known hashed variants. If there is no match, you diff against known variants and check if the output matches any of the 'minimal' implementations. If you can't match anything, you simply stage that content for a manual review.
- jo909 9y ago
  https://builtwith.com/Whatruns.com https://builtwith.com/Whatruns.com Vs https://www.whatruns.com/website/whatruns.com https://www.whatruns.com/website/whatruns.com
dsr_ 9y ago
+1 for having a privacy policy linked from their home page that addresses both their browser extension and their website.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Thank you, first thing we did before the launch!
garethsprice 9y ago
Useful, thanks! Noticed that it doesn't report correctly for subdomains - one of the sites I built is at foo.megacorp.com, but the extension reports the results for megacorp.com which is a separate property.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  WR currently considers subdomains as a part of the main domain. Most users like to know the full tech stack of a website. If there is a blog at blog.company.com and if it is using Intercom, it can be a useful data. I hope this makes sense. Anyway, we will definitely address this concern and think about adding an option for subdomain separation.
uyoakaoma 9y ago
Looks similar to stackshare
justinph 9y ago
Why does this need to be a browser extension? No, thanks.
- deepakkarki 9y ago
  Because that's how they make money. They go about creating a database of what websites use what technologies. They later sell that info to sales people as leads. I'm not sure what extra tracking they do beyond that!
  - tillinghast 9y ago
    You can build a database by accepting URLs submitted by users, too. It just baffles me that people willingly install these extensions that—on the tin!—say that they can "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit". INSANE
    - tedmiston 9y ago
      Yeah that. I would try it as a bookmarklet but I never install Chrome extensions that ask for all data on all websites. It's just an insane permission for what should only get URLs when I explicitly ask it to. I wish Chrome would add a permission like this "website URL of the current page with your express permission every invocation".
    - deburo 9y ago
      Because even though they can, that's not what they're doing. I see comments like yours on this site pretty often, and it is tiring. There are many reasons people behave the way they do, and probably the most common reason is that their behaviors haven't caused them any harm as far as they know. The warning "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit" is perhaps scary the first time you see it, but then it becomes insignificant as time goes by and as extensions get installed without causing any visible harm.
      - tillinghast 9y ago
mshenfield 9y ago
Neat, but still some kinks. I'm not seeing Angular for https://fonts.google.com/ https://fonts.google.com/, but can quickly find the tell-tale ng- attributes in the HTML. BuiltWith has been around for a while and has it's own chrome extension [0]. It correctly identified fonts.google.com as using Angular. [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/builtwith-technology-prof/dapjbgnjinbpoindlpdmhochffioedbn?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/builtwith-technolo...
- cheapsteak 9y ago
  Has anyone used both this and Wappalyzer [1]? The latter is what I've been using and seems to have more users with higher ratings [1] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wappalyzer/gppongmhjkpfnbhagpmjfkannfbllamg?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wappalyzer/gppongm...
  - jijosunny 9y ago
    Comparing with Wappalyzer and BuiltWith, here's why we think we have something different (and maybe better): 1. WhatRuns detects fonts, Wordpress plugins and themes (tens of thousands of them). 2. Ability to follow sites (and know what techs websites started using/ditched). 3. Very lightweight compared to our counterparts, and arguably better UI ;) 4. More accurate data. BuiltWith can be very inaccurate as you might've already noticed. Wappalyzer is fairly accurate, but limited in technologies. WhatRuns is trying to be the best of both worlds.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Noted! :) We'll look into this right away.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
Heh, good luck doing this for HN. You might say "Arc," but it's been modified for a decade. I wonder if the mods would ever be interested in being interviewed or talking about some of the tech. The last bit of Arc info we got was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11240681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11240681, which was awesome. It's pretty unique. I don't think any other large website in the world has written their own stack from top to bottom. Even Facebook uses php.
- statictype 9y ago
  That link was pretty interesting. Having to explicitly declare thread local access is a clever hack. I also wonder what database they use (if any). Did they also build their own http stack?
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    They use in-memory hash tables, which works since the whole site can be in memory. Originally they did build their own http stack but switched to nginx for a reverse proxy. On the other hand I'm not sure how much they lean on nginx's facilities.
rubyfan 9y ago
The Chrome extension is a nonstarter for me.
dgorges 9y ago
Wappalyzer [0] might be a good open source alternative. [0] https://github.com/AliasIO/Wappalyzer/ https://github.com/AliasIO/Wappalyzer/
- jijosunny 9y ago
  As mentioned in my previous comments, here's why we think we have something different (and maybe better) than our counterparts like Wappalyzer: 1. WhatRuns detects fonts, Wordpress plugins and themes (tens of thousands of them). 2. Ability to follow sites (and know what techs websites started using/ditched). 3. Very lightweight compared to our counterparts, and arguably better UI ;) 4. More accurate data. BuiltWith can be very inaccurate as you might've already noticed. Wappalyzer is fairly accurate, but limited in technologies. WhatRuns is trying to be the best of both worlds.
y0y 9y ago
Does anyone know what they are using to detect Wordpress? Unfortunately some sites that I am responsible for running in production are WP and we try our best to hide this fact and block all admin functionality to the public due to WP's less-than-stellar history of security vulnerabilities. This is the first tool I've seen that has detected it and now I'm stumped.
- adventureadmin 9y ago
  Well, you'll certainly be interested in wpscan.
- bpicolo 9y ago
  > we try our best to hide this fact Can't really hide wordpress because any time there's a new vulnerability, scrapers spam every site on the internet attempting to use it it anyway, regardless of what tech they're built on
- nso 9y ago
  Could it be as simple as checking if certain .php files respond to web requests?
- rpeden 9y ago
  It could be something as simple as the class names of elements on the page. WP has some defaults that are recognizable. Also, most WP pages will be loading scripts from from the wp-includes directory. There are probably others I'm overlooking, and some WP plugins probably also drop recognizable script tags into your pages. Since this is the first tool that has detected it, it's very possible you've already covered all of the things I mentioned.
  - gedrap 9y ago
    Yes, `wp-contents`, `wp-includes` and basically anything else prefixed with `wp-` is a very clear signed that WordPress is behind the site.
- octalmage 9y ago
  The WP REST API is a new way to detect if a site is running WordPress. If you hit the homepage of a WordPress site it will return a link header with a location to the REST API. They can also just hit /wp-json/, or /xmlrpc.php, or many other files that WordPress requires. Like looking for assets served from wp-content, or wp-includes.
djmill 9y ago
Edit: About 15 minutes after posting, this seems to work fine on my site now. Sorry for the confusion! The spinner does not stop and it gives no results for my site (https://myhikes.org https://myhikes.org) - this is with both FireFox and Chrome extensions. Seems to work great for everything else though. Just replying in case you're looking for new edge cases to debug!
- cknight 9y ago
  Works for me on your site! (Chrome)
  - djmill 9y ago
    Very weird, now it works after reading this and re-checking. Oddly enough I restarted Chrome and Firefox twice before posting the comment in hopes that it was just my machine. Thanks for the sanity check!
    - jijosunny 9y ago
      It could be because of the peak time HN and PH created yesterday. We had to queue all new URLs so that URLs that we once processed (almost all of the top 1M websites) work fine. There were also minor downtimes between server upgrades.
maxekman 9y ago
Awesome tool! I have often wondered about which tech sites uses but almost never bother with checking the source etc.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Awesome. Thank you so much for your kind words!
sweep4r 9y ago
No need to install anything, just follow this url: https://www.whatruns.com/website/reddit.com https://www.whatruns.com/website/reddit.com
- joekrill 9y ago
  Why no input on the page itself for something like that?
  - jijosunny 9y ago
    We started with extension as developers/designers found it especially handy for a quick look-up while working on their projects. Not to worry though - we're working on something for the web as well! ️
- jaden 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing that link. Here's a bookmarklet (as opposed to the Chrome extension) to launch this on whatever site you're on: javascript:void(window.open('https://www.whatruns.com/website/'+window.location.hostname));
- charlieegan3 9y ago
  This doesn't seem to work for all sites, for example my site https://charlieegan3.com https://charlieegan3.com doesn't work: https://www.whatruns.com/website/charlieegan3.com https://www.whatruns.com/website/charlieegan3.com
  - max23_ 9y ago
    I think the link is just returning cached result that was already identified with the extension.
franciscop 9y ago
This is beautiful! While there are similar alternatives, I love the looks of Whatruns so I'll stick with it. The URL has to be publicly accessible from the Internet, right?
- bognition 9y ago
  Choosing a data vendor based upon the UI seems odd. Personally I'd chose whichever provider has the most accurate up to date information, but thats just me.
  - franciscop 9y ago
    Yup, if they are basically the same but this is more intuitive and easier why not? As I don't depend on this (otherwise I'd agree) and it's just a "for fun" thing, the differences between them are negligible for me.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Thank you so much! I'll share this comment with our designer ;) Addressing your question, all URLs once passed through WhatRuns will be publicly accessible. You will have to use the extension for new sites for now.
dustinmoris 9y ago
Ehm sorry.. but I refuse to clutter my browser with silly extensions which could and really should entirely live on a website as a service.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Hi Dustin, we started with extension as developers/designers found it especially handy for a quick look-up while working on their projects. Not to worry though - we're working on something for the web as well! ️
  - fragmede 9y ago
    HN is remarkably fickle; a browser extension is a perfectly reasonable user-friendly mechanism for the service given the choices out there. There are privacy concerns given the coarse level of granularity that Chrome provides, but until Google changes that ("Read and change all data on websites you visit" shouldn't be the same thing as "give the current URL to the browser extension when I click its button"), that's just what we're stuck with for user friendliness.
jijosunny 9y ago
Hi, Hacker News! We are truly stunned to see us on top of HN today! :) WhatRuns is a free browser extension that shows you what runs a website – from ad networks and developer tools to fonts and Wordpress plugins. You can also follow websites and get notified when they add or remove technologies. We soft-launched a couple of weeks back and was lucky enough to be picked up by the Chrome team. We were featured on the Chrome Webstore, landing us 12k active users in one week. It was a huge validation and helped us tremendously in squashing bugs and making a finished product. We realise we have a long way to go, and our little team is working round the clock to make it happen. We also launched on ProductHunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/whatruns https://www.producthunt.com/posts/whatruns Would love to hear what you think :) UPDATE: Thank you for all the feedback! Sorry about the occasional false detections. We are looking into this. This is largely because we detect a considerably large number of technologies/plugins compared to our counterparts. Lots of possibilities for false pattern recognition etc. Rest assured our team is working round the clock to improve accuracy and add more technologies/plugins. Also, Our servers are going a bit cranky due to the huge traffic we are experiencing today. New websites (that was not loaded on WhatRuns before) are now queued up and might experience 2-3 seconds delay. This is to ensure best experience for our active users. Thank you so much for such a great response!
- jaxondu 9y ago
  Just check https://www.whatruns.com/website/vuejs.org https://www.whatruns.com/website/vuejs.org and you're showing the site as using EmberJS. Looks like you're not launch ready.
  - jijosunny 9y ago
    Sorry you feel that way. We truly understand your frustration with detection accuracy, but when there are tens of thousands of technologies to detect, the only solution is to break things and move fast. We were featured on Chrome Webstore a few weeks back and got a great response (12k+ active users) helped us enormously in improving the accuracy and efficiency, and I'm sure HN and PH launch will be even more helpful in improving the product.
Doctor_Fegg 9y ago
Fun. I'm getting a false positive for Rails (I'm using Passenger, but not Rails), and Elevio for documentation (never heard of it!). Other than that it guesses right.
floriferous 9y ago
It hangs on an old website, with the following error in the console: TypeError: Cannot read property 'hostname' of undefined at Object.setNoAppsFoundText (chrome-extension://cmkdbmfndkfgebldhnkbfhlneefdaaip/js/popup_final.js:153:22)
ishitatsuyuki 9y ago
Really inaccurate. Just tried and it reported React for Vue/Nuxt.js, CloudFlare and nginx for Zeit now.sh.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  We truly understand your frustration with detection accuracy, but when there are tens of thousands of technologies to detect, the only solution is to break things and move fast. We were featured on Chrome Webstore a few weeks back and got a great response (12k+ active users) which helped us enormously in improving the accuracy and efficiency, and I'm sure HN and PH launch will be even more helpful in improving the product.
apocalyptic0n3 9y ago
Doesn't seem to work on subdomains, unfortunately. Just does the main domain instead
- jijosunny 9y ago
  It is working on subdomains, but you are right that the primary domain is prioritised. Most users like to know the full tech stack of a website. If there is a blog at blog.company.com and if it is using Intercom, it can be a useful data. I hope this makes sense. Anyway, we will definitely address this concern and think about adding an option for subdomain separation.
thekonqueror 9y ago
Interesting choice of domain name. At first I thought this is WhatRunsWhere. [1] I checked a few WordPress sites that use CloudFlare, and it didn't detect WordPress. Let me know if you need the URLs. [1] https://www.whatrunswhere.com/ https://www.whatrunswhere.com/
- jijosunny 9y ago
  That would be great! Please share the URLs in question so that we can take a look. We are squashing bugs one at a time ;) Email: hello [at] whatruns.com. Thanks!
fokinsean 9y ago
From these comments, I didn't realize how much dislike there is for chrome extensions.
- briandear 9y ago
  I can’t speak for others, but I don’t like the clutter and potential security/privacy issues. I am not saying there are such issues, but it “feels” like there could be. I don’t have the time or desire to heavily vet extensions so I tend to avoid them. What they say they do and what they actually do — hard for me to quickly be able to verify them.
  - jijosunny 9y ago
    To address your concern with the privacy, WhatRuns do not collect or log any visitor information including IP address, location etc. We receive anonymous website data and match with our database to display the results. Hope this clarifies.
    - tombrossman 9y ago
      > To address your concern with the privacy, WhatRuns do not collect or log any visitor information including IP address, location etc That's not the whole truth - you are using Google Analytics to track visitors and you fail to disclose this in your privacy policy, despite this being mandatory under the Google Analytics T&C's. Well done launching what looks like a very cool project, and I hope you can further improve it by informing visitors that you are using Google Analytics to track them (or even drop GA completely in favor of something privacy friendly).
      - jijosunny 9y ago
        We are using Google Analytics only on the website, it will not (and do not have access to) collect extension user data. However, you are right that we should've mentioned this in our privacy policy. We're on it :)
    - 9y ago
brango 9y ago
I wondered how long it'd take for the BuiltWith competitors to appear after the article a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10316060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10316060). The golden rule of business: If you're onto a sweet money-maker, don't shout about it. I'm currently working on a competitor to a site I read about that bragged about their business model, and if they'd have kept it to themselves they'd be facing one less competitor...
- maxaf 9y ago
  They do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, which holds up almost as well as the "imitate then innovate" mantra.
- alnitak 9y ago
  That article wasn't the first broad mention. I remember reading about BuiltWith being an outstanding one man project a couple of years ago, so I am in fact surprised the copycats took so long to show up.
staticelf 9y ago
I ran it on my site and it didn't find anything. I run jQuery, nginx have google analytics and have my ssl certificate with lets encrypt. All stuff that builtwith.com found without any issues.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Our servers are going a bit cranky due to the huge traffic we are experiencing today. New websites (that was not loaded on WhatRuns before) are now queued up and might experience few seconds of delay. This is to ensure best experience for our active users.
tim333 9y ago
I tried it on a website of mine running on localhost using Python and it said languages "Python Node.js PHP Ruby" which seems a bit over enthusiastic as none of the non Python stuff was running.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  WhatRuns is currently not working on localhost. It is on our roadmap and we will definitely give it more weight! :)
chrisallenlane 9y ago
FWIW, none of the static media (images, css, js) seems to be loading for me - I'm just getting a bunch of 404s. This is happening in all browsers on my system, including when plugins are disabled. Might be network weirdness on my end, I dunno. (Or a HN "hug of death"?) Anyway, wanted to let you know. Congrats on the project :)
- halotrope 9y ago
  Same here
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Thank you so much! Yes, HN 'hug of death' seems to be the culprit here :) We're experiencing occasional downtimes. We're on it. New websites (that was not loaded on WhatRuns before) are now queued up and might experience 2-3 seconds delay.
  - patkai 9y ago
    Btw, how much traffic does HN's "hug of death" mean approximately?
    - jijosunny 9y ago
      Not sure. I'll make sure to update it here after :)
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - chrisallenlane 9y ago
    Glad to help :)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
feritkan 9y ago
What runs whatruns? - since it does not work at the moment
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Sorry, we experienced occasional downtimes earlier today, which could be the reason why. Can you try again now? If you're still facing the issue, please drop us a line with the URL in question so that we can take a look: hello [at] whatruns.com. Thanks!
sus_007 9y ago
How good is this over Wappalyzer ?
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Comparing with Wappalyzer and BuiltWith, here's why we think we have something different (and maybe better): 1. WhatRuns detects fonts, Wordpress plugins and themes (tens of thousands of them). 2. Ability to follow sites (and know what techs websites started using/ditched). 3. Very lightweight compared to our counterparts, and arguably better UI ;) 4. More accurate data. BuiltWith can be very inaccurate as you might've already noticed. Wappalyzer is fairly accurate, but limited in technologies. WhatRuns is trying to be the best of both worlds. :)
vijaybritto 9y ago
How are they detecting other technologies apart from javascript? By requesting the companies to share the tech stack manually?
EnderMB 9y ago
I mainly use Wappalyser, after finding it to be more reliable than BuiltWith, but I've given this a quick go on some of the sites I work on, and I have the following feedback: 1. All in all, this looks really tidy, so nice work! 2. Sadly, it looks a bit limited on detecting anything .NET/Windows. I pointed it at a few Umbraco sites running on Azure, and none of it was picked up. 3. It doesn't look like it works for subdomains. 4. Wappalyser does a good job of detecting Angular 2, whereas this seems to struggle. These issues aside, I'll probably keep it running at work, and if these things can be resolved I can see this being my preferred choice.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Awesome. Thank you so much for your kind words. Addressing your concerns, 1. Thank you ;) 2. Devs are looking into this. Neglecting .Net/Windows wasn't intentional. We will work on this. 3. Yes, WR currently considers subdomains as a part of the main domain. Most users like to know the full tech stack of a website. If there is a blog at blog.company.com and if it is using Intercom, it can be a useful data. I hope this makes sense. Anyway, we will definitely address this concern and think about adding an option for subdomain separation. 4. Noted!
- travmatt 9y ago
  I had seen wappalyzer recommended in the context of webapp pen testing and have used it since - Is recommend it as well
overcast 9y ago
Doesn't seem to handle my simple little kid quotes project. Just spins, and spins with no result. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://kidisms.com/ https://kidisms.com/
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Sorry, we experienced a minor downtime earlier today, which could be the reason why. Can you try again now? If you're still facing the issue, please drop us a line with the URL in question so that we can take a look: hello [at] whatruns.com. Thanks!
alxeder 9y ago
I would greatly appreciate to test your technology on a given site on your website before installing your extension
- dharness 9y ago
  I agree.. tbh, I'm not sure why I'd want this as an extension. Seems like I'd use it too sporadically to justify keeping it in chrome.
- jaib8 9y ago
  as mentioned in the earlier comments, you can test on their url https://www.whatruns.com/website/<domain https://www.whatruns.com/website/<domain name>
- jijosunny 9y ago
  We totally understand your point. We started with extension as developers/designers found it especially handy for a quick look-up while working on their projects. Not to worry though - we're working on something for the web as well!
jasonrhaas 9y ago
I'm leery of Chrome Extensions. They are basically just a plot to collect your usage data and sell it to marketing companies. I have disabled almost all Chrome extensions and locked down my browser. I got tired of the super targeted, annoying advertisements that were being thrown at me. Check out the privacy policy before installing any Chrome Extension. https://www.whatruns.com/privacy https://www.whatruns.com/privacy
- jijosunny 9y ago
  To address your concern with the privacy, WhatRuns do not collect or log any visitor information including IP address, location etc. We receive anonymous website data and match with our database to display the results. Hope this clarifies.
cosinetau 9y ago
Off topic, but, has anyone else been able to identify software frameworks by the behavior the application presents before? I find myself getting slightly better at this as I spend more time in web development.
charlieegan3 9y ago
Testing this against a number of websites I know the stack for this seems to not only be missing information but regularly reports things never used on that site.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Copying the comment I previously posted: We truly understand your frustration with detection accuracy, but when there are tens of thousands of technologies to detect, the only solution is to break things and move fast. We were featured on Chrome Webstore a few weeks back and got a great response (12k+ active users) helped us enormously in improving the accuracy and efficiency, and I'm sure HN and PH launch will be even more helpful in improving the product.
thinbeige 9y ago
Noob question: Looking at your competitors' traffic with SimilarWeb: They have all ok to low traffic, none of them really growing. So it might be a hard business to grow since a lot is SEO driven/organic. However, Builtwith is selling some plans which also include SEO related features like keyword reports. I understand that some might pay for latter but there is even more competition in that space. What I don't get: Who should pay for your stuff? It's of course interesting to see other stacks but honestly it's not a crucial thing. My CTOs and I know what they are doing and of course we like to get inspired but yeah, at the end of the day tons of research, years of experience, debate and the individual use case decide our stack and not what some random website does. Same for design-relates stuff, btw to find a font-face is just a Command-Option-I away. So no offense, but I am just wondering why you start a business which is already there, which is hard to scale and which is hard to get paid for. Guess I missed something and happy to hear your view.
- jayfk 9y ago
  People are paying for services like this because it's a valuable tool for lead generation. If you are selling a Wordpress plugin, you don't want to contact website owners that run on e.g Joomla.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Our business model will be similar to that of BuiltWith's, i.e selling list of websites using a particular technology. For eg., list of websites using Drift chat (https://www.whatruns.com/technology/drift https://www.whatruns.com/technology/drift) will be a super-useful competitive intelligence for other live-chat startups. Also, we are planning to introduce a predictive sales system which will suggest clients based on their technology adoption. For eg., if a company migrates to Magento, they are a potential client to Magento extension developers.
  - thinbeige 9y ago
    Ok thanks and this makes sense, a leadgen tool for BTB sales.
skratlo 9y ago
Please do make the extension open source, as it has access to all website data, mind the privacy, show us the code.
- Chirael 9y ago
  Not likely, unfortunately: "Our proprietary pattern recognition algorithm efficiently detects even the latest web technologies and plugins used on websites." (https://www.whatruns.com/about https://www.whatruns.com/about)
  - anotherbrownguy 9y ago
    Very unlikely that it does this client side. I presume the extension basically makes an API call with the url of the current site.
- icebraining 9y ago
  You don't need their permission to look at the code, just use something like http://crxextractor.com/ http://crxextractor.com/ to fetch the CRX from the Chrome Web Store, then rename to .zip and extract.
KirinDave 9y ago
I would find use for products like this but I'm emphatically not enabling a chrome extension unless I've built up significant trust with the company providing it.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  How about 15k happy users, featured by Google Chrome, transparent extension and top of HN and PH? ;) On a serious note, I understand your point and realise how new extensions can be dangerous. However, we have a very good team and is trying to solve all the concerns we had with our counterparts. I hope you'll give us the benefit of doubt! :)
  - dmitrygr 9y ago
    But why do you need to run on my PC? Just add a "insert url here" box and do it on your server. I implicitly distrust anyone who insists on running code on my PC that they could run elsewhere. Especially.. code they can remotely update
    - jijosunny 9y ago
      We started with extension as developers/designers found it especially handy for a quick look-up while working on their projects. Not to worry though - we're working on something for the web as well! Also, our counterparts got a majority of their traction from browser extensions which made it our obvious priority (even though it wasn't the easiest of options).
  - randomerr 9y ago
    15k is nothing and you can buy 'featured' status. Let me know when it gets closer to 500,000.
    - jijosunny 9y ago
      Chrome team handpick their featured products; I don't think we can buy the status. We know 15k is not a lot (comment was pun intended), but it looks like a good start :)
ipunchghosts 9y ago
Nobody mentioned netcraft!
quakeguy 9y ago
I can't add this to Opera it seems, though there is a button that shows me i could. All extensions disabled, latest version. Chrome works fine.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Sorry about this. We have only publicized Chrome and Firefox for now considering the demand. We will release the rest within a weeks time. Thanks for dropping by!
  - quakeguy 9y ago
    All cool, thx for your effort! Good Luck!
semiquaver 9y ago
I can't comment on the detection accuracy because this extension makes an important mistake -- it ignores the actual URL you are on and always performs detection on the root domain. So if I point the extension to a webapp at app.mycompany.com I get results for our marketing site at mycompany.com, which uses completely different (and more boring) tech.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Yes, WR currently considers subdomains as a part of the main domain. Most users like to know the full tech stack of a website. If there is a blog at blog.company.com and if it is using Intercom, it can be a useful data. I hope this makes sense. Anyway, we will definitely address this concern and think about adding an option for subdomain separation.
tomc1985 9y ago
Why is this a company? It's one Chrome addon. Seriously people.
- anaganisk 9y ago
  their idea is to index All the site tech and sell it to sales people
granitosaurus 9y ago
Wappalyzer[0] is free and libre. Why not more people contribute there instead and just try to create Yet Another Half Baked tool? https://wappalyzer.com/ https://wappalyzer.com/
hk__2 9y ago
If you prefer the command-line, whatweb has been around for a while (first public release in 2009): https://github.com/urbanadventurer/WhatWeb https://github.com/urbanadventurer/WhatWeb
fevangelou 9y ago
Congrats, WhatRuns looks very accurate to my tests so far and indeed better in UI terms. I only have one extra UI recommendation that I think Wappalyzer got right, which you could enable as an option. When a popular CMS/language/server OS is detected, Wappalyzer will use its icon in place of Wappalyzer's plugin icon. E.g. if Joomla is detected, Wappalyzer's icon on the plugins' toolbar will switch to Joomla's logo. There's a specific order to this preference that looks to go from the CMS used (e.g. Joomla, WordPress etc.) down to the framework (e.g. Laravel), programming language (e.g. PHP), webserver (e.g. Nginx) and finally the server OS. In other Words, if Joomla is detected, it will be displayed first, not PHP. The above is extremely helpful for anyone developing for the CMS communities (like myself). Of course, to maintain your identity as a plugin, you could use a double logo (a mashup of your own and the dominant/higher-level technology detected). * UPDATE: You should also consider providing a way for anyone to easily suggest new frameworks, apps, CMS extensions/plugins etc. to be detected, by providing a name, icon, description and the way to be detected (e.g. HTTP header, pattern in the HTML output or even HTML comment, linked source etc.).
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Thanks @fevangelou! Appreciate you taking time to drop your suggestions. Dynamic icon - I agree with you that it can be quite convenient to display the top technology (preferably the CMS). We will think about this as an option in the future updates! Technology submission - That's a great idea. We are adding this to our roadmap. Thank you so much.
  - jazoom 9y ago
    As a counter point, I really don't like that Wapalyzer does this. It always takes me a couple of seconds to find the correct extension to click because its icon always changes. If you keep your icon the same I will switch from Wapalyzer.
    - jijosunny 9y ago
      We got the same response from a ProductHunt user as well. Like we mentioned above, it will only be introduced as an 'option', which means you can happily switch :)
joshdance 9y ago
Love the design. Nice work guys. Are you going to be selling leads based on tech info as well?
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Thanks! I'll share this comment with our designer :) Our business model will be similar to that of BuiltWith's, i.e selling list of websites using a particular technology. For eg., list of websites using Drift chat (https://www.whatruns.com/technology/drift https://www.whatruns.com/technology/drift) will be a super-useful competitive intelligence for other live-chat start-ups. Also, we are planning to introduce a predictive sales system which will suggest clients based on their technology adoption. For eg., if a company migrates to Magento, they are a potential client to Magento extension developers.
TekMol 9y ago
It says ycombinator.com uses React, jQuery, "Vis JS", a Facebook tracking pixel, CloudFlare and Cloudfront ... https://www.whatruns.com/website/ycombinator.com https://www.whatruns.com/website/ycombinator.com That sounds strange. Can these claims be backed up somehow? I cannot see anything in the source that would confirm these. It also says Facebook uses Google Analytics \o/
- grawlinson 9y ago
  Have you checked the headers that these site(s) are sending/receiving? There's usually a couple of indicators in them that point towards whatever tech stack is running.
  - jijosunny 9y ago
    It could also be the data collected from HackerNews as WhatRuns consider subdomain as part of the main domain. Most users like to know the full tech stack of a website. If there is a blog at blog.company.com which is using Intercom, it can be a useful data. I hope this makes sense. Anyway, we will definitely address this issue and consider introducing an option for subdomain separation.
peejsmith 9y ago
Would it be possible for you to add OVP & CDN detection?
- jijosunny 9y ago
  OVPs and CDNs like Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront and most others are already detected by WR.
  - peejsmith 9y ago
    I see this now. Thank you very much for your reply.
x0ner 9y ago
This is pretty nifty. Cracking the extension open reveals a fairly basic API you can use to skip the extension. Here's some code to use it. https://gist.github.com/9b/f5fe434bf9965d673963884b56d93d9a https://gist.github.com/9b/f5fe434bf9965d673963884b56d93d9a On the privacy side, I could see concern from those using the extension. When the site is not found in their database, the full HTML of the page appears to be submitted to the servers and processed. This is a bit of what you would expect, but may present some concern for cases where a new site is submitted and PII is sent to WhatRuns servers.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Great hack. We will release the API very soon! :) Privacy side, I'm sure you noticed that we filter out any text content before sending html tags ‘anonymously’ for technology identification.
Myrmornis 9y ago
Tried on a site whose backend I know doesn't contain any ruby on rails and it says web framework is ruby on rails. Maybe they use Bayesian inference and don't worry about not having any data...
karli 9y ago
I like the idea, but i have one big problem with Whatsrun: it is capturing my browsing behaviour because it sends any URL i browse in the background to the whatsrun.com server, even when i don't want to know what software the page is running (means clicking the icon), so Whatruns get's a full browsing history from me (and you even set a UUID cookie to track unique users!). This is a huge privacy issue! Imagine Whatruns is starting to sell this data! To replicate simply open the dev-console for the extension and click the network tab.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Thanks! No visitor information is ever logged. We don't collect or log any visitor information including IP address, location etc. We receive anonymous website data and match with our database to display the results. I'm sure you noticed that we filter out any text content before sending HTML tags ‘anonymously’ for technology identification. This speeds up the process and is responsible for the speed WhatRuns has achieved. Hope this clarifies. Drop us a line if you still have any concerns, would love to clear it for you: hello [at] whatruns.com
douglaspatague 9y ago
Looks cool, but care to share how you manage to process the entire web, which is around 200 million domains and billions of web pages? Sounds like a herculean task for a startup your size.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Yes, it is challenging to index and process billions of web pages on a regular basis. Our current architecture can be scaled to handle 500+ million web-pages. However, to increase the crawl frequency and introduce more services, we are building a distributed computing network - called Newton Network (newton.network). We hope this will give us enough processing power to power our ambitions ;)
egberts1 9y ago
Wow.... Thanks to my website's Content-Security-Policy, I blocked Whatruns' javascript!!!
amitgupta15 9y ago
Pretty cool. Something like this was overdue. Loved it.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Thanks Amit, glad you like it!

430 points by mcone 9y ago

bognition 9y ago

Looks to be very similar to https://builtwith.com/ https://builtwith.com/

myth_drannon 9y ago
or https://stackshare.io/ https://stackshare.io/
- nmbr213 9y ago
  or https://wappalyzer.com/ https://wappalyzer.com/
  - mkagenius 9y ago
    or for android apps : https://android.fallible.co/builtwith/zendesk/1 https://android.fallible.co/builtwith/zendesk/1
- michaelmior 9y ago
  My understanding is that StackShare doesn't detect the technologies that are used but simply displays information that has been manually recorded. Edit: Looks like I'm probably wrong since I see they have a tool named "Stack Scanner"
jijosunny 9y ago
True. Comparing with Wappalyzer and BuiltWith, here's why we think we have something different (and maybe better): 1. WhatRuns detects fonts, Wordpress plugins and themes (tens of thousands of them). 2. Ability to follow sites (and know what techs websites started using/ditched). 3. Very lightweight compared to our counterparts, and arguably better UI ;) 4. More accurate data. BuiltWith can be very inaccurate as you might've already noticed. Wappalyzer is fairly accurate, but limited in technologies. WhatRuns is trying to be the best of both worlds.
- trjordan 9y ago
  How is WhatRuns more accurate? Are you doing something different to get your information?
  - jijosunny 9y ago
    We are using a deep learning algorithm to improve the detection. We also have a built-in module that automatically detects new web patterns – which we then manually curate to ensure accuracy.
    - korzun 9y ago
      > We are using a deep learning algorithm to improve the detection. No, you are not.
      - jijosunny 9y ago
        @korzun I'll explain. We use several signals like code snippets, filename, directory name, header info and several others to accurately identify technologies. However, there are many possibilities where this can go wrong even with few signals correct. Every time we detect a technology, we calculate a probability of its accuracy and filter out the rest. This system self-learns and improves the identification over time. Hope this helps.
        MrQuincle 9y ago
        What is self-learning? What kind of algorithms if I may ask?
        korzun 9y ago
        I like your website but what you are describing is not a deep learning algorithm. I'm not a big fan of people who do something well and then start going overboard with buzz words. You are most likely have a system that consumes content, compares that content against known hashed variants. If there is no match, you diff against known variants and check if the output matches any of the 'minimal' implementations. If you can't match anything, you simply stage that content for a manual review.
jo909 9y ago
https://builtwith.com/Whatruns.com https://builtwith.com/Whatruns.com Vs https://www.whatruns.com/website/whatruns.com https://www.whatruns.com/website/whatruns.com

dsr_ 9y ago

+1 for having a privacy policy linked from their home page that addresses both their browser extension and their website.

jijosunny 9y ago
Thank you, first thing we did before the launch!

garethsprice 9y ago

Useful, thanks! Noticed that it doesn't report correctly for subdomains - one of the sites I built is at foo.megacorp.com, but the extension reports the results for megacorp.com which is a separate property.

jijosunny 9y ago
WR currently considers subdomains as a part of the main domain. Most users like to know the full tech stack of a website. If there is a blog at blog.company.com and if it is using Intercom, it can be a useful data. I hope this makes sense. Anyway, we will definitely address this concern and think about adding an option for subdomain separation.

uyoakaoma 9y ago

Looks similar to stackshare

justinph 9y ago

Why does this need to be a browser extension? No, thanks.

deepakkarki 9y ago
Because that's how they make money. They go about creating a database of what websites use what technologies. They later sell that info to sales people as leads. I'm not sure what extra tracking they do beyond that!
- tillinghast 9y ago
  You can build a database by accepting URLs submitted by users, too. It just baffles me that people willingly install these extensions that—on the tin!—say that they can "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit". INSANE
  - tedmiston 9y ago
    Yeah that. I would try it as a bookmarklet but I never install Chrome extensions that ask for all data on all websites. It's just an insane permission for what should only get URLs when I explicitly ask it to. I wish Chrome would add a permission like this "website URL of the current page with your express permission every invocation".
  - deburo 9y ago
    Because even though they can, that's not what they're doing. I see comments like yours on this site pretty often, and it is tiring. There are many reasons people behave the way they do, and probably the most common reason is that their behaviors haven't caused them any harm as far as they know. The warning "Read and change all your data on the websites you visit" is perhaps scary the first time you see it, but then it becomes insignificant as time goes by and as extensions get installed without causing any visible harm.
    - tillinghast 9y ago

mshenfield 9y ago

Neat, but still some kinks. I'm not seeing Angular for https://fonts.google.com/ https://fonts.google.com/, but can quickly find the tell-tale ng- attributes in the HTML. BuiltWith has been around for a while and has it's own chrome extension [0]. It correctly identified fonts.google.com as using Angular. [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/builtwith-technology-prof/dapjbgnjinbpoindlpdmhochffioedbn?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/builtwith-technolo...

cheapsteak 9y ago
Has anyone used both this and Wappalyzer [1]? The latter is what I've been using and seems to have more users with higher ratings [1] - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wappalyzer/gppongmhjkpfnbhagpmjfkannfbllamg?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wappalyzer/gppongm...
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Comparing with Wappalyzer and BuiltWith, here's why we think we have something different (and maybe better): 1. WhatRuns detects fonts, Wordpress plugins and themes (tens of thousands of them). 2. Ability to follow sites (and know what techs websites started using/ditched). 3. Very lightweight compared to our counterparts, and arguably better UI ;) 4. More accurate data. BuiltWith can be very inaccurate as you might've already noticed. Wappalyzer is fairly accurate, but limited in technologies. WhatRuns is trying to be the best of both worlds.
jijosunny 9y ago
Noted! :) We'll look into this right away.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

Heh, good luck doing this for HN. You might say "Arc," but it's been modified for a decade. I wonder if the mods would ever be interested in being interviewed or talking about some of the tech. The last bit of Arc info we got was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11240681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11240681, which was awesome. It's pretty unique. I don't think any other large website in the world has written their own stack from top to bottom. Even Facebook uses php.

statictype 9y ago
That link was pretty interesting. Having to explicitly declare thread local access is a clever hack. I also wonder what database they use (if any). Did they also build their own http stack?
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  They use in-memory hash tables, which works since the whole site can be in memory. Originally they did build their own http stack but switched to nginx for a reverse proxy. On the other hand I'm not sure how much they lean on nginx's facilities.

rubyfan 9y ago

The Chrome extension is a nonstarter for me.

dgorges 9y ago

Wappalyzer [0] might be a good open source alternative. [0] https://github.com/AliasIO/Wappalyzer/ https://github.com/AliasIO/Wappalyzer/

jijosunny 9y ago
As mentioned in my previous comments, here's why we think we have something different (and maybe better) than our counterparts like Wappalyzer: 1. WhatRuns detects fonts, Wordpress plugins and themes (tens of thousands of them). 2. Ability to follow sites (and know what techs websites started using/ditched). 3. Very lightweight compared to our counterparts, and arguably better UI ;) 4. More accurate data. BuiltWith can be very inaccurate as you might've already noticed. Wappalyzer is fairly accurate, but limited in technologies. WhatRuns is trying to be the best of both worlds.

y0y 9y ago

Does anyone know what they are using to detect Wordpress? Unfortunately some sites that I am responsible for running in production are WP and we try our best to hide this fact and block all admin functionality to the public due to WP's less-than-stellar history of security vulnerabilities. This is the first tool I've seen that has detected it and now I'm stumped.

adventureadmin 9y ago
Well, you'll certainly be interested in wpscan.
bpicolo 9y ago
> we try our best to hide this fact Can't really hide wordpress because any time there's a new vulnerability, scrapers spam every site on the internet attempting to use it it anyway, regardless of what tech they're built on
nso 9y ago
Could it be as simple as checking if certain .php files respond to web requests?
rpeden 9y ago
It could be something as simple as the class names of elements on the page. WP has some defaults that are recognizable. Also, most WP pages will be loading scripts from from the wp-includes directory. There are probably others I'm overlooking, and some WP plugins probably also drop recognizable script tags into your pages. Since this is the first tool that has detected it, it's very possible you've already covered all of the things I mentioned.
- gedrap 9y ago
  Yes, `wp-contents`, `wp-includes` and basically anything else prefixed with `wp-` is a very clear signed that WordPress is behind the site.
octalmage 9y ago
The WP REST API is a new way to detect if a site is running WordPress. If you hit the homepage of a WordPress site it will return a link header with a location to the REST API. They can also just hit /wp-json/, or /xmlrpc.php, or many other files that WordPress requires. Like looking for assets served from wp-content, or wp-includes.

djmill 9y ago

Edit: About 15 minutes after posting, this seems to work fine on my site now. Sorry for the confusion! The spinner does not stop and it gives no results for my site (https://myhikes.org https://myhikes.org) - this is with both FireFox and Chrome extensions. Seems to work great for everything else though. Just replying in case you're looking for new edge cases to debug!

cknight 9y ago
Works for me on your site! (Chrome)
- djmill 9y ago
  Very weird, now it works after reading this and re-checking. Oddly enough I restarted Chrome and Firefox twice before posting the comment in hopes that it was just my machine. Thanks for the sanity check!
  - jijosunny 9y ago
    It could be because of the peak time HN and PH created yesterday. We had to queue all new URLs so that URLs that we once processed (almost all of the top 1M websites) work fine. There were also minor downtimes between server upgrades.

maxekman 9y ago

Awesome tool! I have often wondered about which tech sites uses but almost never bother with checking the source etc.

jijosunny 9y ago
Awesome. Thank you so much for your kind words!

sweep4r 9y ago

No need to install anything, just follow this url: https://www.whatruns.com/website/reddit.com https://www.whatruns.com/website/reddit.com

joekrill 9y ago
Why no input on the page itself for something like that?
- jijosunny 9y ago
  We started with extension as developers/designers found it especially handy for a quick look-up while working on their projects. Not to worry though - we're working on something for the web as well! ️
jaden 9y ago
Thanks for sharing that link. Here's a bookmarklet (as opposed to the Chrome extension) to launch this on whatever site you're on: javascript:void(window.open('https://www.whatruns.com/website/'+window.location.hostname));
charlieegan3 9y ago
This doesn't seem to work for all sites, for example my site https://charlieegan3.com https://charlieegan3.com doesn't work: https://www.whatruns.com/website/charlieegan3.com https://www.whatruns.com/website/charlieegan3.com
- max23_ 9y ago
  I think the link is just returning cached result that was already identified with the extension.

franciscop 9y ago

This is beautiful! While there are similar alternatives, I love the looks of Whatruns so I'll stick with it. The URL has to be publicly accessible from the Internet, right?

bognition 9y ago
Choosing a data vendor based upon the UI seems odd. Personally I'd chose whichever provider has the most accurate up to date information, but thats just me.
- franciscop 9y ago
  Yup, if they are basically the same but this is more intuitive and easier why not? As I don't depend on this (otherwise I'd agree) and it's just a "for fun" thing, the differences between them are negligible for me.
jijosunny 9y ago
Thank you so much! I'll share this comment with our designer ;) Addressing your question, all URLs once passed through WhatRuns will be publicly accessible. You will have to use the extension for new sites for now.

dustinmoris 9y ago

Ehm sorry.. but I refuse to clutter my browser with silly extensions which could and really should entirely live on a website as a service.

jijosunny 9y ago
Hi Dustin, we started with extension as developers/designers found it especially handy for a quick look-up while working on their projects. Not to worry though - we're working on something for the web as well! ️
- fragmede 9y ago
  HN is remarkably fickle; a browser extension is a perfectly reasonable user-friendly mechanism for the service given the choices out there. There are privacy concerns given the coarse level of granularity that Chrome provides, but until Google changes that ("Read and change all data on websites you visit" shouldn't be the same thing as "give the current URL to the browser extension when I click its button"), that's just what we're stuck with for user friendliness.

jijosunny 9y ago

Hi, Hacker News! We are truly stunned to see us on top of HN today! :) WhatRuns is a free browser extension that shows you what runs a website – from ad networks and developer tools to fonts and Wordpress plugins. You can also follow websites and get notified when they add or remove technologies. We soft-launched a couple of weeks back and was lucky enough to be picked up by the Chrome team. We were featured on the Chrome Webstore, landing us 12k active users in one week. It was a huge validation and helped us tremendously in squashing bugs and making a finished product. We realise we have a long way to go, and our little team is working round the clock to make it happen. We also launched on ProductHunt today: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/whatruns https://www.producthunt.com/posts/whatruns Would love to hear what you think :) UPDATE: Thank you for all the feedback! Sorry about the occasional false detections. We are looking into this. This is largely because we detect a considerably large number of technologies/plugins compared to our counterparts. Lots of possibilities for false pattern recognition etc. Rest assured our team is working round the clock to improve accuracy and add more technologies/plugins. Also, Our servers are going a bit cranky due to the huge traffic we are experiencing today. New websites (that was not loaded on WhatRuns before) are now queued up and might experience 2-3 seconds delay. This is to ensure best experience for our active users. Thank you so much for such a great response!

jaxondu 9y ago
Just check https://www.whatruns.com/website/vuejs.org https://www.whatruns.com/website/vuejs.org and you're showing the site as using EmberJS. Looks like you're not launch ready.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  Sorry you feel that way. We truly understand your frustration with detection accuracy, but when there are tens of thousands of technologies to detect, the only solution is to break things and move fast. We were featured on Chrome Webstore a few weeks back and got a great response (12k+ active users) helped us enormously in improving the accuracy and efficiency, and I'm sure HN and PH launch will be even more helpful in improving the product.

Doctor_Fegg 9y ago

Fun. I'm getting a false positive for Rails (I'm using Passenger, but not Rails), and Elevio for documentation (never heard of it!). Other than that it guesses right.

floriferous 9y ago

It hangs on an old website, with the following error in the console: TypeError: Cannot read property 'hostname' of undefined at Object.setNoAppsFoundText (chrome-extension://cmkdbmfndkfgebldhnkbfhlneefdaaip/js/popup_final.js:153:22)

ishitatsuyuki 9y ago

Really inaccurate. Just tried and it reported React for Vue/Nuxt.js, CloudFlare and nginx for Zeit now.sh.

jijosunny 9y ago
We truly understand your frustration with detection accuracy, but when there are tens of thousands of technologies to detect, the only solution is to break things and move fast. We were featured on Chrome Webstore a few weeks back and got a great response (12k+ active users) which helped us enormously in improving the accuracy and efficiency, and I'm sure HN and PH launch will be even more helpful in improving the product.

apocalyptic0n3 9y ago

Doesn't seem to work on subdomains, unfortunately. Just does the main domain instead

jijosunny 9y ago
It is working on subdomains, but you are right that the primary domain is prioritised. Most users like to know the full tech stack of a website. If there is a blog at blog.company.com and if it is using Intercom, it can be a useful data. I hope this makes sense. Anyway, we will definitely address this concern and think about adding an option for subdomain separation.

thekonqueror 9y ago

Interesting choice of domain name. At first I thought this is WhatRunsWhere. [1] I checked a few WordPress sites that use CloudFlare, and it didn't detect WordPress. Let me know if you need the URLs. [1] https://www.whatrunswhere.com/ https://www.whatrunswhere.com/

jijosunny 9y ago
That would be great! Please share the URLs in question so that we can take a look. We are squashing bugs one at a time ;) Email: hello [at] whatruns.com. Thanks!

fokinsean 9y ago

From these comments, I didn't realize how much dislike there is for chrome extensions.

briandear 9y ago
I can’t speak for others, but I don’t like the clutter and potential security/privacy issues. I am not saying there are such issues, but it “feels” like there could be. I don’t have the time or desire to heavily vet extensions so I tend to avoid them. What they say they do and what they actually do — hard for me to quickly be able to verify them.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  To address your concern with the privacy, WhatRuns do not collect or log any visitor information including IP address, location etc. We receive anonymous website data and match with our database to display the results. Hope this clarifies.
  - tombrossman 9y ago
    > To address your concern with the privacy, WhatRuns do not collect or log any visitor information including IP address, location etc That's not the whole truth - you are using Google Analytics to track visitors and you fail to disclose this in your privacy policy, despite this being mandatory under the Google Analytics T&C's. Well done launching what looks like a very cool project, and I hope you can further improve it by informing visitors that you are using Google Analytics to track them (or even drop GA completely in favor of something privacy friendly).
    - jijosunny 9y ago
      We are using Google Analytics only on the website, it will not (and do not have access to) collect extension user data. However, you are right that we should've mentioned this in our privacy policy. We're on it :)
  - 9y ago

brango 9y ago

I wondered how long it'd take for the BuiltWith competitors to appear after the article a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10316060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10316060). The golden rule of business: If you're onto a sweet money-maker, don't shout about it. I'm currently working on a competitor to a site I read about that bragged about their business model, and if they'd have kept it to themselves they'd be facing one less competitor...

maxaf 9y ago
They do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, which holds up almost as well as the "imitate then innovate" mantra.
alnitak 9y ago
That article wasn't the first broad mention. I remember reading about BuiltWith being an outstanding one man project a couple of years ago, so I am in fact surprised the copycats took so long to show up.

staticelf 9y ago

I ran it on my site and it didn't find anything. I run jQuery, nginx have google analytics and have my ssl certificate with lets encrypt. All stuff that builtwith.com found without any issues.

jijosunny 9y ago
Our servers are going a bit cranky due to the huge traffic we are experiencing today. New websites (that was not loaded on WhatRuns before) are now queued up and might experience few seconds of delay. This is to ensure best experience for our active users.

tim333 9y ago

I tried it on a website of mine running on localhost using Python and it said languages "Python Node.js PHP Ruby" which seems a bit over enthusiastic as none of the non Python stuff was running.

jijosunny 9y ago
WhatRuns is currently not working on localhost. It is on our roadmap and we will definitely give it more weight! :)

chrisallenlane 9y ago

FWIW, none of the static media (images, css, js) seems to be loading for me - I'm just getting a bunch of 404s. This is happening in all browsers on my system, including when plugins are disabled. Might be network weirdness on my end, I dunno. (Or a HN "hug of death"?) Anyway, wanted to let you know. Congrats on the project :)

halotrope 9y ago
Same here
jijosunny 9y ago
Thank you so much! Yes, HN 'hug of death' seems to be the culprit here :) We're experiencing occasional downtimes. We're on it. New websites (that was not loaded on WhatRuns before) are now queued up and might experience 2-3 seconds delay.
- patkai 9y ago
  Btw, how much traffic does HN's "hug of death" mean approximately?
  - jijosunny 9y ago
    Not sure. I'll make sure to update it here after :)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- chrisallenlane 9y ago
  Glad to help :)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

feritkan 9y ago

What runs whatruns? - since it does not work at the moment

jijosunny 9y ago
Sorry, we experienced occasional downtimes earlier today, which could be the reason why. Can you try again now? If you're still facing the issue, please drop us a line with the URL in question so that we can take a look: hello [at] whatruns.com. Thanks!

sus_007 9y ago

How good is this over Wappalyzer ?

jijosunny 9y ago
Comparing with Wappalyzer and BuiltWith, here's why we think we have something different (and maybe better): 1. WhatRuns detects fonts, Wordpress plugins and themes (tens of thousands of them). 2. Ability to follow sites (and know what techs websites started using/ditched). 3. Very lightweight compared to our counterparts, and arguably better UI ;) 4. More accurate data. BuiltWith can be very inaccurate as you might've already noticed. Wappalyzer is fairly accurate, but limited in technologies. WhatRuns is trying to be the best of both worlds. :)

vijaybritto 9y ago

How are they detecting other technologies apart from javascript? By requesting the companies to share the tech stack manually?

EnderMB 9y ago

I mainly use Wappalyser, after finding it to be more reliable than BuiltWith, but I've given this a quick go on some of the sites I work on, and I have the following feedback: 1. All in all, this looks really tidy, so nice work! 2. Sadly, it looks a bit limited on detecting anything .NET/Windows. I pointed it at a few Umbraco sites running on Azure, and none of it was picked up. 3. It doesn't look like it works for subdomains. 4. Wappalyser does a good job of detecting Angular 2, whereas this seems to struggle. These issues aside, I'll probably keep it running at work, and if these things can be resolved I can see this being my preferred choice.

jijosunny 9y ago
Awesome. Thank you so much for your kind words. Addressing your concerns, 1. Thank you ;) 2. Devs are looking into this. Neglecting .Net/Windows wasn't intentional. We will work on this. 3. Yes, WR currently considers subdomains as a part of the main domain. Most users like to know the full tech stack of a website. If there is a blog at blog.company.com and if it is using Intercom, it can be a useful data. I hope this makes sense. Anyway, we will definitely address this concern and think about adding an option for subdomain separation. 4. Noted!
travmatt 9y ago
I had seen wappalyzer recommended in the context of webapp pen testing and have used it since - Is recommend it as well

overcast 9y ago

Doesn't seem to handle my simple little kid quotes project. Just spins, and spins with no result. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ https://kidisms.com/ https://kidisms.com/

jijosunny 9y ago
Sorry, we experienced a minor downtime earlier today, which could be the reason why. Can you try again now? If you're still facing the issue, please drop us a line with the URL in question so that we can take a look: hello [at] whatruns.com. Thanks!

alxeder 9y ago

I would greatly appreciate to test your technology on a given site on your website before installing your extension

dharness 9y ago
I agree.. tbh, I'm not sure why I'd want this as an extension. Seems like I'd use it too sporadically to justify keeping it in chrome.
jaib8 9y ago
as mentioned in the earlier comments, you can test on their url https://www.whatruns.com/website/<domain https://www.whatruns.com/website/<domain name>
jijosunny 9y ago
We totally understand your point. We started with extension as developers/designers found it especially handy for a quick look-up while working on their projects. Not to worry though - we're working on something for the web as well!

jasonrhaas 9y ago

I'm leery of Chrome Extensions. They are basically just a plot to collect your usage data and sell it to marketing companies. I have disabled almost all Chrome extensions and locked down my browser. I got tired of the super targeted, annoying advertisements that were being thrown at me. Check out the privacy policy before installing any Chrome Extension. https://www.whatruns.com/privacy https://www.whatruns.com/privacy

jijosunny 9y ago
To address your concern with the privacy, WhatRuns do not collect or log any visitor information including IP address, location etc. We receive anonymous website data and match with our database to display the results. Hope this clarifies.

cosinetau 9y ago

Off topic, but, has anyone else been able to identify software frameworks by the behavior the application presents before? I find myself getting slightly better at this as I spend more time in web development.

charlieegan3 9y ago

Testing this against a number of websites I know the stack for this seems to not only be missing information but regularly reports things never used on that site.

jijosunny 9y ago
Copying the comment I previously posted: We truly understand your frustration with detection accuracy, but when there are tens of thousands of technologies to detect, the only solution is to break things and move fast. We were featured on Chrome Webstore a few weeks back and got a great response (12k+ active users) helped us enormously in improving the accuracy and efficiency, and I'm sure HN and PH launch will be even more helpful in improving the product.

thinbeige 9y ago

Noob question: Looking at your competitors' traffic with SimilarWeb: They have all ok to low traffic, none of them really growing. So it might be a hard business to grow since a lot is SEO driven/organic. However, Builtwith is selling some plans which also include SEO related features like keyword reports. I understand that some might pay for latter but there is even more competition in that space. What I don't get: Who should pay for your stuff? It's of course interesting to see other stacks but honestly it's not a crucial thing. My CTOs and I know what they are doing and of course we like to get inspired but yeah, at the end of the day tons of research, years of experience, debate and the individual use case decide our stack and not what some random website does. Same for design-relates stuff, btw to find a font-face is just a Command-Option-I away. So no offense, but I am just wondering why you start a business which is already there, which is hard to scale and which is hard to get paid for. Guess I missed something and happy to hear your view.

jayfk 9y ago
People are paying for services like this because it's a valuable tool for lead generation. If you are selling a Wordpress plugin, you don't want to contact website owners that run on e.g Joomla.
jijosunny 9y ago
Our business model will be similar to that of BuiltWith's, i.e selling list of websites using a particular technology. For eg., list of websites using Drift chat (https://www.whatruns.com/technology/drift https://www.whatruns.com/technology/drift) will be a super-useful competitive intelligence for other live-chat startups. Also, we are planning to introduce a predictive sales system which will suggest clients based on their technology adoption. For eg., if a company migrates to Magento, they are a potential client to Magento extension developers.
- thinbeige 9y ago
  Ok thanks and this makes sense, a leadgen tool for BTB sales.

skratlo 9y ago

Please do make the extension open source, as it has access to all website data, mind the privacy, show us the code.

Chirael 9y ago
Not likely, unfortunately: "Our proprietary pattern recognition algorithm efficiently detects even the latest web technologies and plugins used on websites." (https://www.whatruns.com/about https://www.whatruns.com/about)
- anotherbrownguy 9y ago
  Very unlikely that it does this client side. I presume the extension basically makes an API call with the url of the current site.
icebraining 9y ago
You don't need their permission to look at the code, just use something like http://crxextractor.com/ http://crxextractor.com/ to fetch the CRX from the Chrome Web Store, then rename to .zip and extract.

KirinDave 9y ago

I would find use for products like this but I'm emphatically not enabling a chrome extension unless I've built up significant trust with the company providing it.

jijosunny 9y ago
How about 15k happy users, featured by Google Chrome, transparent extension and top of HN and PH? ;) On a serious note, I understand your point and realise how new extensions can be dangerous. However, we have a very good team and is trying to solve all the concerns we had with our counterparts. I hope you'll give us the benefit of doubt! :)
- dmitrygr 9y ago
  But why do you need to run on my PC? Just add a "insert url here" box and do it on your server. I implicitly distrust anyone who insists on running code on my PC that they could run elsewhere. Especially.. code they can remotely update
  - jijosunny 9y ago
    We started with extension as developers/designers found it especially handy for a quick look-up while working on their projects. Not to worry though - we're working on something for the web as well! Also, our counterparts got a majority of their traction from browser extensions which made it our obvious priority (even though it wasn't the easiest of options).
- randomerr 9y ago
  15k is nothing and you can buy 'featured' status. Let me know when it gets closer to 500,000.
  - jijosunny 9y ago
    Chrome team handpick their featured products; I don't think we can buy the status. We know 15k is not a lot (comment was pun intended), but it looks like a good start :)

ipunchghosts 9y ago

Nobody mentioned netcraft!

quakeguy 9y ago

I can't add this to Opera it seems, though there is a button that shows me i could. All extensions disabled, latest version. Chrome works fine.

jijosunny 9y ago
Sorry about this. We have only publicized Chrome and Firefox for now considering the demand. We will release the rest within a weeks time. Thanks for dropping by!
- quakeguy 9y ago
  All cool, thx for your effort! Good Luck!

semiquaver 9y ago

I can't comment on the detection accuracy because this extension makes an important mistake -- it ignores the actual URL you are on and always performs detection on the root domain. So if I point the extension to a webapp at app.mycompany.com I get results for our marketing site at mycompany.com, which uses completely different (and more boring) tech.

jijosunny 9y ago
Yes, WR currently considers subdomains as a part of the main domain. Most users like to know the full tech stack of a website. If there is a blog at blog.company.com and if it is using Intercom, it can be a useful data. I hope this makes sense. Anyway, we will definitely address this concern and think about adding an option for subdomain separation.

tomc1985 9y ago

Why is this a company? It's one Chrome addon. Seriously people.

anaganisk 9y ago
their idea is to index All the site tech and sell it to sales people

granitosaurus 9y ago

Wappalyzer[0] is free and libre. Why not more people contribute there instead and just try to create Yet Another Half Baked tool? https://wappalyzer.com/ https://wappalyzer.com/

hk__2 9y ago

If you prefer the command-line, whatweb has been around for a while (first public release in 2009): https://github.com/urbanadventurer/WhatWeb https://github.com/urbanadventurer/WhatWeb

fevangelou 9y ago

Congrats, WhatRuns looks very accurate to my tests so far and indeed better in UI terms. I only have one extra UI recommendation that I think Wappalyzer got right, which you could enable as an option. When a popular CMS/language/server OS is detected, Wappalyzer will use its icon in place of Wappalyzer's plugin icon. E.g. if Joomla is detected, Wappalyzer's icon on the plugins' toolbar will switch to Joomla's logo. There's a specific order to this preference that looks to go from the CMS used (e.g. Joomla, WordPress etc.) down to the framework (e.g. Laravel), programming language (e.g. PHP), webserver (e.g. Nginx) and finally the server OS. In other Words, if Joomla is detected, it will be displayed first, not PHP. The above is extremely helpful for anyone developing for the CMS communities (like myself). Of course, to maintain your identity as a plugin, you could use a double logo (a mashup of your own and the dominant/higher-level technology detected). * UPDATE: You should also consider providing a way for anyone to easily suggest new frameworks, apps, CMS extensions/plugins etc. to be detected, by providing a name, icon, description and the way to be detected (e.g. HTTP header, pattern in the HTML output or even HTML comment, linked source etc.).

jijosunny 9y ago
Thanks @fevangelou! Appreciate you taking time to drop your suggestions. Dynamic icon - I agree with you that it can be quite convenient to display the top technology (preferably the CMS). We will think about this as an option in the future updates! Technology submission - That's a great idea. We are adding this to our roadmap. Thank you so much.
- jazoom 9y ago
  As a counter point, I really don't like that Wapalyzer does this. It always takes me a couple of seconds to find the correct extension to click because its icon always changes. If you keep your icon the same I will switch from Wapalyzer.
  - jijosunny 9y ago
    We got the same response from a ProductHunt user as well. Like we mentioned above, it will only be introduced as an 'option', which means you can happily switch :)

joshdance 9y ago

Love the design. Nice work guys. Are you going to be selling leads based on tech info as well?

jijosunny 9y ago
Thanks! I'll share this comment with our designer :) Our business model will be similar to that of BuiltWith's, i.e selling list of websites using a particular technology. For eg., list of websites using Drift chat (https://www.whatruns.com/technology/drift https://www.whatruns.com/technology/drift) will be a super-useful competitive intelligence for other live-chat start-ups. Also, we are planning to introduce a predictive sales system which will suggest clients based on their technology adoption. For eg., if a company migrates to Magento, they are a potential client to Magento extension developers.

TekMol 9y ago

It says ycombinator.com uses React, jQuery, "Vis JS", a Facebook tracking pixel, CloudFlare and Cloudfront ... https://www.whatruns.com/website/ycombinator.com https://www.whatruns.com/website/ycombinator.com That sounds strange. Can these claims be backed up somehow? I cannot see anything in the source that would confirm these. It also says Facebook uses Google Analytics \o/

grawlinson 9y ago
Have you checked the headers that these site(s) are sending/receiving? There's usually a couple of indicators in them that point towards whatever tech stack is running.
- jijosunny 9y ago
  It could also be the data collected from HackerNews as WhatRuns consider subdomain as part of the main domain. Most users like to know the full tech stack of a website. If there is a blog at blog.company.com which is using Intercom, it can be a useful data. I hope this makes sense. Anyway, we will definitely address this issue and consider introducing an option for subdomain separation.

peejsmith 9y ago

Would it be possible for you to add OVP & CDN detection?

jijosunny 9y ago
OVPs and CDNs like Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront and most others are already detected by WR.
- peejsmith 9y ago
  I see this now. Thank you very much for your reply.

x0ner 9y ago

This is pretty nifty. Cracking the extension open reveals a fairly basic API you can use to skip the extension. Here's some code to use it. https://gist.github.com/9b/f5fe434bf9965d673963884b56d93d9a https://gist.github.com/9b/f5fe434bf9965d673963884b56d93d9a On the privacy side, I could see concern from those using the extension. When the site is not found in their database, the full HTML of the page appears to be submitted to the servers and processed. This is a bit of what you would expect, but may present some concern for cases where a new site is submitted and PII is sent to WhatRuns servers.

jijosunny 9y ago
Great hack. We will release the API very soon! :) Privacy side, I'm sure you noticed that we filter out any text content before sending html tags ‘anonymously’ for technology identification.

Myrmornis 9y ago

Tried on a site whose backend I know doesn't contain any ruby on rails and it says web framework is ruby on rails. Maybe they use Bayesian inference and don't worry about not having any data...

karli 9y ago

I like the idea, but i have one big problem with Whatsrun: it is capturing my browsing behaviour because it sends any URL i browse in the background to the whatsrun.com server, even when i don't want to know what software the page is running (means clicking the icon), so Whatruns get's a full browsing history from me (and you even set a UUID cookie to track unique users!). This is a huge privacy issue! Imagine Whatruns is starting to sell this data! To replicate simply open the dev-console for the extension and click the network tab.

jijosunny 9y ago
Thanks! No visitor information is ever logged. We don't collect or log any visitor information including IP address, location etc. We receive anonymous website data and match with our database to display the results. I'm sure you noticed that we filter out any text content before sending HTML tags ‘anonymously’ for technology identification. This speeds up the process and is responsible for the speed WhatRuns has achieved. Hope this clarifies. Drop us a line if you still have any concerns, would love to clear it for you: hello [at] whatruns.com

douglaspatague 9y ago

Looks cool, but care to share how you manage to process the entire web, which is around 200 million domains and billions of web pages? Sounds like a herculean task for a startup your size.

jijosunny 9y ago
Yes, it is challenging to index and process billions of web pages on a regular basis. Our current architecture can be scaled to handle 500+ million web-pages. However, to increase the crawl frequency and introduce more services, we are building a distributed computing network - called Newton Network (newton.network). We hope this will give us enough processing power to power our ambitions ;)

egberts1 9y ago

Wow.... Thanks to my website's Content-Security-Policy, I blocked Whatruns' javascript!!!

amitgupta15 9y ago

Pretty cool. Something like this was overdue. Loved it.

jijosunny 9y ago
Thanks Amit, glad you like it!