Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

DontBeEvil.rip is a search engine designed specifically for developers, accessible via API, CLI, and web interface. It indexes only high-quality developer resources from sources like Hacker News, Stack Overflow, and… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. DontBeEvil.rip: Search, for developers (API, expressions, CLI) launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1. 1
   Context.dev▲814

   Hello, My name is Yahia, I've been working on scraping products for a long time and maintain a couple of free sites in my spare time (E.g. knifegeek.io) What prompted this is i've rebuilt scraping infra at every company I've started and finally just made it a product. Pass a URL, get clean markdown, html, images, sitemap or pass a domain, get logos, colors, socials, industry data. Goal is to offer a better service than VC funded competitors at a fraction of the cost. Stealth is included and automatic at no additional cost (normally an upcharge by alternatives). Would love your honest thoughts.

   Jul 2026 · context.dev · its alternatives →

2. 2
   Crawlee – Web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js▲282

   Hey HN, This is Jan, founder of Apify, a web scraping and automation platform. Drawing on our team's years of experience, today we're launching Crawlee [1], the web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js that's designed for the fastest development and maximum reliability in production. For details, see the short video [2] or read the announcement blog post [3]. Main features: - Supports headless browsers with Playwright or Puppeteer - Supports raw HTTP crawling with Cheerio or JSDOM - Automated parallelization and scaling of crawlers for best performance - Avoids blocking using…

   2022 · crawlee.dev · its alternatives →

3. 3
   Apify SDK – A scalable web crawling and scraping library for JavaScript▲78

   Crawlee—A web scraping and browser automation library for Node.js to build reliable crawlers. In JavaScript and TypeScript. Extract data for AI, LLMs, RAG, or GPTs. Download HTML, PDF, JPG, PNG, and other files from websites. Works with Puppeteer, Playwright, Cheerio, JSDOM, and raw HTTP. Both headf

   2018 · github.com · its alternatives →

4. 4
   Turn any website into a knowledge base for LLMs▲305

   I built this tool because I wanted a way to just take a bunch of URLs or domains, and query their content in RAG applications. It takes away the pain of crawling, extracting content, chunking, vectorizing, and updating periodically. I'm curious to see if it can be useful to others. I meant to launch this six months ago but life got in the way...

   2024 · embedding.io · its alternatives →

5. 5FS
   Feep! search, an independent search engine for programmers▲182

   Hi HN! This started late last year as an afternoon project to play around with ElasticSearch, and then I kept thinking of new features I wanted to add. I still have a lot of things I want to build, but now seemed like a good time to put it out there: even if the results aren’t nearly the quality I’d like, I’ve still found it useful and I want to show it off! I’ve been working on it since September 2021, but only in fits and starts. The entire thing runs on a computer in my living room (there’s a picture on the About page); I haven’t done any load testing so we’ll see how it holds up.

   2022 · search.feep.dev · its alternatives →

6. 6
   I made a better Perplexity for developers▲185

   Hi HN, I am Jiayuan, and I'm here to introduce a tool we've been building over the past few months: Devv (https://devv.ai). In simple terms, it is an AI-powered search engine specifically designed for developers. Now, you might ask, with so many AI search engines already available—Perplexity, You.com, Phind, and several open-source projects—why do we need another one? We all know that Generative Search Engines are built on RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)[1] combined with Large Language Models (LLMs). Most of the products mentioned above use indexes from general search engines…

   2024 · devv.ai · its alternatives →

7. 7
   ScrapingBee (formerly ScrapingNinja)▲275

   The easiest web scraping API on the web

   2019 · scrapingbee.com · its alternatives →

8. 8
   Crawlee▲229

   Build reliable web scrapers and robots, fast!

   2022 · crawlee.dev · its alternatives →

9. 9
   Trails▲81

   Hey all, Justin here. I previously built Phind, the AI search engine for developers. One of the biggest problems we had there was figuring out what went wrong with bad searches. We had tons of searches per day, but less than 1% of users gave any explicit feedback. So we were either manually digging through searches or making general system improvements and hoping they helped. This problem gets harder with agents. Traces are longer and more complex. It takes more effort to review them, so I'm building a tool that lets you analyze LLM outputs directly to help developers of LLM apps and agents…

   Jan 2026 · trails-red.vercel.app · its alternatives →

10. 10AE
    An experimental code search engine▲88

    2018 · codegrep.com · its alternatives →

11. 11
    FlowLens▲134

    Hi HN, We often run into this with coding agents like Claude Code: debugging turns into copy-pasting logs, writing long explanations, and sharing screenshots. FlowLens is an MCP server plus a Chrome extension that captures browser context (video, console, network, user actions, storage) and makes it available to MCP-compatible agents like Claude Code. You can try it here: https://magentic.ai/flowlens Any feedback—good, bad, or brutal—is welcome.

    Dec 2025 · magentic.ai · its alternatives →

12. 12
    Anakin▲148

    Every second thing I build needs to access the web, and I was frustrated with not finding something that just works all the time. With my team, we built this because I wanted to enable access to extremely difficult websites and apps for every AI agent. We have solved this cat-and-mouse problem with self-healing built in. It's one API to get data from hostile sites, and it can do easy sites too. You POST a URL and get back Markdown, JSON, HTML, a screenshot, or all of them. That same call handles anti-bot, proxy rotation, JS rendering, persistent authenticated sessions, and schema-based…

    2021 · anakin.io · its alternatives →

13. 13
    Tag – instantly jump to your ag matches▲98

    Instantly jump to your ag or ripgrep matches. Contribute to aykamko/tag development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2016 · github.com · its alternatives →

14. 14
    Hello▲73

    The best search engine for software developers

    2022 · its alternatives →

15. 15TM
    Tiny Metasearch Engine to Find Software Developers▲77

    Free Recruitment Meta Search Engine for Sourcing Software Developers

    2023 · talentsignals.com · its alternatives →

16. 16IM
    I'm tired of sharing code using PasteBin and Slack, so I made this▲41

    Hey developers I think we're tired of copying and pasting our codes and sharing links using PasteBin, GithubGist, or Slack. What if you could share the codes without copying the link and share them right from your favorite editor? That was the motivation for creating TurboGist. Right now, it's still in the MVP stage, and I'm trying to gather feedback from developers like you. It's available as a beta in the VS Code Extension store. Can you guys check this out? It'd help me a lot. You don't need to pay any penny, 100% FREE. However, I'm working on introducing a self-hosted feature. Besides, a…

    2025 · turbogist.dev · its alternatives →

17. 17
    A search engine based on social signals▲46

    We built a search engine that shows you the most engaging stories/topics being shared across Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, and Google+. We crawled over 15 million articles the past 3 months, retrieved the total number of Facebook likes, tweets, Google+’s etc and built a search index around it. Here's what our infrastructure looks like: Rails/Redis: We use the Sidekiq gem as a message queue. We have hundreds of workers that do the crawling, data mining, and number crunching. ElasticSearch: We built the search index using ElasticSearch, with the data imported from our Postgres…

    2013 · buzzsumo.com · its alternatives →

18. 18
    A somewhat faster, more lightweight, ripgrep-inspired alternative▲29

    Hold on tight. Contribute to alexpasmantier/grip-grab development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

19. 19IM
    I made a platform to load and performance test API's▲30

    I built BuzzBench because I was frustrated with how complex performance testing tools have become. And I was ending up writing my own scripts to test endpoints and manually check out resource usage at the time of testing. Checkout demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAnbZMoQvmQ

    2025 · buzzbench.io · its alternatives →

20. 20IB
    I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage▲16

    Hey HN -- I'm a solo dev. Built this because I got tired of AI crawlers reading my HTML in plain text while robots.txt did nothing. The core trick: shuffle characters and words in your HTML using a seed, then use CSS (flexbox order, direction: rtl, unicode-bidi) to put them back visually. Browser renders perfectly. textContent returns garbage. On top of that: email/phone RTL obfuscation with decoy characters, AI honeypots that inject prompt instructions into LLM scrapers, clipboard interception, canvas-based image rendering (no img src in DOM), robots.txt blocking 30+ AI crawlers, and…

    Mar 2026 · obscrd.dev · its alternatives →

21. 21
    Crawlie – Free open-source SEO audit tool for humans and agents▲20

    With AI, it's faster than ever to ship a marketing site... but most of what gets generated is slop that was never built to be found. Plus the tools meant to catch that fall short: most SEO auditors cost money, don't play nicely with your agents, or tell you what's wrong without telling you how to actually rank for SEO and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization: being cited by AI search like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews). crawlie fixes that! It's 100% free, it's local-first, it's agent-native (MCP baked in!), and every issue it finds comes with why it matters and how to fix it.

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

22. 22
    Trying to fix the web scraping industry's benchmark problem▲18

    We've been trying to evaluate web scraping companies, but when you look at their benchmarks, you can't verify anything, and they mostly exist to prove the company is successful. They put somewhere between 98% and 100% because they pick their own urls, define success their own way, and don't publish the harness. We also saw companies like scrapfly astroturf websites like scrapeway and call them independent. So, we built an open source benchmark that we want to represent the frontier of web data. We're trying to look across all major anti-bot providers and industries, to build a comprehensive…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

23. 23
    Jevcrawl – A web crawler for AI agents with no LLM in the crawl loop▲21

    MCP server and CLI that crawls websites for AI agents: finds the answer page 2x more often than Crawl4AI, 10x cheaper per answer than letting Claude crawl. - RayenMlayeh/jevcrawl

    8d ago · github.com · its alternatives →

24. 24
    CrawlerCheck▲16

    Since the last Show HN 7 months ago, I've shipped some major updates: • Operators Directory – browse 160+ crawlers by company (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.). See all their bots, safety stats, and official docs in one place. • Enhanced crawler profiles with "Blocking Impact" analysis and common use cases • Added 25+ new AI crawlers including latest models and scrapers • Bulk robots.txt generator – generate allow/block rules for all filtered bots in one click • RFC 9309 strict compliance – mimics Googlebot's exact "Longest Match" logic The tool now helps answer "who owns CCBot?" or…

    2025 · crawlercheck.com · its alternatives →

Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →