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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to I made a better Perplexity for developers

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…

Devv is an AI-powered search engine built specifically for developers. Unlike general search engines, it uses a specialized index focused on development resources, including official documentation and programming… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. I made a better Perplexity for developers launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1
    Devv.AI▲456

    Developer-centric AI search, augmented by code and docs

    2024 · devv.ai · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    We built a search engine interface on top of OpenAI GPT 3.5 and Microsoft Bing that summarizes and cites top search results in response to natural language questions. By using search results, the AI is able to reference recent news and provide citations for specific facts. Our interface offers concise answers, without having to click through links, scroll past irrelevant content, or read ads. No login is required; no personal data is collected. We believe in the power of combining the intuitive UI of web search with the intelligence of large language models. The search engine does indexing…

    2025 · perplexity.ai · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    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 →

  4. 4G4

    Hi HN, Today we’re launching GPT-4 answers on Phind.com, a developer-focused search engine that uses generative AI to browse the web and answer technical questions, complete with code examples and detailed explanations. Unlike vanilla GPT-4, Phind feeds in relevant websites and technical documentation, reducing the model’s hallucination and keeping it up-to-date. To use it, simply enable the “Expert” toggle before doing a search. GPT-4 is making a night-and-day difference in terms of answer quality. For a question like “How can I RLHF a LLaMa model”, Phind in Expert mode delivers a…

    2023 · phind.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Discover, compare, and choose AI models—100% Free

    2024 · countless.dev · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    AI-powered, conversational search and discovery tool

    2025 · stackoverflow.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Compare AI models easily! All providers in one place. Find the best LLM for your needs with our comprehensive pricing calculator and feature comparison tool. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and more.

    2024 · countless.dev · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    GenAI powered search for your app and website

    2024 · devrev.ai · its alternatives →

  9. 9
    Devbook▲286

    Search engine for developers

    2021 · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    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 →

  11. 11DR

    I'd like to invite everyone to try out DontBeEvil.rip, an experimental search engine for developers. tl;dr $ alias rip="curl -G -H 'Accept: text/plain' --url https://dontbeevil.rip/search --data-urlencode " $ rip 'q=Heartbleed bug' DontBeEvil.rip is a year long experiment to see if a small team can build a developer-focused search engine that is self-sustaining on $10 monthly subscriptions. It works by only indexing high-quality resources that are relevant to developers. You won't get useless listicles because we'll never crawl them. Relevant urls are harvested from HN,…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  12. 12WS

    We’ve trained a generative AI model to browse the web and answer questions/retrieve code snippets directly. Unlike ChatGPT, it has access to primary sources and is able to cite them when you hover over an answer (click on the text to go to the source being cited). We also show regular Bing results side-by-side with our AI answer. The model is an 11-billion parameter T5-derivative that has been fine-tuned on feedback given on hundreds of thousands of searches done (anonymously) on our platform. Giving the model web access lessens its burden to need to store a snapshot of human knowledge…

    2022 · beta.sayhello.so · its alternatives →

  13. 13DS
  14. 14
    Hello▲73

    The best search engine for software developers

    2022 · its alternatives →

  15. 15
    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 →

  16. 16

    Last week's post from Thariq "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML" went viral in X. He made a good point about HTML being the more expressive and human friendly alternative to markdown files. I completely buy in where he's coming from, I've been asking Claude Code to create me HTML files to better understand what we're planning and building together. What Thariq didn't address was the part of sharing and collaborating on these HTML artifacts (he proposed uploading to S3). While I've been heavy user of HTML artifacts to share quarterly plans, implementation specs, technical guides and…

    May 2026 · display.dev · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    I've been exploring the (not so=) amazing potential of AI in coding and have compiled a list of tools. From AI-powered IDEs to code generators, this resource is my contribution to the community. I'm still on the fence about including txt2sql projects, as their functionality seems too basic to me. And I'm personally maintaining this, so your feedback is wellcome.

    2025 · aicode.danvoronov.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    A s̶e̶a̶r̶c̶h̶ e̶n̶g̶i̶n̶e̶ huntr for devs

    2021 · tamilan-apps-and-tech.github.io · its alternatives →

  19. 19FS

    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 →

  20. 20

    Hey everyone! I’m excited to announce the release of my last project, MiniSearch. I admire Perplexity.ai, Phind.com, You.com, Bing, Bard and all these search engines integrated with AI chatbots. And as a curious developer, I took the chance and created my own version. Using Web-LLM and Transformers.js to provide browser-based text-generation models on desktop and mobile, I built a minimalist self-hosted search app on which an AI analyses the results, comments on them and responds to your query summarising the info. In the backend, it still queries a real search engine, but besides that,…

    2023 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →

  21. 21TM

    Free Recruitment Meta Search Engine for Sourcing Software Developers

    2023 · talentsignals.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22IB

    Hi there! When Supabase announced their recent hackathon, I thought it was a good time to build something to learn more about so many of the new AI models and tech out there. From the different techniques of embedding documents to the future RAG. With the rise of short form content with TikTok and Youtube. A lot more knowledge is in videos than ever before. Finding specific answers within millions of videos can be difficult for any one person to go through. So the question is if there is Google that indexes text on website making it easier to find based on the context of on your question,…

    2023 · avse.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    AI-powered AEO to boost your visibility in AI search

    2025 · devsplit.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Your Personalized AI-Powered Search Engine Builder

    2024 · gensearch.serenebase.com · its alternatives →

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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 →