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Dev tools · October 1, 2024

Sourcebot, an open-source Sourcegraph alternative

Hi HN, We’re Brendan and Michael, the creators of Sourcebot (https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot). Sourcebot is an open-source code search tool that allows you to quickly search across many large codebases. Check out our demo video here: https://youtu.be/mrIFYSB_1F4, or try it for yourself on our demo site here: https://demo.sourcebot.dev While at prior roles, we’ve both felt the pain of searching across hundreds of multi-million line codebases. Using local tools like grep were ill-suited since you often only had a handful of codebases…

Sourcebot, an open-source Sourcegraph alternative launched on October 1, 2024 with 259 votes, #157 of 5,185 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.

Visit github.com ↗Alternativestop 3% of October 2024

In plain words

Sourcebot is an open-source code search tool designed for developers who need to search across multiple large codebases simultaneously. Created as an alternative to Sourcegraph, it indexes codebases in the background and provides a web-based search interface, addressing the limitations of command-line tools like grep when working with hundreds of multi-million line repositories. The tool is available on GitHub for self-hosting.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Sourcebot is a self-hosted tool that helps humans and agents understand your codebase. - sourcebot-dev/sourcebot

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hi HN, We’re Brendan and Michael, the creators of Sourcebot (https://github.com/sourcebot-dev/sourcebot). Sourcebot is an open-source code search tool that allows you to quickly search across many large codebases. Check out our demo video here: https://youtu.be/mrIFYSB_1F4, or try…

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