
Whatruns: Identify technologies used on any website - mcone
https://www.whatruns.com/
======
jijosunny
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
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
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.

~~~
jaxondu
Sorry don't meant to be rude and I understand there are tens of thousands of
technologies to detect. Kind of expecting your engine to be able to detect
front end JS frameworks easier than backends, at least for those popular JS
frameworks. In case you not notice the site I'm pointing to is the home page
of VueJS and you're showing them using a competitor tech.

~~~
jijosunny
We're on it. Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention.

~~~
rjbwork
Well, at least you've got the business-speak down and can fix your bugs
quickly. That'll get you far, I think.

~~~
jijosunny
Haha, I'll take that as a compliment.

------
KirinDave
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
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
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
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).

------
bognition
Looks to be very similar to [https://builtwith.com/](https://builtwith.com/)

~~~
jijosunny
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.

~~~
takeda
At least they do it properly; as a site.

Your extension only works on Chrome, and it is for a feature that is not used
commonly. There is no good reason to install it on a web browser.

Installing it in a browser is also a threat that the extension might do more
than just scanning sites, and even if it doesn't affect privacy it still
encourages installing extra junk on web browsers.

~~~
jijosunny
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! ️

BTW WhatRuns works on all major browsers.

~~~
takeda
I only see Chrome buttons on the site.

~~~
jijosunny
That is if you access from Chrome. Please head over to our 'Download' page for
Firefox:
[https://www.whatruns.com/downloads/](https://www.whatruns.com/downloads/) We
haven't publicised other extensions due to lack of demand.

~~~
takeda
I'm on firefox and just checked it sends proper user agent (for firefox 55)

------
thinbeige
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.

~~~
jijosunny
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
Ok thanks and this makes sense, a leadgen tool for BTB sales.

~~~
3131s
Or for hackers looking to exploit technologies with known vulnerabilities.

~~~
demonshreder
This was the first use case that popped into my head

------
mshenfield
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-
technolo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/builtwith-technology-
prof/dapjbgnjinbpoindlpdmhochffioedbn?hl=en)

~~~
cheapsteak
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/gppongm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wappalyzer/gppongmhjkpfnbhagpmjfkannfbllamg?utm_source=chrome-
ntp-icon)

~~~
jijosunny
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.

------
dustinmoris
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
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
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.

------
EnderMB
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
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!

------
chrisallenlane
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 :)

~~~
jijosunny
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
Btw, how much traffic does HN's "hug of death" mean approximately?

~~~
jijosunny
Not sure. I'll make sure to update it here after :)

------
fevangelou
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
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
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
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 :)

~~~
jazoom
Nice. I'll check it out today.

Update: You've already won me over with the better layout (compared to
Wapalyzer), separating them into technologies. The fonts is a nice addition
too.

~~~
jijosunny
Awesome! Glad you like it.

~~~
jazoom
I still like it, but I'm starting to see a lot of things that are obviously
incorrect. For example, facebook.com uses Google Analytics? Hacker News uses
React? Most sites I check out have obviously incorrect technologies, so I
don't know which ones I can trust. Unfortunately that makes this tool pretty
much useless.

Once you've fixed this I'll be sure to use it regulary.

------
jasonrhaas
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
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.

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

~~~
dharness
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.

------
brango
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
They do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, which holds up
almost as well as the "imitate then innovate" mantra.

------
dgorges
Wappalyzer [0] might be a good open source alternative.

[0]
[https://github.com/AliasIO/Wappalyzer/](https://github.com/AliasIO/Wappalyzer/)

~~~
jijosunny
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.

------
x0ner
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
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.

------
y0y
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.

~~~
didgeoridoo
I'm curious what efforts you've made to "hide" WordPress. Can you share any of
your techniques? I assume it's stuff like:

\- Rename paths to eliminate "wp-" prefixes and recognizable folder structure
(wp-content, wp-include, etc)

\- Remove or rename any common plugins that inject recognizable WP-specific
code into the page

\- Rewrite requests to bare paths instead of e.g. index.php

I assume you'd also try to do as much handling as possible at the Apache/NGINX
layer instead of letting requests hit the WP application.

Seems like a HUGE amount of effort, and I'm probably not even getting
everything. Is there a more efficient way of securing/locking-down a WP site?

~~~
buu700
For cyph.com/blog, we have a WordPress instance accessible only by SSH tunnel,
and what gets deployed publicly is a static site generated using a plugin
called Simply Static (with a little bit of additional processing).

~~~
ValentineC
How long does it usually take for a small site to be generated using Simply
Static? I tried it once before, and wasn't very impressed by the performance
(I don't think it's a problem with the plugin, but maybe PHP itself).

~~~
buu700
Simply Static itself takes about a minute, but it's actually a decent amount
longer because we have to simulate a browser and run retry logic to handle
failures. All in all, with post-processing included, the static blog
generation is the single longest part of our deployment process.

Ultimately it isn't a huge deal for us though, since it runs concurrently with
other build/deployment steps that in total (sequentially) take a similar
amount of time.

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

~~~
briandear
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
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
> 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
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 :)

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

~~~
deepakkarki
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
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

~~~
deburo
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
> The warning […] is perhaps scary the first time you see it, but then it
> becomes insignificant as time goes by…

Which is exactly why it's dangerous. Granting access like this without a
thought to the potential consequences is just asking for a bad character to
take advantage of the blind trust people place in extension authors.

The core issue is the options Chrome gives extension authors. Offering the
ability to grant permissions per-site and per-use would greatly reduce the
threat. Even just a per-use "Are you sure?" confirmation would help.

------
sillysaurus3
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
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
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.

------
garethsprice
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
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.

------
djmill
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
Works for me on your site! (Chrome)

~~~
djmill
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
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.

------
semiquaver
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
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.

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

~~~
jijosunny
Thank you, first thing we did before the launch!

------
rubyfan
The Chrome extension is a nonstarter for me.

------
tomc1985
Why is this a company? It's one Chrome addon.

Seriously people.

~~~
anaganisk
their idea is to index All the site tech and sell it to sales people

------
karli
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
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

------
Doctor_Fegg
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.

------
TekMol
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
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
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.

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

------
thekonqueror
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
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!

------
floriferous
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)

------
hk__2
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)

------
Myrmornis
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...

------
douglaspatague
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
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 ;)

------
tim333
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
WhatRuns is currently not working on localhost. It is on our roadmap and we
will definitely give it more weight! :)

------
overcast
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
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!

------
cosinetau
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.

------
staticelf
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
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.

------
charlieegan3
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
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.

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

~~~
jijosunny
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!

------
quakeguy
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
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
All cool, thx for your effort! Good Luck!

------
egberts1
Wow.... Thanks to my website's Content-Security-Policy, I blocked Whatruns'
javascript!!!

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

~~~
jijosunny
Awesome. Thank you so much for your kind words!

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

~~~
Chirael
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
Very unlikely that it does this client side. I presume the extension basically
makes an API call with the url of the current site.

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

~~~
jijosunny
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.

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

~~~
jijosunny
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.

------
apocalyptic0n3
Doesn't seem to work on subdomains, unfortunately. Just does the main domain
instead

~~~
jijosunny
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.

------
amitgupta15
Pretty cool. Something like this was overdue. Loved it.

~~~
jijosunny
Thanks Amit, glad you like it!

------
uyoakaoma
Looks similar to stackshare

------
sus_007
How good is this over Wappalyzer ?

~~~
jijosunny
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. :)

------
ipunchghosts
Nobody mentioned netcraft!

------
sweep4r
No need to install anything, just follow this url:

[https://www.whatruns.com/website/reddit.com](https://www.whatruns.com/website/reddit.com)

~~~
charlieegan3
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_
I think the link is just returning cached result that was already identified
with the extension.

------
franciscop
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
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
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.

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

~~~
jijosunny
OVPs and CDNs like Cloudflare, Amazon Cloudfront and most others are already
detected by WR.

~~~
peejsmith
I see this now. Thank you very much for your reply.

