BuiltWith vs Wappalyzer: what each one actually does
Coverage, detection method, free tiers, prices and contact data compared from both vendors own pages, plus the blind spot both share on real stores.
ComparisonNovember 12, 2026 · 9 min read
BuiltWith and Wappalyzer both answer "what is this website built with", and then diverge completely. BuiltWith is an index of the whole web with decades of history, sold to sales, research and investment teams. Wappalyzer is a fingerprint matcher wrapped in four smaller products: lookups, lead lists, email verification and alerts. ShopLeads is our product and sells e-commerce store and contact data, so we say so; this page is a straight read of both vendors own pages on November 9, 2026.
The short answer: pick BuiltWith if the question is historical or whole-web, pick Wappalyzer if the question is one technology turned into a list on a smaller budget, and pick neither if the technology you care about is a Shopify app or the answer you need is a person.
BuiltWith
Wappalyzer
What it is
A technology index of the whole web, with history
Fingerprint detection plus four products on top
Technologies tracked
128,274
8,189 across 106 categories
Domain coverage stated
491.9 million domains
Not published as a figure
History
Back 41 years, to January 1985
Not published; the company dates to 2008
How it detects
Indexes the internet itself, no third-party data
Public signals: HTML, scripts, headers, cookies, fingerprints
Free tier
Single-site lookups, free forever
50 lookups and 50 verifications a month, 5 alerts, sample lists
How each one gets its data, and why that decides what you can trust
This is the part that matters and the part most comparisons skip. BuiltWith's own answer, in the FAQ on its plans page, is blunt: it indexes the internet the same way a search engine does to power search, and takes no data from third parties (BuiltWith plans). Wappalyzer's own answer is a method rather than a scale: it looks for public signals on websites, including HTML code, scripts, headers, cookies and other fingerprints that indicate which tools are in use (Wappalyzer technologies).
Those two statements predict the differences you will actually hit. A scheduled crawl of the whole web gives BuiltWith history and a change log, and costs it freshness between crawls. A fingerprint matcher that also ships a browser extension gets a reading the moment somebody loads a page, and depends on somebody having written a fingerprint for the thing you care about. Neither approach can report software that never touches a web page, which is why both are the wrong tool for an ERP, an HR system or a security stack.
The technology counts are not comparable like for like. 128,274 against 8,189 is a 15-to-1 gap on paper, but the two vendors count different units: BuiltWith counts every widget, tag and hosted service it has ever named, and Wappalyzer counts entries in a curated public directory. Compare the two on the specific technology you sell against, not on the headline.
Where each one wins
1
Pick BuiltWith for history, breadth and anything resembling research
The index with a memory
Nothing on Wappalyzer's published pages matches 491.9 million domains and 41 years of history, and the history is the real product. Adoption curves, who moved from one platform to another and when, spend estimates and sales revenue figures for e-commerce sites all come out of the same index (BuiltWith plans).
Its e-commerce side is bigger than its reputation suggests: over 2500 e-commerce technologies and 2 billion unique e-commerce products across over 26 million e-commerce websites, with exportable spend, revenue and location attributes (BuiltWith).
Read the Basic tier carefully. At $295 a month it is capped at 2 technologies, 2 keywords and 2 retail reports, so it answers one fixed question. Unlimited technologies starts at Pro, $495 (plans).
Every plan includes exportable contact names, emails and titles for individuals publicly listed with a business, within the GDPR restrictions it states.
Its API is a separate purchase rather than a plan feature: credits per lookup, a documented Domain API and Change API, and a free endpoint for basic lookups (BuiltWith API).
Pick Wappalyzer for a lower floor and a real free tier
Cheaper to start, and bundled differently
Wappalyzer gets you working for nothing: a free account includes 50 technology lookups and 50 email verifications a month, 5 website alerts and free sample lead lists, and the sample is the useful part, because you can review coverage before you pay (Wappalyzer pricing).
Pro at $250 a month undercuts BuiltWith Basic, with the trade-off stated on the page: one user, two lead-list technology targets, and no included API credits. Business at $450 adds five users, unlimited technology targets, 20,000 API credits and CRM enrichment; Enterprise is quoted from $850 (pricing).
Email verification in the same account is something BuiltWith does not sell, and it means a technology list arrives already checked (pricing).
Watch two meters: plan API credits expire after 60 days, and the API itself requires Business (API docs).
If you sell to merchants, the comparison that decides your month is not BuiltWith against Wappalyzer. Wappalyzer's add-ons section lists 181 Shopify apps and 3 Shopify themes. For contrast, Store Leads tracks 9,098 apps and 1,006 technologies across 13,990,637 active stores, and StoreCensus reports 8,300+ Shopify apps indexed.
A general web index knows that a store runs Shopify and Klaviyo. An e-commerce index knows it runs Shopify, Klaviyo, Recharge and no loyalty app, which is the sentence an outreach email is built on.
Neither general tool filters on the thing you most want to filter on when selling an app: the absence of a category of app.
Pick neither when you need a person, not a profile
Where both stop
Both vendors hand you a domain and some company-page contact data. Neither is a people database you can filter by seniority, department or whether the work email has been checked, and that filter is the difference between a list and a week of outreach. ShopLeads is built for exactly that step: store filters and people filters in one search, free to run, with contacts masked until you unlock one.
Store filters: platform, installed apps and technologies by exact name, tech gaps such as no reviews app or no loyalty program, monthly sales bands from 10k-100k up to 10M+, country and category.
People filters: seniority from owner down to manager, about 30 departments, titles to include or exclude, and whether the person has a checked work email, a mobile, a direct dial or a LinkedIn profile.
Search and counts cost nothing, through the app or the REST API and MCP server. Signing up is open: the trial runs 7 days with 500 free credits and a card.
The blind spot both share, measured on five real stores
Detection reads what a page serves. When a brand serves its app scripts from its own domain, the third-party signatures both vendors look for are not in the page, and no amount of index size fixes that. We read five live Shopify storefronts on November 9, 2026, looked for 25 common app fingerprints in the homepage HTML, and counted the distinct hosts each page loads scripts from.
Read from each storefront's own homepage HTML on November 9, 2026. All five answered /products.json as JSON or referenced cdn.shopify.com that day, so all five are live Shopify storefronts.
Gymshark is the case to remember. It is unmistakably a Shopify store, and its homepage loads scripts from four hosts: Shopify's CDN, the Shop app and two of its own. Everything else is proxied through its own domain, so a crawler and an extension see the same near-empty page. Whichever tool you pick, read a blank technology profile on a large brand as "unknown", never as "not installed".
One more practical note, because it decides whether you can automate anything. Asking for a Wappalyzer single-site lookup without signing in returned a sign-up form on November 9, 2026, and requesting a BuiltWith lookup page with a non-browser client the same day returned a CAPTCHA challenge rather than a report (builtwith.com). Both are reasonable defenses; both mean the free lookup is a human workflow, and anything scripted belongs on a paid API.
How to choose in one pass
Your question
Start with
Why
How has adoption of this technology moved over years
BuiltWith
Nothing else here publishes 41 years of history
Who uses this one technology, on the smallest budget
Wappalyzer
A free tier that builds sample lists, and a lower entry price
What is this single site running, right now, for free
Either
BuiltWith lookups are free forever; a free Wappalyzer account covers 50 a month
I need the list verified before I send
Wappalyzer
Email verification is in the same account as the list
Which stores run this Shopify app, or lack one
An e-commerce index
App-level coverage in the thousands rather than the hundreds
Who do I email at these companies
A people database
Neither vendor filters people by seniority, department or email status
Neither is reliably more accurate, because they fail in different places. BuiltWith crawls on a schedule, so it can lag a change; Wappalyzer matches fingerprints, so it misses anything nobody has fingerprinted. Both go blind on a store that serves its app scripts from its own CDN. Test both on the one technology you sell against.
Is Wappalyzer cheaper than BuiltWith?
At the entry point, yes. Wappalyzer Pro is $250 a month and BuiltWith Basic is $295, and Wappalyzer has a genuine free tier of 50 lookups a month. If you need an API the comparison changes: Wappalyzer bundles it into its $450 Business plan (Wappalyzer pricing), while BuiltWith sells API lookups separately by credit and publishes a free API endpoint (BuiltWith API).
Can I use BuiltWith and Wappalyzer for free?
Partly. BuiltWith is free for individual site lookups forever, and a free Wappalyzer account includes 50 technology lookups and 50 email verifications a month plus sample lead lists. Neither free tier gives you a full exportable list.
Which tracks more technologies?
BuiltWith, by its own published figures: 128,274 technologies against the 8,189 listed in Wappalyzer's directory. The two are counting different units, though, so the headline gap overstates the practical difference for most single-technology questions.
Which is better for finding Shopify stores?
Neither, if you need app-level detail. Wappalyzer lists 181 Shopify apps, while the e-commerce indexes track thousands: Store Leads reports 9,098 apps and StoreCensus 8,300+ Shopify apps indexed. ShopLeads, our product, pairs those store filters with the decision-makers at each store.
