A Wappalyzer API alternative in five lines of Python
"What is this website built with?" sits behind a lot of everyday work: qualifying a lead list by the tools companies already pay for, sizing up competitors, auditing client sites, finding every store on a given platform. Wappalyzer and BuiltWith answer it, but their APIs come on monthly plans. If you only need a few thousand lookups now and then, paying per website is simpler. The five lines from…
A Python script can quickly analyze a list of websites to determine the technologies they use, without requiring a paid Wappalyzer API. By installing the apify-client library and creating a free Apify account to obtain an API token, anyone can run the script. With just five lines of code, the script submits the list of URLs to the Clearfetch Tech Stack Detector actor, which scans each site once using plain HTTP requests.
The actor then outputs a row for each website, including the domain, technical details, confidence scores, and DNS records that reveal providers and software. Key information like email platforms and ecommerce systems are readily available, providing valuable insights for sales prospecting. The script can handle up to 10,000 domains in about 30 minutes, stopping cleanly if the run reaches its time or budget limits.
The technology detection works by examining headers, cookies, HTML, meta tags, script URLs, inline scripts, the DOM, and DNS records, using patterns from the open webappanalyzer fingerprints. The service costs $0.05 per website analyzed, with a discounted rate until the end of October 2026. A ready-to-use example is available on GitHub, and similar analyses can be performed for various lead lists, such as identifying HubSpot usage or detecting ecommerce platforms.
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