runsonwhat vs Apify: a tech stack database or a scraper? (2026)

Apify is a scraping platform where independent developers publish tech stack detectors that scan the URLs you give them, one run at a time. runsonwhat is a ready-made database that has already checked company records well beyond the website and keeps the proof behind every match.

Key takeaways

• Apify doesn't detect technology itself. It hosts Actors written by third parties, including an official one from BuiltWith, and bills you to run them.
• Most tech stack Actors read a single page's HTML, headers and scripts, and several say plainly that they don't run JavaScript or can be blocked by bot protection.
• runsonwhat reads DNS, email records, certificate logs, website code, a real-browser crawl and subprocessor lists, and 26.5% of its matches have no trace in website code at all.
• Lists of companies that use a tool are the core of runsonwhat; on Apify, only one small Actor offers that, limited to its own crawl of popular sites.
• Apify's platform plans run from a free tier to a Business plan, and each Actor adds its own fee per site or per result on top.
• Apify fits developers assembling their own scraping pipeline; runsonwhat fits people who want the answer, through the site, the API or the Chrome extension.

What is the difference between runsonwhat and Apify?

runsonwhat is a single maintained database of companies and the tools they run, with the record behind each match. Apify is a platform for running scrapers: its tech stack detectors are programs written by independent authors, each with its own fingerprints, method and price, and nothing is checked until you run one on your own list of URLs.

That makes the choice one of build versus use. With Apify, you pick an Actor, test it, feed it domains and pay per run, then store and clean the results yourself. With runsonwhat, the scanning, matching and upkeep are already done, so a question like "which companies run HubSpot?" or "what does stripe.com use?" has an answer waiting.

The tiles below sum up what the runsonwhat database already holds, before anyone runs anything.

The two also differ in what they can see. An Actor that fetches a homepage sees what that page loads. runsonwhat also reads the records a company controls outside its website, which is where email providers, identity tools, AI vendors and help desks usually show up.

What is Apify, and what are Actors?

Apify is a cloud platform for web scraping and automation, and an Actor is a packaged program that runs on it. On Apify's about page in October 2026, the company says it is "building the world's largest platform for web data and tools for AI builders," with 93,188 ready-made Actors in its Store.

Anyone can publish an Actor, set a price and earn from it. The same page reports 91,000 customers worldwide. That open model is why the Store has scrapers for almost everything, from product listings and maps to job boards and, the subject here, website technology.

Actors run on Apify's infrastructure and can be called by API, on a schedule or from other tools. Apify's schedules documentation says schedules "allow you to run your Actors and tasks at specific times," set with cron expressions. Its integrations page lists webhooks, Make, n8n, Zapier, Clay and Slack among the places results can go.

For tech stack detection, this means you are choosing a scraper, not a data source. Two Actors with similar names can return very different results for the same domain, because each author wrote their own fingerprints and decided how much of the page to read.

How do Apify's tech stack Actors detect technology?

Most tech stack Actors fetch the URL you give them, usually a homepage, and match its HTML, response headers and script addresses against a list of known patterns. A few load the page in a real browser and watch its network traffic, which catches tools added by JavaScript after the page loads.

The plain HTTP approach is fast and cheap, but it has limits the authors state themselves. Automation Lab's Tech Stack Detector says it uses "HTTP-only requests, no browser overhead," and warns that a URL can fail if "the server blocks non-browser requests (returns 403)." Tools injected by a tag manager or loaded after the first paint are easy to miss this way.

Browser-based Actors see more of the page, at a higher price per site. Even they stop at the page's edge: the Website Tech Stack Scanner notes that "technologies loaded strictly behind authenticated login walls cannot be observed from a public URL scan," and that some tools load only on product or checkout pages.

Coverage claims vary widely. Some Actors ship a short curated list of fingerprints; others reuse the open-source Wappalyzer rules. Clearfetch's Tech Stack Detector, for example, describes "7,600+ fingerprints in 109 categories" from the webappanalyzer database, and says it analyzes the URL you give it, usually the homepage.

Which tech stack Actors on Apify do people use most?

The most used tech stack Actors on Apify are BuiltWith's official scraper, a handful of independent detectors with a few hundred to about fifteen hundred users each, and one small reverse-lookup Actor. Here is what each says about itself on its Store page in October 2026.

What does BuiltWith's official Actor return?

BuiltWith Official Technology Scraper is published by BuiltWith and returns BuiltWith's own records for a list of root domains, as a JSON object with a list of technologies, tags and categories. Its page lists a price of $2.00 per thousand results, with no charge for platform usage.

The Actor has 708 total users on its Store page. It is a programmatic route into BuiltWith's database rather than a new scan.

What does NexGenData's Wappalyzer alternative do?

NexGenData's Wappalyzer Alternative checks headers, HTML and script sources against "a curated catalog of 251 named technology fingerprints," with an optional confidence score for each detection.

It is the most used of the group, with 1,493 total users on its Store page, and charges $0.1 per domain for a full detection.

What does the Website Tech Stack Scanner add?

The Website Tech Stack Scanner by misterkhan waits for single-page apps to load and "monitors live XHR/Fetch network traffic," which catches tools a plain fetch would miss. It claims it can "detect 7,000+ technologies," and its listed starting price is $70.00 per thousand results.

How does Automation Lab's Tech Stack Detector work?

Automation Lab's Tech Stack Detector skips the browser and returns an evidence list and a confidence score for each detection, such as a header or an HTML marker it found. Its page lists 386 total users and claims "45+ technologies detected," so it suits quick framework and hosting checks more than full marketing stacks.

Can any Actor list websites by technology?

Websites Using Technology by Orbifetch is the reverse-lookup exception. It "gives you ready-made lists of websites that use a technology," drawn from "our own monthly crawl of the top 300,000 websites." Its Store page shows three total users, so it is a new and lightly tested option.

How does runsonwhat detect technology?

runsonwhat reads every public record a company controls and lists a tool only when a direct record backs it up, keeping that record for every match. The website is one source among several, which is why it finds email, identity, AI and collaboration tools that never appear in page code.

• DNS and email records: verification tokens, SPF, MX, DKIM, DMARC and CAA, rechecked weekly.
• Subdomains and certificate logs: new public certificates are read as they are issued, revealing portals pointed at a vendor and when they first appeared.
• Website code: headers, cookies, scripts, the site's own JavaScript bundles, tag-manager containers, Segment settings, ads.txt and OpenID configuration.
• Real-browser crawl: HTTP Archive's monthly Chrome crawl of homepages, which catches tags that appear only at runtime.
• Subprocessor lists: vendors a company declares on its own legal pages.

Each source has its own rules for what counts. A detection is listed only with a direct source or high combined confidence, and hints such as a policy header alone stay hints. Our methodology page explains what counts as a match, how starts and stops are inferred, and how to cite the data.

Why does a homepage scan miss so many tools?

A homepage scan misses every tool that never loads in the browser. Email providers, identity platforms, AI vendors, chat tools and much of a company's back office are set up in DNS records, email authentication, certificates and legal pages, not in scripts on the homepage, so a page-only scanner can't see them however good its fingerprints are.

The chart shows how large that blind spot is for some of the best-known tools. For Atlassian, Anthropic, OpenAI, Zoom, Slack and Notion, none of the sampled runsonwhat matches came from website code.

Across all tools, 26.5% of runsonwhat's matches have no trace in website code, measured on a random sample of 143,424 matches. Those are matches a scraper that reads only web pages would never return, whichever Actor you pick.

Even for website tools, a single fetch is fragile. Bot protection, slow pages and tags injected by a tag manager all cut results. runsonwhat unpacks tag-manager containers and adds a real-browser crawl, so a tag that only fires at runtime still has a chance to be counted.

Which is better for building lists of companies that use a tool?

runsonwhat is better for lists, because the lists already exist. Every tool page names the companies running it, with industry, company size, country and LinkedIn filters, and signed-in users can export a filtered list to CSV. On Apify, a list by technology means scanning a domain list yourself, or using the one small reverse-lookup Actor.

The scale difference shows on the tool pages themselves. In the October 2026 data, runsonwhat listed 86,506 companies on HubSpot and 57,695 on Anthropic.

Newer tools get the same treatment. ChatGPT Ads, OpenAI's ad conversion pixel, had 14,537 companies on the same date, found through tag-manager containers, website code and the browser crawl.

With an Actor, building the same list starts with a list of domains you already have, so it can only confirm companies you already suspected. The reverse-lookup Actor works the other way, but only over the popular sites in its crawl, which leaves out most private companies and startups.

Can you see when a company started or stopped using a tool?

Yes on runsonwhat, which records adoption dates and tracks starts and stops between scans. An Apify Actor reports what one page showed at the moment you ran it; to see change, you have to store every run and compare the results yourself.

runsonwhat dates adoption from certificate logs where it can. As of 8 October 2026 it held 15,299 adoption dates proven by certificates, reaching back to 2010, for hosts such as a support or login portal pointed at a vendor.

Starts and stops come from repeated scans of the same company with the same method, so a change of scanning method never reads as a company dropping a tool. Tool pages show who started and who stopped, and followers of a tool can get a weekly email of those changes.

How much does it cost to run a tech stack detector on Apify?

Running a tech stack detector on Apify costs a platform plan plus the Actor's own fee. On Apify's pricing page in October 2026, the Free plan includes $5 of monthly usage, and paid plans include usage equal to their price.

• Free: $0 a month, with $5 of platform usage.
• Starter: $19 a month, or $17 a month billed yearly.
• Scale: $199 a month, or $179 a month billed yearly.
• Business: $999 a month, or $899 a month billed yearly.

Platform usage is billed in compute units. Apify's documentation says an Actor with 1024MB of memory running for an hour uses one compute unit, and the pricing page lists $0.2 per unit on Free and Starter, falling on bigger plans.

The Actor fee is where costs really differ. Some charge a fraction of a cent per site, while browser-based scanners charge dollars per hundred sites. BuiltWith's Actor states that you aren't charged for Apify platform usage when you run it, only for results.

How do you get runsonwhat data into your own tools?

runsonwhat offers four ways in, depending on how you work. Anyone can look up a domain on the site, sales and research teams can export filtered lists to CSV, developers can call the runsonwhat API, and the Chrome extension shows a site's stack in one click while you browse.

The API is the closest match to what developers use Apify for. It returns a company's tools by domain, the companies behind a tool with filters and cursor pages, and the starts and stops of a tool, category or company. Every match says where it was found, so a CRM field can carry the evidence along with the tool name.

The extension reads the page you are on locally and adds the company's stored tools from runsonwhat, including ones found in DNS, email and certificate records. Its export menu downloads the current site's tools as a CSV or copies them as text.

When should you choose Apify instead?

Choose Apify when you are a developer building your own pipeline and tech detection is one step in it. It suits scanning a specific list of URLs on a schedule, sending results through webhooks, Make or Zapier, or combining a tech check with other scraping, such as pulling contact pages or product data from the same sites.

It also makes sense when you want BuiltWith's data inside a workflow you already run on Apify, through the official Actor, or when you need to scan internal or unusual URLs that no database would cover, such as staging sites or a client's microsites.

Choose runsonwhat when you want the answer without building anything: which companies use a tool, what a company uses including tools behind its website, since when, and the record that proves it. The best tech stack lookup tools comparison covers the other options side by side.

What should you check before picking a tech stack Actor?

Before picking an Actor, check how it fetches pages, how many fingerprints it really has, and how its price is charged. These three things decide what you get back far more than the Actor's title, and several Store pages show different prices in the header and the README.

• Method: a plain HTTP fetch is cheap but misses tools added by JavaScript; a browser-based Actor sees more at a higher price.
• Fingerprints: a curated list of a few hundred patterns will miss most marketing and sales tools; a list built on open-source rules covers far more.
• Evidence: prefer an Actor that returns what it matched, so you can check a surprising result.
• Maintenance: look at total users, recent runs and ratings, because an unmaintained Actor drifts as vendors change their scripts.

Other comparisons

• The best tech stack lookup tools in 2026, all seven compared
• runsonwhat vs BuiltWith
• runsonwhat vs Wappalyzer
• runsonwhat vs TheirStack
• runsonwhat vs Bloomberry
• runsonwhat vs WebReveal

Sources

• runsonwhat: database queries on 8 October 2026; methodology
• Apify: pricing, about, integrations, schedules, usage and resources, all checked 20 October 2026
• Apify Store Actors, checked 20 October 2026: BuiltWith Official Technology Scraper, NexGenData Wappalyzer Alternative, Website Tech Stack Scanner, Automation Lab Tech Stack Detector, Clearfetch Tech Stack Detector, Websites Using Technology