Forency vs BuiltWith vs Wappalyzer: which tech lookup tool should you actually pay for?

By Nate Cheever · August 2026

If you sell to companies based on what software they run, you have probably priced out BuiltWith or Wappalyzer and winced. BuiltWith's API starts at $295 a month. Wappalyzer's starts at $250. For an agency with a real prospecting operation, that is fine. For a solo consultant who wants to check what forty prospects are running before a campaign, it is absurd.

I built Forency because I wanted the lookup without the enterprise bill, and because I wanted my AI assistant to be able to do it without me.

Here is an honest comparison, including the parts where the other two win.

What each one actually is

BuiltWith is a technology database first and an API second. It tracks over 126,000 technologies across tens of millions of sites, and it keeps history, so you can ask who started using Klaviyo in the last 90 days. That historical index is genuinely hard to build and it is what you are paying for.

Wappalyzer started as the browser extension everyone has installed. Its fingerprint database, around 7,400 technologies, is the open-source foundation that most detection tools trace back to, including mine. The paid product wraps that in an API and a lead database.

Forency does one thing: you hand it a URL, it hands back what that site is running right now, and it works from inside your AI assistant as well as from your code.

The comparison

Where BuiltWith and Wappalyzer beat me, plainly

Two things, and they are not small.

Reverse lookup. They can hand you every site running Shopify Plus in Colorado. I cannot. That requires crawling the web continuously and holding the index, which is exactly what $295 a month pays for. If your workflow starts with “give me a list of companies that use X,” you want BuiltWith and this post is not for you.

History. BuiltWith can tell you a company switched from Marketo to HubSpot in March. That timing signal is worth real money to a sales team. I only see today.

There is a third thing I should say because someone will check: I do not run a browser. Forency reads the HTML and headers a server sends, so a site that assembles itself entirely in JavaScript can come back thin. A sparse result means little was detectable, not that the site runs nothing. BuiltWith and Wappalyzer both render pages and will beat me on those sites.

Where Forency wins

The price, obviously. Free to start, $29 a month for a thousand lookups, $49 for ten thousand. If you check a few hundred prospects a month, you were never going to get $295 a month of value out of the big index.

The right hundred technologies instead of all of them. Coverage counts are a vanity metric. Nobody has ever lost a deal because a tool failed to detect an obscure CDN. What people actually filter on is a short list: is it Shopify or WooCommerce, HubSpot or Salesforce, do they run Klaviyo, do they take Stripe, do they have a chat widget, are they on a modern stack or stuck on jQuery and Drupal. I cover those deliberately and well, rather than covering everything thinly.

It works inside your AI assistant. This is the part I actually built the company around.

The MCP part, which is the real difference

Forency ships an MCP server, so Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible assistant can run lookups on its own. If your client supports remote servers there is nothing to install at all: point it at https://forency.io/api/mcp with your API key. If it runs servers locally, four lines of config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "forency": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "forency-mcp"],
      "env": { "FORENCY_API_KEY": "fcy_your_key" }
    }
  }
}

Then you type something like:

Here are 15 prospects from my pipeline. Which ones use HubSpot, and which are on Salesforce?

and you get a table back. No dashboard, no CSV export, no writing a script to loop over URLs and parse JSON. The assistant runs the scans and formats the answer.

To be accurate about the competition here, because I checked: Wappalyzer did publish an MCP server in March 2026. It was created and abandoned the same day, was never published to npm so the install command in its own README does not work, and it needs a $250 a month key. BuiltWith has nothing. So this is a real gap, but it is a gap because nobody has bothered to fill it properly, not because nobody thought of it.

One example of what “curated” buys you

Scan gymshark.com and the naive answer is “Shopify, two technologies.” That is wrong in a way that matters: the bare domain redirects to a checkout host, and a checkout page is nearly empty. The real site is at www, and it runs Next.js, React, Contentful, and Algolia on CloudFront.

Forency notices the redirect, scans the site you actually asked about, tells you it did so, and still reports the Shopify it found on the checkout host, because a brand's commerce platform is exactly the kind of thing you were asking about. That behaviour is not clever detection. It is someone having hit the problem and fixed it.

Who should pick what

Pick BuiltWith if you need lists of companies by technology, or you need to know when someone switched. That is a different product and it is worth the money for teams that need it.

Pick Wappalyzer if you want the broad fingerprint database with an established company behind it and the browser extension your team already uses.

Pick Forency if you mostly look up sites you already know about, if $250 a month for that is out of proportion to the value, or if you want your AI assistant doing the work instead of you.

Free tier is 100 lookups a month, no card. That is enough to tell whether it detects the things you care about, which is the only test that matters.