BuiltWith: Overview and Alternative for iOS/Android Mobile Apps

Have you ever stumbled across a well-built, attractive website and wondered “Just how did they make this anyway?” The good news is that you can find out for yourself by using services such as BuiltWith.

In this article, we’ll go over everything you need to know about BuiltWith: features, pricing, reviews, and potential alternatives for analyzing iOS and Android mobile apps.

What is BuiltWith?

BuiltWith describes itself as a “website profiler, lead generation, competitive analysis and business intelligence tool.” The company is best known for its profiler tool that displays the list of web technologies used on a particular website.

Founded in Australia in 2007, BuiltWith has since grown to offer detailed analyses of more than 250 million websites. Users can either enter the site address into the BuiltWith website, or download the extensions for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

Why Use BuiltWith?

Knowing the technologies that a particular website deploys, or the websites on which a particular technology is present, has many potential use cases.

Lead Generation and Sales Intelligence

Suppose that you’ve developed a plug-in for the e-commerce platform Shopify that you hope will help companies make more sales. Of course, listing your plug-in on the Shopify app store should be your very first step. With more than 1,200 Shopify apps available, however, your great innovation could easily get lost in the crowd.

Tools such as BuiltWith can drastically simplify the marketing process for businesses like yours. Using BuiltWith, you can look up a list of websites that use the Shopify platform. You can then generate a list of prospects, applying filters to drill down to exactly the right audience. For example, you can search for websites that have a high monthly technology spend, making them more likely to have room left in their budget.

What’s more, BuiltWith can help you improve your sales pitches to these prospects once you reach out to them. You can get a clear snapshot of the web technologies that a prospect is using — as well as their competitors. BuiltWith also provides insights about which technologies are gaining or losing popularity in the market, helping you make a better case.

Market Analysis

Whether you’re just entering the market or you’ve been around for decades, knowing what your competitors are doing is an invaluable advantage. BuiltWith analyzes more than 250 million websites to see how companies’ technology infrastructure has evolved over time.

For example, suppose that you’ve just launched an e-commerce website using Shopify, and you want to catch up rapidly with your competition. BuiltWith can highlight complementary technologies, letting you know which tools and platforms are most likely to be deployed with Shopify.

Just interested in what the big dogs are doing? BuiltWith provides usage trends and insights for the entire Internet, as well as the websites in the top 10K, 100K, and 1 million of popularity.

BuiltWith Services and Features

Although BuiltWith’s profiler tool is the company’s most visible offering, it has quite a lot more for customers who are willing to subscribe to one of their plans. In this section, we’ll provide an overview of the features and services that BuiltWith has to offer.

Website Profiler

BuiltWith’s website profiler tool is capable of tracking nearly 30,000 different technologies in a variety of categories: widgets, analytics, frameworks, content management systems, advertisers, content delivery networks, web standards, and web servers.

Suppose we want to analyze the website of the Wall Street Journal (https://www.wsj.com/). Once we enter the URL into BuiltWith, we see a list of more than 100 different technologies separated into these categories.

For example, as of January 2019, we see that the WSJ website is using roughly 30 technologies for analytics. These include Rapleaf, Optimizely, and Google Analytics.

Click on the “Detailed Technology Profile” tab to see more information about the technologies on the WSJ website. For example, the WSJ website first started using Rapleaf in August 2013.

Under this tab, BuiltWith also provides a list of technologies that were formerly present on the WSJ website but that have since been removed. For example, we can see that the WSJ removed several analytics tools from its website in June 2018, including Yahoo Web Analytics and Datalogix.

The last three tabs provide additional information about the WSJ website. This data includes contact information, estimated technology spend per month, connected external websites, and domains that redirect to https://www.wsj.com/. Some of this information is only available with the paid version of BuiltWith.

Technology Profiler

BuiltWith is capable of tracking not only websites, but also the technologies themselves. You can slice and dice the data in multiple ways to see how a particular technology is changing in popularity, both over the years and among particular users.

For example, suppose that you are interested in using the JavaScript framework AngularJS to build your website. You can check the BuiltWith page for AngularJS to see that the framework has soared in popularity over the past 5 years. AngularJS is currently in use on 15 percent of the top 10,000 websites, and more than 3,300,000 websites on the entire Internet.

BuiltWith can even cluster together certain types of technologies, such as A/B testing tools and . For example, BuiltWith recently introduced a feature to analyze websites that have “Find a Store” functionality. According to the Find a Store page on BuiltWith, there are currently 23,000 websites that allow customers to find stores near their location.

BuiltWith Plans and Pricing

Using BuiltWith to look up a single website is entirely free of charge. However, BuiltWith also offers three tiers of plans for customers who want more in-depth analyses and intelligence:

• Basic ($295/month or $2950/year): This plan provides detailed analyses of two web technologies. For example, you can download a list of all websites using the Magento e-commerce platform, and break this down by any keyword you choose (e.g. Magento customers using tools for A/B testing). You can also select 2,000 domains every month to see how they evolve in their use of different web technologies.
• Pro ($495/month or $4950/year): This plan provides detailed analyses of an unlimited number of web technologies. In addition, you can select 20,000 domains every month to see how they evolve in their use of different web technologies (a tenfold increase over the Basic plan).
• Team ($995/month or $9950/year): This plan is intended for larger teams that may have multiple people using BuiltWith at any given time. You receive an unlimited number of system logins, instead of a single login as with the Basic and Pro plans.

BuiltWith Reviews

BuiltWith has received a largely positive reception on the business technology review platform G2 Crowd. The 31 reviews on the G2 Crowd website give BuiltWith an average rating of 4.2 stars out of 5.

According to one user, BuiltWith is “the best tool for getting quick technical insights.” Another reviewer agrees, writing that BuiltWith is “the best technology profiler for the price and convenience.”

Reviewers praise BuiltWith’s straightforward user experience, saying that it’s “very easy to understand what technologies are in use by potential clients.” One user highlights BuiltWith’s “reporting, clarity of data, [and] ease of use.”

However, some reviewers report that BuiltWith did not detect every technology that they expected it to. One user writes that BuiltWith “does not always pick up all softwares that it should.” Another user notes that BuiltWith “is not always accurate and can sometimes not display technology that is very prominent.”

In addition, a few reviewers on G2 Crowd would like to see BuiltWith offer more detailed and accurate data. One user writes, “I dislike that there is no indication as to how much a company is spending on the technologies.” Another reviewer complains that “some data is very off on numbers like revenue.”

BuiltWith Alternatives for Mobile Apps? Analyzing iOS/Android Apps with MightySignal

Judging by the reviews above, the vast majority of users agree that BuiltWith is valuable for their business. However, the tool does have its limits as well.

In particular, the BuiltWith service only applies to websites; it can’t analyze other platforms such as mobile apps. The good news is that there are services similar to BuiltWith that can analyze iOS and Android mobile apps.

MightySignal provides analytics and business intelligence about the SDKs (software development kits) that developers have installed in a particular mobile app. An SDK is a set of tools and libraries that software and mobile developers use to include additional functionality when building applications.

For example, MightySignal’s analysis of the Spotify Music iOS app reveals that the app uses 29 external SDKs. These include the Adjust SDK for ad campaign analytics, the Facebook SDK for users to login using their Facebook account, and the Google Analytics SDK for measuring user activities.

What’s more, there are 16 SDKs that were formerly installed in the Spotify iOS app, but have since been uninstalled. For example, according to MightySignal, the Ford SDK was removed in January 2018. This corresponds with the Spotify website, which states that the Spotify integration with Ford’s SYNC entertainment system was removed on January 16, 2018.

The same benefits of using profiling tools such as BuiltWith apply to MightySignal as well. MightySignal’s Advanced Ad Intelligence feature, for example, provides insights about the ad campaigns that a given app is running. The more ad networks on which an app is advertising, the more likely they are to have a high marketing budget.

MightySignal uses the data that it collects to provide accurate, up-to-date information about the most popular SDKs and mobile apps. You can view the most popular SDKs for the top iOS apps, separating them into categories such as monetization, user interface, and social media. By presenting SDKs in this format, MightySignal makes it easier to identify trends and see what the leading mobile apps are doing.

Interested in trying it out for yourself? MightySignal has a free live scan that will give you fresh new insights about the top iOS and Android apps in seconds.