Two exports, one handle. OSINTsearch returned 547 profiles for the username richard on 2026-09-05, one row per platform, 267 of them with an account creation date and 164 with a bio. osint.industries returned 400 rows across 310 modules for the same handle on 2026-08-26, with 285 profile URLs, 113 registration dates, and 95 rows that are mailbox-existence checks rather than profiles. Those runs are ten days apart, so this is OSINTsearch vs osint.industries as two dated snapshots, not a same-day race. The pricing gap is easier to state: osintsearch.org sells a weekly search quota starting at $0, and osint.industries sells credits starting at £19 for 30. This OSINT search head-to-head covers inputs, price, exports, history fields and API, from both files.
We build Revealer.US and have no stake in either tool. Our own richard run is in the osint.industries alternatives post, and the OSINTsearch review covers that tool alone.
What we looked at
Two exports, two dates. The osint.industries file is the richard JSON from 2026-08-26, the same file behind its row in our username benchmark. The OSINTsearch file is the schema 2 JSON export of its 09:20 richard run on 2026-09-05. Module lists change weekly, so the ten-day gap is a real caveat and every figure carries its date.
Counts as the files report them. Every number came out of a Python pass over the two files. OSINTsearch writes profiles_found: 547 into its meta block. osint.industries writes no checked total anywhere, so it gets a row count and no hit rate. Nothing was merged, deduped or re-run.
Pricing from the vendor pages. osint.industries prices are from its pricing page as of September 2026, in pounds sterling as the page prints them. OSINTsearch prices are from osintsearch.org/pricing the same day, in US dollars.
One handle. richard resolves to many people, so both exports are coverage tests, not identity tests.
OSINTsearch vs osint.industries: the richard numbers
| Field | OSINTsearch, richard, 2026-09-05 | osint.industries, richard, 2026-08-26 |
|---|---|---|
| Rows in export | 547 | 400 |
| Distinct platforms or modules | 547 | 310 |
| Checked total in file | 758 endpoints (site claim; not in file) | Not recorded |
| Rows marked registered or found | 547 | 400 |
| Rows with a profile URL | 547 | 285 |
| Rows with a creation or registration date | 267 | 113 |
| Rows with a bio | 164 | 52 |
| Rows with a location | 76 | Not a top-level field |
| Rows with linked accounts | 52 (linked_socials) |
Not a top-level field |
| Mailbox-existence rows | 0 | 95 (Microsoft 77, Mail.ru 5, Zoho 5, Apple 3, Proton 3, Posteo 2) |
| Former usernames | 1 row (osu, former_usernames) plus raw previous_usernames 1, name_history 1 |
2 rows (r6trn, namemc, "Previously Used Identifiers" in body) |
| Ban or status fields | 12 rows carry banned, is_banned or trade_ban_state in raw; 1 reads true (lolz) |
3 rows: Slushy "Account Status: active", Fragment "Auction Status: Taken", Steam "Trade Ban State: None" |
Three things to read out of it.
The 400 is not a profile count. 95 of the osint.industries rows check whether richard@ exists at a mail provider, 77 of them on Microsoft-hosted domains. Real hits for an email-centric investigation, useless for a username sweep. Take them out, plus 20 further rows with no profile URL, and 285 rows point at a page you can open. All 547 OSINTsearch rows carry a URL.
Dates favor OSINTsearch by more than 2 to 1. 267 OSINTsearch rows carry a created_at that is not the zero time, against 113 osint.industries rows with a registered_date. osint.industries also records last_seen_date on 15 rows, and its timeline is the better view of the dates it does have.
Neither export is rich on ban flags for richard. OSINTsearch's normalized former_usernames column fills on one row (osu, the handle thegame98), the same osu history fingerprint.to surfaced in August. Its raw block carries ban-type keys on 12 rows, 11 of them false, no or None; only the Lolz row reads is_banned: true. osint.industries has two "Previously Used Identifiers" rows (Rainbow Six tracker and NameMC) and one Steam trade-ban line.
Input types: username first against email first
osint.industries is email and phone first. Its modules are built around "does this identifier have an account here", which is why 95 of the richard rows are mailbox checks. Feed it an email address and it asks Microsoft, Zoho, Proton, Mail.ru, Apple and Posteo whether that mailbox exists, then walks the address across the social modules. Username works, as the 310-module richard file shows, but the product is shaped around email. Its pricing page adds name and crypto wallet searches (ETH, BTC, TRC) on every plan.
OSINTsearch is username first. The site calls itself "a live data search engine" and the username sweep is the front door: 758 endpoints across six categories, from Social/messaging to Long tail, in about 30 seconds. Email and phone come second: the site claims 203 email modules and 24 phone modules. Our email-mode test on the surfinup8 address returned 14 profiles, 11 carrying the email. That is a working email path, not a 310-module one.
So the username search vs email search question answers itself by input. A handle gets the larger list on OSINTsearch. An email address that needs a mailbox check gets the 95 rows only osint.industries produces.
Pricing: credits against a weekly quota
Prices as of September 2026, from each vendor's pricing page.
| Plan | osint.industries | OSINTsearch |
|---|---|---|
| Free | No free plan listed; free trial for "eligible parties" | $0, 15 searches per week, preview access, basic exports |
| Entry | Basic, £19 per month, 30 credits (about £0.63 per lookup) | Starter, $20 per month, 50 searches per week, full profiles, partial breach records, AI summaries in PDF |
| Middle | Intermediate, £49 per month, 100 credits (£0.49 per lookup), API access | Pro, $49.99 per month, 500 searches per week, full breach records with identifiers, deep search depths 1 to 4, priority support |
| Upper | Advanced, £99 per month, 300 credits (£0.33 per lookup) | None between Pro and Enterprise |
| Top | Enterprise, custom, shared team credit pool, SSO, volume pricing | Enterprise, custom, unlimited, REST API, account manager, SLA |
| Rollover | Credits do not expire monthly; top-ups of up to 30,000 credits at any time | Quotas reset every Monday at 00:00 UTC; unused searches do not carry over |
| Exports | PDF and Word reports; JSON export in our Aug 26 session | PDF, JSON and CSV on every account including Free, per the pricing page as of September 2026 |
| Storage | 30, 100 or 300 cloud cases (5 GB, 20 GB, 100 GB) | Search History, investigation case files |
| Yearly | Not listed on the page we fetched | Up to 17 percent off |
osint.industries credits suit an investigator who runs a few high-value lookups a month and wants them to keep. 30 credits on Basic is 30 lookups, they roll over, and the per-lookup price falls from about £0.63 to £0.33 as you climb. The trade is that a 40-lookup month on Basic means buying credits, and that osint industries pricing has no free plan on the page, only a trial for eligible parties.
OSINTsearch's weekly quota suits volume. 50 searches a week on Starter is 200 or more a month for $20, and Pro's 500 a week is 2,000 or more a month for $49.99. Against £49 for 100 credits, that is an order of magnitude more searches per dollar, assuming one credit is one lookup. The trade runs the other way: a quiet week's searches are gone on Monday.
Per search, OSINTsearch is far cheaper. For three lookups this quarter that you want to keep for next quarter, credits fit better. The free tier is one-sided: 15 searches a week at $0 is a usable plan, and osint.industries has nothing equivalent as of September 2026.
Exports and what a row carries
osint.industries writes one object per module hit with module, a category (36 on richard, led by Technology at 101 rows), a spec_format array of typed fields such as registered, profile_url and creation_date, and a timeline block holding registered_date and last_seen_date. There is no top-level location, no linked-accounts field, and no normalized former-name or ban column; "Previously Used Identifiers" and "Account Status" live inside per-module body maps.
OSINTsearch writes a meta block, an identity block and a flat platforms array. Each platform row carries the same column set: platform, username, user_id, display_name, profile_url, verified, followers, following, posts, bio, location, created_at, last_active, avatar_url, source, former_usernames, and a raw object with the untouched source payload. On richard, 365 rows have a user_id and 346 an avatar. The CSV export widens that to 88 columns, including account_status, account_banned, is_suspended, is_deleted, linked_socials, last_active_days_ago and seed_username for deep-search provenance.
The OSINTsearch row is a fixed schema you can filter on account_banned or former_usernames without knowing which module wrote it. The osint.industries row is module-shaped, richer where a module is rich and harder to filter across modules. Of the exports we have opened in this series, OSINTsearch's is the only one with a normalized former-username and account-status column on every row.
Former usernames and account status
Both tools surface this only where sources still provide it, and for richard that was thin on both sides: one osu history line on OSINTsearch, two "Previously Used Identifiers" rows on osint.industries, one true ban flag between them.
The difference is where it lands. OSINTsearch promotes former handles to a first-class former_usernames column and keeps the platform's own flag in raw, so a filter finds the osu and Lolz rows. On its other handles from the same week the column filled from Steam (GammaCIA), Instagram (mollyhalecia) and osu ("African Anger"). osint.industries puts the same data in a per-module body map, so you find NameMC history by reading the NameMC card.
OSINTsearch also keeps metadata for profiles that are no longer available. Its Sep 5 post on a banned Instagram handle from a public DOJ wire-fraud case returned a user ID, a banned_or_disabled flag, the bio and the picture from a page that no longer loads. The osint.industries richard file records registered: true on all 400 rows and has no field for a suspended or removed account.
Identity summary and case files
OSINTsearch ships an identity block at the top of every username export: probable_name with a confidence score and per-platform sources, probable_location, probable_email, username_variants with the platforms that reported each variant, websites and platforms_agreeing. On richard it lists five username variants and a probable location of United Kingdom at a confidence of 0.01, the honest score for a handle thousands of people use. The site's own copy: "Shared details can suggest a connection; verify it before treating accounts as the same person."
osint.industries has no equivalent summary in the export. It has the timeline view in the app and cloud case storage sized by plan, where a case is a saved search with reports attached.
OSINTsearch's investigation export is a different object: a case file bundling People Search source records, included social profiles and a search journal. The one we opened is a 30-page "EVIDENCE-ONLY EDITION" PDF with four sections (Report overview, People source records, Social evidence, Search journal), stating 1 People Search source record, 2 included social profiles, 3 search runs and 441 reported checks, with the caution that "A shared email, phone number or username is an investigative lead. It does not establish that records belong to the same person." Nothing in the osint.industries file corresponds to that.
API
Both sell one. osint.industries turns API access on at Intermediate, £49 per month for 100 credits. OSINTsearch lists a REST API and API key controls on Enterprise only, so a pipeline there means a custom quote. That is a clear osint.industries win for anyone who needs a key this week.
Where osint.industries is stronger
Mailbox existence on email input. 95 of the 400 richard rows, 77 on Microsoft-hosted domains alone. OSINTsearch's export has no rows of that kind.
Timeline view. The registered_date and last_seen_date pair, drawn per module, reads account age at a glance better than a created_at column, even though OSINTsearch fills more dates (267 to 113).
Maturity and module breadth on email. Years on the market, every richard row tagged reliable_source: true, and name and crypto wallet inputs with no OSINTsearch counterpart. OSINTsearch launched publicly in 2026.
Self-serve API and rolling credits. A key at £49 a month, and lookups that keep.
Where OSINTsearch is stronger
Username coverage (547 URL-bearing rows against 285), a fixed row schema with former_usernames, account_status and account_banned in every CSV row, the confidence-scored identity block, the investigation case file, and price: 15 searches a week for $0, 500 a week for $49.99.
How to choose
| You need | Start with |
|---|---|
| A username sweep with the most linked pages | OSINTsearch |
| Which mail providers hold a mailbox for an address | osint.industries |
| A free plan you can run every week | OSINTsearch |
| A self-serve API key today | osint.industries |
| Former handles and ban flags as filterable columns | OSINTsearch |
| A visual timeline of registration and last-seen dates | osint.industries |
| Lookups that do not expire | osint.industries |
| A case file bundling people records, profiles and a search journal | OSINTsearch |
| Breach and stealer-log correlation next to the sweep | Revealer.US, or OSINTsearch Pro for breach records with identifiers |
OSINTsearch's own comparison, Best osint.industries Alternative in 2026, reaches a similar split and discloses that its author builds the tool. On our numbers, a handle-first team should start on OSINTsearch and keep osint.industries for the mailbox question; an email-first team should do the reverse.
Frequently asked questions
Is OSINTsearch an osint.industries alternative? For username input, yes: 547 profiles with a URL on 2026-09-05, against 285 URL-bearing osint.industries rows on 2026-08-26. For email input it is a partial one. It claims 203 email modules and does not run the mailbox-existence checks that produced 95 rows in the osint.industries file.
How much does osint.industries cost in 2026? As of September 2026, Basic is £19 per month for 30 credits, Intermediate is £49 for 100 credits with API access, Advanced is £99 for 300 credits, and Enterprise is custom. Credits do not expire monthly and you can buy up to 30,000 top-up credits at any time.
Do osint.industries credits expire? No. The pricing page states credits do not expire monthly and are retained if you cancel. OSINTsearch's weekly quota resets every Monday at 00:00 UTC and unused searches are gone.
Which tool has a free tier? OSINTsearch, at 15 searches per week with preview access and basic exports. osint.industries lists no free plan on its pricing page as of September 2026, only a free trial for eligible parties.
Why are the two richard runs on different dates? The osint.industries export is from 2026-08-26 and the OSINTsearch export from 2026-09-05. Both tools change module lists weekly, so treat the counts as dated snapshots, not a same-day contest.
Does a hit mean it is the same person? No. richard resolves to many people on both tools. OSINTsearch's identity block scores its probable name at 0.01 on this handle for that reason, and a shared username across platforms is a lead to verify, not a match.