sherlock
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Hunt down social media accounts by username across social networks
sherlock --no-txt <username> sherlock --json 2356 <username>
Summary
Sherlock is an open-source command-line tool that searches for a given username across more than 400 social networks and reports back where accounts exist. It costs nothing to use, runs as a Python package installed via pipx, pip, uv, or Docker, and is aimed at OSINTOSINTOpen-source intelligence, collecting and analyzing information from publicly available sources. Investigators use it to learn about people, infrastructure or threats. researchers, investigators, and red teamers doing footprinting on a person or handle before an engagement. Results can be written to text, CSV, or JSON, and site lists can be loaded from an open pull request, which suits testing proposed additions before they merge or running searches in CI without leaving files on disk. It sits in the reconnaissance and OSINT space alongside other username-enumeration tools, filtering known false-positive-prone sites automatically to keep results clean. First committed in 2018, it remains active, with 322 contributors and steady commits over the past year.
Hunt down social media accounts by username across social networks
How sherlock helps
Which social networks does a given handle actually exist on?
checks the username against more than 400 site profiles and lists each one where an account was found, so a researcher gets a single sweep instead of checking sites by hand
Is this the same person's handle across platforms, or a coincidence?
running one username through the full site list surfaces where it resolves to a live profile versus a dead one, letting an investigator build out a footprint before an engagement
How do I keep a person-search running in a pipeline without littering the disk with result files?
results can be routed to CSV or JSON instead of the default text file, or suppressed from disk entirely, so a CI job can consume the output programmatically
Can I test a proposed new site check before it's merged into the tool?
a site manifest can be loaded straight from an open pull request's URI, so the added site gets searched immediately without waiting for a release
Which of my search results are just noise from sites prone to false positives?
known false-positive-prone sites are filtered out automatically based on ongoing upstream testing, keeping the returned list closer to real matches
Where did each hit actually come from, for follow-up verification?
each found account is written out per username to its own result file (or CSV/JSON record), giving a reviewable list to check by hand rather than trusting the tool's judgment alone
Languages
Command line
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Screenshots
From the release notes, newest first. Click one to see it full size.Score card
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Shipping velocity releases a month, last 12 months
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Documentation quality release-notes rubric, 0–100
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Breaking-change discipline how rarely a release breaks users, and notice given
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Maintenance risk quiet time against its own cadence, maintainers
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Innovation & surface new capabilities, API and MCP surface
- Community health
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Contributor trend distinct committers, this year against last
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Maintainer concentration bus factor now against a year ago
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Issue backlog trend issues closed per issue opened, 12 months
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Responsiveness median time to a maintainer’s first reply
Nine scores for sherlock, each built from the releases, notes and API history this site tracks — and, on Researcher and Business, where it stands among every measured tool in its category and how that has moved.
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Blank means never measured; nothing here is a filled-in zero.
Peer standings are included with Researcher and Business. See how this tool ranks against its competitors, using data we don't publish anywhere else.
See plans →Each score is 0–100 on a published rubric, derived from data this site already shows. A dimension we cannot measure says so — it is never scored 0 and never enters a rank.
How this is scored
- Shipping velocity — releases a month over the last 12 months, on a log scale where 16 a month scores 100. Needs 3 releases in the window.
- Documentation quality — the release-notes rubric published on the analytics page, unchanged.
- Breaking-change discipline — the share of releases carrying a breaking change (none scores 100, half or more scores 0). Only projects that label breaking changes are measured: a clean record cannot be told from an unlabelled one.
- Maintenance risk — quiet time measured against the tool's own release cadence (quiet longer than 90 days and three typical gaps scores 0), plus the number of active maintainers and whether contributors are growing, where known. Higher is lower risk.
- Innovation & surface — new capabilities in the feature ledger this year, API and MCP operations added, and the share of commits that are features: the mean of whichever we hold.
- Community health (open-source tools only) — each is a direction, not a size: contributors this year against last, the bus factor now against a year ago, and issues closed per issue opened, where steady scores 50, doubled 100 and halved 0; plus the median time to a maintainer's first reply (an hour scores about 100, a month or more 0). A commercial card has no repository and carries none of the four.
- Documented delivery (commercial tools) — when a vendor's documented new capabilities have slowed against its own baseline, that counts against the overall standing as heavily as two low dimensions. Steady delivery, or too little history to judge, leaves the standing alone; it is never a sixth score.
- Open-source tools are scored on repository signals; commercial tools on their published changelog. Ranks compare tools within one category and one profile and need at least five measured peers; the overall standing needs three ranked dimensions. Best-in-breed or consolidator is a shape, not a quality, and is never scored.
Release-note detail over time
See how much detail sherlock puts in its release notes, quarter by quarter, and compare it with tracked tools in the same category. This history uses up to ten retained, reviewed notes per tool; sparse or blank older quarters may reflect that limit.
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Releases
3 entries
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- May 20261
- September 20251
- July 20241
Project health
Issue, contributor and maintainer activity in sherlock-project/sherlock, 2023-10 – 2026-09, as of 2026-09-25. Twelve-month figures first; the trend lines run the whole window.
- Contributors 41 +10 vs prior 12 months
- Maintainers 16 +16 joined · −3 left, last 12 months
- Bus factor 8 committers behind half the commits
- Community-filed 97% of issues opened, last 12 months
- Median time to close 78 days first maintainer reply 26 hours
- Open backlog 108 of 1,190 issues ever filed
- Issues opened / month 9 · 0 communitymaintainers
- Open backlog 108
- Contributors / month 2
- Commits / month 4
- Stars 92,062
- bugs 16%
- features 19%
- questions 7%
- other 58%
Counts from the project's public repository and git history; no individuals are identified. Maintainers are the committers covering 80% of the last year's commits. how we measure this
Libraries its release ships
What its latest release locks, checked against known advisories.None of its release's images build from a lockfile we can read.
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