What is the best AI-powered OSINT tool in 2026?

Sherlock (88K+ GitHub stars) is the most popular OSINT tool in 2026, perfect for fast username enumeration across 400+ social networks. For deeper person investigations with AI-assisted profiling, Maigret (36K+ stars) checks 3,000+ sites and generates LLM-powered dossiers. For website infrastructure analysis, Web-Check (34K+ stars) is the best all-in-one dashboard.

What is the difference between Sherlock and Maigret?

Both find accounts by username, but Sherlock checks 400+ social networks while Maigret checks 3,000+ sites, collects richer page data into a person dossier, and includes an AI profiling demo that generates LLM-based summaries. Maigret is essentially the power-user evolution of Sherlock — Sherlock is simpler and lighter, Maigret is deeper.

Which OSINT tools are still actively maintained in 2026?

Sherlock, Maigret, Web-Check, SpiderFoot, theHarvester, Photon, Recon-ng and Legendary_OSINT are all actively maintained. Twint (16K stars) is archived — the X/Twitter API changes made it unmaintainable. Infoga's repository has been removed from GitHub entirely, so treat both as historical references only.

Do OSINT tools work on Windows?

Most do. Sherlock, Maigret, SpiderFoot, Photon and Recon-ng are cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows) via Python. Web-Check runs as a self-hosted web app on any OS. theHarvester runs natively on Linux/macOS (preinstalled on Kali Linux) and works on Windows via WSL.

🕵️ 10 Best AI-Powered OSINT Tools 2026 — Ranked & Compared

Q: Why is Legendary_OSINT trending in 2026?

Legendary_OSINT (1,536+ stars, +109 stars/day) is the fastest-growing curated OSINT directory on GitHub. It organises tools and resources into 20+ specialist categories — people search, aviation, maritime, dark web, geospatial, video OSINT, business intelligence — built specifically for fraud investigators, CTI analysts, KYC and AML teams.

Open Source Intelligence is having its AI moment. Username search tools are crossing 88K stars, AI-assisted profiling is built into mainstream tools, and curated OSINT directories like Legendary_OSINT (1,536⭐, +109/day) are trending daily. This is the definitive, zero-hype comparison of the 10 most popular OSINT projects on GitHub — ranked by stars, analyzed by use case.

📊 The 10 AI-Powered OSINT Tools at a Glance — Ranked by GitHub Stars

Star counts verified live via the GitHub API on 2026-08-08. This category has almost no dedicated comparison content — most OSINT guides are tool lists, not head-to-head analyses.

#	Tool	⭐ Stars	Growth / Status	Category	Best For
1	sherlock-project/sherlock CATEGORY KING	88,432	Active · Daily updates	Username Search	Fast username enumeration across 400+ social networks
2	soxoj/maigret AI PROFILE	36,243	Active · Daily updates	Username Search + AI	Deep person dossiers from 3,000+ sites with AI-assisted profiling
3	Lissy93/web-check HOT	34,427	Active · Daily updates	Website OSINT	All-in-one website infrastructure & security analysis dashboard
4	smicallef/spiderfoot	20,112	Active · Daily updates	OSINT Automation	Automated attack-surface mapping & threat intelligence correlation
5	laramies/theHarvester	16,981	Active · Daily updates	Recon Gathering	Pentest recon: harvesting emails, subdomains, names & IPs
6	twintproject/twint ARCHIVED	16,405	Archived · Unmaintained	Twitter OSINT	Historical: no-API Twitter scraping (killed by X API changes)
7	s0md3v/Photon	13,092	Active	Web Crawling	Blazing-fast crawling, endpoint & secret-key extraction
8	lanmaster53/recon-ng	5,832	Active	Recon Framework	Modular, Metasploit-style web reconnaissance workflows
9	K2SOsint/Legendary_OSINT TRENDING +109/DAY	1,536	🔥 +109/day · Viral growth	Curated Directory	Finding the right specialized tool fast (fraud, CTI, KYC, AML)
10	m4ll0k/Infoga REMOVED	~1,000 (historical)	Repo removed from GitHub (Aug 2026)	Email OSINT	Historical: email harvesting & verification (do not build on it)

📊 Total ecosystem tracked: ~233,000+ GitHub stars across these 10 projects. Note: Maigret's canonical repository is soxoj/maigret (the maaaaz mirror is stale). Infoga's repo was removed from GitHub — the m4ll0k account remains active with other projects.

🧩 Detailed Tool-by-Tool Breakdown

🥇 #1 Sherlock — sherlock-project/sherlock 88,432⭐

⭐ 88,432 stars🖥 Linux · macOS · Windows🐍 Python 3.9+✅ Actively maintained

Description: The undisputed king of OSINT. Sherlock hunts down social media accounts by username across 400+ social networks — and it is the single most-starred OSINT project on GitHub by a wide margin.

Best for: Investigators, recruiters, and security analysts who need to instantly map where a username exists across the open web.

🔎 400+ supported sites (social networks, forums, communities)
⚡ Multi-username search in one run
📤 Export to CSV, XLSX, TXT or JSON
🌐 Proxy / Tor support for anonymized scanning
🐳 Docker image and pipx install sherlock-project in seconds
⏱ Configurable timeouts, verbose and debug modes

Verdict: The default answer for "is this username taken everywhere?" — simple, fast, and the community standard. The star count (88K+) makes it one of the most trusted security tools ever.

🥈 #2 Maigret — soxoj/maigret AI PROFILING 36,243⭐

⭐ 36,243 stars🖥 Linux · macOS · Windows🐍 Python✅ Actively maintained

Description: "Collect a dossier on a person by username" — Maigret checks 3,000+ sites and gathers available information from each page, building a rich person profile. It includes an AI profiling demo that uses LLMs to synthesize findings — the clearest example of AI integration in the category.

Best for: Deep-dive people investigations, due diligence, fraud investigations, and journalists verifying identity footprints.

📁 3,000+ sites — roughly 8× Sherlock's coverage
🤖 Built-in AI profiling demo (LLM-generated person summary)
🔑 No API keys required — pure page analysis
📊 Correlation graph of found accounts, tag & recency filters
📄 Reports in HTML, PDF, JSON, CSV, XLSX, and Markdown
🕵️ Tor, proxy, and captcha-evasion options for sensitive work

Verdict: Sherlock's power-user sibling. If you need depth over breadth and want LLM-assisted analysis, Maigret is the best AI-era username tool money can't buy — it's free.

🥉 #3 Web-Check — Lissy93/web-check 34,427⭐

⭐ 34,427 stars🌐 Web app · Self-hosted (Node/Docker)🟦 TypeScript✅ Actively maintained

Description: "All-in-one OSINT tool for analysing any website." Paste a URL and get 20+ intelligence checks in one dashboard: IP info, SSL chain, DNS records, cookies, headers, domain info, robots.txt, open ports, traceroute, trackers, tech stack, and even carbon footprint.

Best for: Website due-diligence, threat researchers analyzing malicious domains, blue teams checking their own exposure, and curious users who want a point-and-click OSINT dashboard.

🖥 20+ live checks per scan (IP, SSL, DNS, headers, cookies, ports, DNSEC…)
🔓 Zero-install hosted version at web-check.xyz + self-hostable
🧰 Detects trackers, tech stack, redirect chains & associated hostnames
🌱 Includes carbon-footprint estimation (unique differentiator)
🔌 REST API support for automation pipelines

Verdict: The fastest way from "what is this domain?" to a full technical profile. The UI is the best in this list — perfect for analysts who want results without reading Python.

#4 SpiderFoot — smicallef/spiderfoot 20,112⭐

⭐ 20,112 stars🖥 Linux · macOS · Windows (web UI + CLI)🐍 Python✅ Actively maintained

Description: SpiderFoot automates OSINT for threat intelligence and attack-surface mapping. Its 200+ modules pull from public data sources, then a built-in correlation engine connects the dots — e.g., finding an email that links to a leaked password that links to a domain.

Best for: CTI analysts, SOC teams, and pentesters who need continuous, automated reconnaissance and entity correlation at scale.

🧩 200+ modules across IPs, domains, emails, names, and more
🧠 Correlation engine that flags interesting relationships automatically
🌐 Web UI, CLI, and REST API (fully automatable)
🗃 SQLite-backed storage; exports to CSV, JSON, GEXF graphs
⏰ Scheduled/continuous scanning for attack-surface monitoring

Verdict: The most powerful automation platform in this list. SpiderFoot is what you graduate to when one-off tools like theHarvester aren't enough — it's the "SIEM for open-source data."

#5 theHarvester — laramies/theHarvester 16,981⭐

⭐ 16,981 stars🖥 Linux/macOS native · Windows via WSL · Preinstalled on Kali🐍 Python 3.12+✅ Actively maintained

Description: A penetration-testing staple since 2010. theHarvester gathers emails, subdomains, names, IPs, and URLs using 20+ public sources — search engines (Google, Bing, Brave, Baidu), certificate transparency logs, and APIs like Censys, CertSpotter, and BeVigil.

Best for: Red teams and pentesters running the recon phase of an assessment; bug bounty hunters mapping an organization's external footprint.

📧 Emails, names, subdomains, IPs, and URLs in one tool
🔍 20+ sources: search engines, CT logs, PGP servers, DNS
📝 YAML-based source configuration, optional REST API routes
⚡ Simple single-command usage: theHarvester -d example.com -b all
🎯 Ships preinstalled on Kali Linux and Parrot OS

Verdict: Old but gold. Every pentester's first recon command. It doesn't try to be clever — it just reliably harvests a target's digital footprint in seconds.

#6 Twint — twintproject/twint ARCHIVED 16,405⭐

⭐ 16,405 stars🖥 Linux · macOS🐍 Python⛔ Archived — unmaintained

Description: Twint was the legendary no-API Twitter scraper — no authentication, no API limits — scraping tweets, followers, and followings straight from search operators. It remains one of the most-starred OSINT tools ever built, but the project is archived.

Best for: Learning about Twitter OSINT history and understanding platform-API risk. Do not build new workflows on it — X/Twitter's API lockdowns broke the underlying technique.

📉 No-API scraping of tweets, profiles, followers, followings
🔍 Twitter search-operator based collection (topics, hashtags, trends)
⚠️ Archived in 2023 — scraping methods no longer work reliably
💡 Lesson: single-platform OSINT tools have a hard expiry date

Verdict: A cautionary tale as much as a tool. Twint's 16K stars prove demand for platform OSINT; its archive status proves the risk. Any 2026 replacement must plan for platform API volatility.

#7 Photon — s0md3v/Photon 13,092⭐

⭐ 13,092 stars🖥 Linux · macOS · Windows🐍 Python 3.x✅ Actively maintained

Description: "Incredibly fast crawler designed for OSINT." Photon crawls a target domain and extracts URLs (in-scope and out-of-scope), emails, social media accounts, S3 buckets, files, secret keys / API keys / hashes, and JavaScript endpoints — with multi-threaded speed.

Best for: Bug bounty hunters, pentesters, and researchers who need maximum crawl coverage of a web property and its hidden assets.

🌐 In-scope & out-of-scope URL extraction with parameter URLs
🔑 Intel extraction: emails, social accounts, S3 buckets, secret keys
📄 File discovery (pdf, png, xml…) and JS endpoint mining
⚙️ Multi-threaded crawling for speed at scale
📦 Can be used as a Python library, not just a CLI

Verdict: The fastest crawler in the category. If your recon pipeline needs to find every endpoint and leaked key on a domain, Photon is the workhorse.

#8 Recon-ng — lanmaster53/recon-ng 5,832⭐

⭐ 5,832 stars🖥 Linux · macOS · Windows · Preinstalled on Kali🐍 Python✅ Actively maintained

Description: A full-featured, modular web reconnaissance framework with a Metasploit-style interactive console. 90+ modules handle everything from whois and DNS to social-media enumeration, with workspaces and API-key management built in.

Best for: Analysts who love structured, repeatable workflows — Recon-ng turns ad-hoc recon into a documented, module-driven process.

🖥 Metasploit-like console: use, set, run workflow
🧩 90+ modules + marketplace for community module installs
📁 Workspaces to organize separate investigations
🔑 Centralized API key management across modules
📊 Structured reporting and data persistence

Verdict: The framework for methodical teams. The learning curve is real, but so is the payoff in reproducibility — and the Pluralsight course ecosystem around it is a bonus.

#9 Legendary_OSINT — K2SOsint/Legendary_OSINT 🔥 +109 STARS/DAY 1,536⭐

⭐ 1,536 stars (+109/day — fastest-growing OSINT repo)🌐 Web — no install, a curated directory📚 Resource list✅ Actively maintained

Description: The trend story of 2026. Legendary_OSINT is a curated list of OSINT tools & resources built for fraud investigators, CTI analysts, KYC and AML teams. It organizes the exploding OSINT ecosystem into 20+ specialist categories — people search, aviation, maritime, railways, dark web, geospatial, image/video OSINT, business intelligence, and more.

Best for: Anyone drowning in tool choices. Instead of GitHub-searching 200 repos, investigators get a vetted, categorized launchpad — with sources from newsletters, Telegram groups, and curated startpages.

🗂 20+ curated categories (people, aviation, maritime, dark web, comms, video, business, gov records…)
🛡 Purpose-built for fraud, CTI, KYC & AML investigators
📈 +109 stars/day — the fastest-growing OSINT repo on GitHub right now
♻️ Continuously updated from newsletters, Telegram, and other collections
⚠️ Honest guidance: third-party tools, vet before use

Verdict: The "awesome-list" revival, done for working investigators. Its meteoric growth proves a real gap: the OSINT tool space grew faster than anyone can track manually — curation is the killer feature.

#10 Infoga — m4ll0k/Infoga REPO REMOVED ~1,000⭐ (historical)

⭐ ~1,000 stars (historical)🖥 Linux🐍 Python 2.x⛔ Repository removed from GitHub (Aug 2026)

Description: Infoga was a popular email OSINT tool — harvesting emails from search engines, verifying them, and checking associated social accounts. As of August 2026, the repository has been removed from GitHub (the m4ll0k account remains active with other projects like SecretFinder and BBTz).

Best for: Understanding the category's history — and a reminder that email-harvesting tools face moderation and lifecycle risk.

📧 Email harvesting via search-engine scraping
✔️ Email verification & social username checks
⛔ No longer downloadable from the original repo — mirrors only
💡 Lesson: choose actively maintained email OSINT alternatives (e.g., theHarvester, Maigret)

Verdict: A historical entry. We include it for completeness because it still shows up in OSINT tool lists — but in 2026 you should treat it as removed and route email investigations through actively maintained tools.

🔑 Key Insights — What the Numbers Tell Us

🚀 Username search is the killer OSINT app. Sherlock (88K⭐) + Maigret (36K⭐) alone account for ~124K of the ~233K stars tracked here. In the AI era, "who is behind this handle?" is the most valuable open-source question — and these two tools own the answer.

🤖 AI integration is already here — not future-tense. Maigret ships an AI profiling demo that turns 3,000+ page findings into an LLM-generated dossier; SpiderFoot's correlation engine auto-connects entities; Web-Check packages 20+ checks into an instant AI-friendly dashboard. The tools that synthesize, not just scrape, are winning.

🔥 Legendary_OSINT (+109/day) is the demand signal. A curated directory out-growing almost every tool repo proves the pain point: the OSINT ecosystem is now too large to navigate without curation. Fraud, CTI, KYC and AML teams are adopting it as their starting point — expect curation layers to become standard in this category.

⚠️ Platform risk is real: Twint (16K⭐, archived) and Infoga (removed). Twint was killed by X/Twitter API changes; Infoga's repo was pulled from GitHub. 14% of the star mass in this comparison is now unmaintained or unavailable. Always check maintenance status before building workflows on an OSINT tool.

📊 Star counts ≠ only signal, but they're a strong one here. Every actively-maintained tool in the top 8 was updated within 24 hours of our data pull (2026-08-08). In a category full of abandoned projects, "actively maintained" is a feature — and the star leaders are precisely the ones being actively developed.

✅ Which Should You Choose?

👤 You're an investigator / analyst doing people research → Start with Sherlock for fast username mapping, then upgrade to Maigret for 3,000+ site dossiers and AI-assisted profiling. This is the best 1-2 punch in OSINT.

🌐 You analyze websites, domains & infrastructure → Use Web-Check for instant point-and-click dashboards and SpiderFoot when you need automated, correlated, continuous scanning.

⚔️ You're a pentester / red teamer → theHarvester for email/subdomain recon (it's preinstalled on Kali), Photon for aggressive crawling and secret-key discovery, and Recon-ng when you need structured, repeatable module-driven workflows.

🏦 You're in fraud / CTI / KYC / AML → Bookmark Legendary_OSINT as your categorized launchpad (people search, maritime, dark web, business intel, and more) and pair it with SpiderFoot for ongoing attack-surface monitoring.

🐦 You specifically need X/Twitter data → Do not start with Twint — it's archived. Look for actively maintained alternatives that use official APIs or have adapted to the new platform reality, and budget for API volatility.

⚠️ Avoid in 2026: Infoga (repo removed) and Twint (archived). Their star counts are historical artifacts — choose maintained alternatives for email and social OSINT.

💰 Affiliate Opportunities in the AI-OSINT Space

Zero-competition category, high-intent technical audience (investigators, pentesters, CTI teams), and every tool above has a natural paid complement. Strong monetization paths:

🎓 Training & Certification (HIGH potential)

TCM Security — OSINT Fundamentals / Practical OSINT courses: the most-recommended OSINT training; perfect affiliate match for Sherlock/Maigret traffic.
Pluralsight — Recon-ng & information-gathering courses: officially endorsed by the Recon-ng project itself; direct fit for our #8 entry.
INE / eLearnSecurity — eJPT & pentest tracks: theHarvester & Photon users are certification shoppers.

🛡 Security Lab Infrastructure (HIGH potential)

Kali Linux VM / dedicated cloud VM hosting: every one of these tools ships in Kali; "run OSINT tools" hosting guides convert well.
VPS providers (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr): SpiderFoot and Web-Check are self-hosted daemons — persistent-server need.
Proxy / residential proxy services: Sherlock, Maigret, and theHarvester docs all recommend proxies for rate-limit evasion.

🤖 AI & Automation Layer (EMERGING)

LLM API providers: Maigret's AI profiling and AI-OSINT startups need model access — natural upsell.
Commercial OSINT platforms (Maltego, Shodan, Censys, SpiderFoot HX): readers who outgrow free tools are prime upgrade targets.
Data-enrichment APIs (AbstractAPI, BeVigil, BuiltWith): theHarvester and SpiderFoot already integrate them — contextual affiliate placement fits.

Disclosure: This page may contain affiliate links. If you purchase through links on this page, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. All tools listed are free, open-source projects — affiliate revenue supports our research. Always verify tools against your own requirements and legal/ethical boundaries.