Tracelight
Tracelight vs. SpiderFoot

Hosted & opinionated vs. self-hosted & flexible.

SpiderFoot is the gold-standard open-source OSINT framework. It's also a full-time DevOps responsibility. Tracelight runs the same caliber of OSINT against you, hosted, with citation-anchored reporting baked into every output. Same job, different tradeoff.

Setup + operational overhead

Feature
Tracelight
SpiderFoot
Time to first investigation
60 seconds — sign up + run a lookup
1–4 hours — install, configure DB, configure 200+ module API keys
Hosting
Fully hosted, zero infrastructure
Self-hosted (you run the Python server + DB)
Updates
Continuous — new workers ship transparently
Manual — you pull, restart, manage Python deps
API key management
We hold + rotate keys; you never see them
You source + manage every API key (~80 modules need them)

Work product

Feature
Tracelight
SpiderFoot
Citation-anchored reports
Every claim links to evidence row → raw API response
CSV / JSON / GEXF export of raw findings; narrative is your job
PDF report
Signed PDF, ready to hand to opposing counsel
None — you build it
Multi-source verification badge
Yes — auto-shown when 2+ workers confirm a finding
Aggregation visible; verification not surfaced as a UI badge
Read-only share links
Signed URLs with token expiry + view tracking
None — you share files

Workflow + collaboration

Feature
Tracelight
SpiderFoot
Multi-tenant workspaces
Yes — separate workspaces per team / engagement
Single-user typically; multi-user requires self-managed auth
Continuous monitoring + alerts
Native — daily/weekly cadence, severity-graded alerts
Possible via cron + your own alerting wiring
Slack / Discord / Teams integration
Native, HMAC-signed webhooks, Slack OAuth bot
DIY
Public REST API
Documented, Bearer-auth, rate-limited per plan
API exists but auth + rate-limit is your problem

Compliance + defensibility

Feature
Tracelight
SpiderFoot
FCRA-aware consent capture
Built into report generation flow
Not a product feature
GDPR DSAR export
Per-subject JSON export endpoint
DIY against the SQLite backend
Audit log
Every viewer + download recorded
Application-level audit logging is on you

Pricing

Feature
Tracelight
SpiderFoot
Cost
From $49/mo (Starter) — pricing public
Open source (free) — but real cost is your time + ops + API keys
Total cost of ownership for 1 PI / 1 small team
$49–$149/mo, no infra time
Free + 4–8 hours/month of ops + API key fees from sources

When SpiderFoot wins

SpiderFoot is the right tool when (a) data sovereignty matters more than anything else (e.g. classified investigations where data legally cannot leave your infrastructure), (b) you have engineering capacity to run + maintain it, (c) you need very specific custom modules and want to fork the source. For the 90% of small PI shops, journalists, and diligence teams that just want a citation-anchored OSINT report in 60 seconds, hosted wins.

Try Tracelight free for 7 days.

Skip the 4-hour install. Sign up, run your first lookup, see the citation trail. Then decide.

Start free trial See the demo

Comparison based on publicly available SpiderFoot documentation (v4.0). SpiderFoot is open-source software maintained by Steve Micallef.