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SeekOut is a recruiting platform that searches "1B+ profiles" and, its homepage says, finds talent "from patents, GitHub, publications" and other signals. For engineers, its best-known feature is the Coder Score: one to five stars for each GitHub member, overall and per language.
People look for a SeekOut alternative for three common reasons. Only the entry plan has a published price. The full ATS integration is on custom plans. And a star rating tells you how someone's code ranks across GitHub, not whether they fit your role. This page compares four alternatives for engineering roles, then puts AyHire and SeekOut side by side. AyHire is our product, so read those parts with that in mind.
Every vendor claim comes from the vendor's own pages, opened on 27 October 2026.
What SeekOut does with GitHub
SeekOut's help centre (both articles dated 1 September 2026) describes it plainly:
- It indexes "the descriptions and metadata of all GitHub repositories", and analyses "every code contribution" for its impact.
- Each GitHub member gets a Coder Score of one to five stars. Five stars is the top 2%, four the top 10%, three the top 30%.
- The two most significant inputs are how many other people work on a project and how often someone's code is forked.
- It merges GitHub data with public sources such as LinkedIn, for skills, experience, location and current employer.
SeekOut pricing (as of 27 October 2026)
From SeekOut's pricing page:
- Sourcing Core: $149 a month billed yearly ($1,788 a year), or $179 billed monthly. 3 seats, 500 contact credits and 1,000 exports a month, email campaigns. No ATS integration in the comparison table. 14 days free, no card.
- Sourcing, Sourcing + Integration and Full Recruiting Funnel: custom, billed yearly. ATS integration starts on Sourcing + Integration.
The pricing page doesn't mention GitHub, so confirm on the trial that GitHub search is part of the plan you would buy.
AyHire vs SeekOut
- What you get back: SeekOut gives a database search with a Coder Score per person. AyHire gives a call on each person for one role: who to talk to first, one line of why, and one thing to check, with a link to the commit, pull request or README behind each judgement.
- What is judged: SeekOut's Coder Score is general and the same for every role. AyHire judges each person against your role's own criteria (Must have, Important, Nice to have), and an unknown never counts against anyone. AyHire also keeps four general scores of public work, one click behind the call.
- Where people come from: SeekOut searches its own index of 1B+ profiles. AyHire starts from the work: it searches GitHub for repos that match the role, then finds the people who wrote most of them.
- Outreach: SeekOut sends email campaigns. AyHire never contacts anyone: you write from your own inbox.
- ATS: SeekOut's full integration is on a custom plan. AyHire sends shortlisted people to Greenhouse, Lever and 11 more ATSs, or to any tool through a webhook, on both plans.
- Price: SeekOut Sourcing Core is $149 a month billed yearly for 3 seats. AyHire is $99 a month for one person, or Team at $79 a person a month (2 or more). Three people on Team cost $237 a month, or $197.50 a month billed yearly.
- Trial: 14 days on SeekOut, 14 on AyHire, neither needs a card. AyHire's GitHub profile check is free with no account at all.
- Roles beyond engineering: SeekOut covers every function. AyHire is built for engineering roles; for roles that are mostly not code, its web app also looks on LinkedIn and lists those people apart.
Pick SeekOut if you want one tool for search and outreach across all your roles, with a GitHub rating as one signal. Pick AyHire if your hard part is deciding which engineers are worth a call, and you want to see the code behind that decision.
The difference on a real search
On 27 October 2026 we gave AyHire a brief for a Rust database engineer, through its MCP server. It searched GitHub for topic:database language:"Rust" repos with 1,000 stars or more, pushed since 1 September 2026. 37 repos matched. AyHire read the 8 most-starred and took the five people who wrote the most of each: 40 people, each with the repo they were found through and their rank in it. 12 of the 40 already had an AyHire analysis from the last 30 days, which opens free and at once.
Here are the projects, by the commits of their top five people:
- meilisearch/meilisearch, 59,685 stars: 9,817 commits.
- surrealdb/surrealdb, 33,238 stars: 3,703 commits, 2,478 from one person.
- influxdata/influxdb, 31,786 stars: 11,246 commits, spread evenly (2,064 to 2,515 each).
- chroma-core/chroma, 29,591 stars: 2,472 commits.
- t8y2/dbx, 27,922 stars, created in April 2026: 6,029 commits, 4,075 from its owner.
- clockworklabs/SpacetimeDB, 25,397 stars: 1,639 commits.
- tursodatabase/turso, 25,068 stars: 14,702 commits.
- valeriansaliou/sonic, 21,371 stars: 1,265 commits, almost all from two people.
A rating built on project size and forks rates everyone near the top of these projects highly, and it should. What it can't tell you is which of those 40 people worked on the part your role needs: a storage engine, a query planner, a sync protocol or a desktop client. That is the question AyHire's next step answers. It reads each person's commits, pull requests and READMEs against the role's criteria and links what it found. We list projects here, not people: the developers didn't ask to be on a marketing page.
The other SeekOut alternatives
Juicebox, for natural-language search with outreach
Juicebox searches "800M+ profiles from 30+ data sources" from a plain-language brief and lists "activity signals from GitHub" among its signals. Pricing: a free plan, Starter $99 a seat a month billed yearly ($119 monthly), Growth $179 ($199), Business custom. Email outreach starts on Starter; ATS or CRM integration is listed on Business. More in our Juicebox alternatives.
Pin, for a free plan
Pin has a free plan (5 contact lookups a week, email-only sequences), Solo at $100 a user a month billed yearly and Professional at $135. ATS integration is an add-on below Enterprise. Its pricing page doesn't mention GitHub.
Gem, for a CRM tied to your ATS
Gem offers sourcing across 800M+ profiles, sequences and bi-directional ATS sync, priced by company size. Companies of 1 to 10 people can join its Startup Program at $130 a month billed yearly. Its pricing page doesn't mention GitHub.
hireEZ, for volume
hireEZ searches 45+ channels, sends email, SMS and InMail, and lists 40+ native ATS integrations. Solo starts at $494 a month with a 7-day trial. Its pricing page doesn't mention GitHub.
Questions people ask
What is SeekOut's Coder Score?
A rating of one to five stars that SeekOut gives each GitHub member, overall and per language. Five stars is the top 2% of GitHub members. Its biggest inputs are how many people work on a project and how often someone's code is forked.
How much does SeekOut cost?
As of 27 October 2026, Sourcing Core is $149 a month billed yearly ($1,788 a year) or $179 billed monthly, with 3 seats. The other plans are priced by quote and billed yearly.
Is there a cheaper SeekOut alternative for hiring engineers?
AyHire is $99 a month for one person, with ATS push included. Pin has a free plan and a $100 Solo plan billed yearly. Which is cheaper for you depends on seats: SeekOut's $149 covers three.
Does AyHire send outreach like SeekOut?
No. AyHire finds LinkedIn and email with their source and how sure it is, but it never contacts anyone. You write to people yourself, which is what we recommend anyway: name the work you read. Our guide to finding engineers on GitHub covers how.
Sources, all opened on 27 October 2026: SeekOut, SeekOut pricing, SeekOut GitHub search and Coder Score (1 September 2026), Juicebox PeopleGPT, Juicebox pricing, Pin pricing, Gem pricing, hireEZ pricing. AyHire's search ran the same day; the commit counts are GitHub's.