Open Source PowerGREP AlternativesFile Search Utilities and other similar apps like PowerGREP

The best open source alternative to PowerGREP is FSearch. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to PowerGREP and many of them is open source so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting open source alternatives to PowerGREP are DocFetcher, Clapgrep, Cardinal File Search and grepWin.

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Alternatives
PowerGREP alternatives page was last updated

Alternatives list

  1. FSearch icon
     87 likes

    FSearch is a fast file search utility for GNU/Linux operating systems, inspired by Everything Search Engine. It's written in C and based on GTK+3.

    92 FSearch alternatives

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • Flathub
    Good alternative?
     
  2. DocFetcher icon
     133 likes

    DocFetcher is an Open Source desktop search application: It allows you to search the contents of files on your computer. — You can think of it as Google for your local files. The application runs on Windows, Linux and macOS, and is made available under the Eclipse Public License.

    142 DocFetcher alternatives

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    Good alternative?
     
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  3. Clapgrep icon
     13 likes

    Ever had a folder full of PDF files, where you knew, somewhere in there, is what you're looking for. But you did not know in which file. So you had to search each of them at a time…

    65 Clapgrep alternatives

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • Flathub
    • Flatpak
    • Linux Mobile
    Good alternative?
     
  4. Quick macOS file searching with substring, prefix, suffix, exact, and path-mixed patterns, case-sensitive or regex search modes, instant language switching, keyboard shortcuts, Quick Look previews, Finder integration, clipboard copy, and open-source code.

    65 Cardinal File Search alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source (MIT)

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    Good alternative?
     
  5. grepWin icon
     76 likes

    grepWin is a simple search and replace tool which can use PCRE regular expressions to search for strings of text within files. grepWin adds an entry to the shell context menu to easily search selected folders.

    36 grepWin alternatives

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
    • PortableApps.com
    • Chocolatey
    Good alternative?
     
  6. grep icon
     38 likes

    grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression.

    47 grep alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    • Haiku
    • Linux Mobile
    Good alternative?
     
  7. Cross-platform desktop search application offering rapid full-text and regular expression search, recursive folder filtering, result highlighting, large file support, and a lightweight native UI built with Tauri and powered by ripgrep, ideal for complex codebases.

    84 Searchmonkey III alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source (MIT)

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    • BSD
    Good alternative?
     
  8. dnGREP icon
     42 likes

    dnGrep allows you to search across files with easy-to-read results. Search through text files, Word documents, PDFs, and archives using text, regular expression, XPath, and phonetic queries. dnGrep includes search-and-replace, whole-file preview, right-click search in File...

    59 dnGREP alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
    Good alternative?
     
  9. AstroGrep icon
     33 likes

    AstroGrep is A Microsoft Windows GUI File Searching (grep) utility. Features include regular expressions, versatile printing options, stores most recent used paths and has a "context" feature which is very nice for looking at source code.

    43 AstroGrep alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
    Good alternative?
     
  10.  4 likes

    A user-friendly, faster, more capable grep replacement. Includes a TUI, Google-like Boolean search with AND/OR/NOT, fuzzy search, hexdumps, searches (nested) archives (zip, 7z, tar, pax, cpio), compressed files (gz, Z, bz2, lzma, xz, lz4, zstd, brotli), pdfs, docs, and...

    Cost / License

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • Homebrew
    • MacPorts
    • Termux
    • BSD
    • FreeBSD
    • OpenBSD
    • NetBSD
    • Alpine Linux
    • Chocolatey
    • Windows
    Good alternative?
     
  11. SwiftSearch icon
     21 likes

    SwiftSearch is a lightweight program whose purpose is to help you quickly find the files you need on your Windows machine without ever requiring you to index your drives. Most search utilities that achieve similar speeds do so by indexing drives while the computer is idle, but...

    79 SwiftSearch alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free Personal
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Alerts

    • Discontinued

    Platforms

    • Windows
    Good alternative?
     
  12. Locate32 icon
     82 likes

    Locate32 is software which can be used to find files from your harddrives and other locations. It works like updatedb and locate commands in Unix based systems. In other words, it uses databases to store information about directory structures and uses these databases in searches.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Alerts

    • Discontinued

    Platforms

    • Windows
    Good alternative?
     
12 of 27 PowerGREP alternatives