Windows Grep Alternatives

Windows Grep is described as 'The program combines the power and flexibility of traditional command line grep utilities available on DOS, UNIX and other platforms with the ease of use of Microsoft Windows' and is an app in the os & utilities category. There are more than 25 alternatives to Windows Grep for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, Chocolatey and Web-based apps. The best Windows Grep alternative is grepWin, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like Windows Grep are AstroGrep, dnGREP, SearchMyFiles and TextSeek.

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Windows Grep alternatives page was last updated

Alternatives list

  1. grepWin icon
     75 likes
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    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.

    35 grepWin alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
    • PortableApps.com
    • Chocolatey
     
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    7
    • Almost everyone thinks grepWin is a great Windows Grep alternative.

    • grepWin is the most popular Windows alternative to Windows Grep.

    • grepWin is the most popular Open Source & free alternative to Windows Grep.

    • grepWin is Free and Open SourceWindows Grep is Paid and Proprietary
    • grepWin is LightweightWindows Grep is not according to our users
  2. AstroGrep icon
     33 likes
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    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.

    39 AstroGrep alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
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    9
  3. dnGREP icon
     41 likes
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    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...

    57 dnGREP alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  4. SearchMyFiles icon
     35 likes
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    SearchMyFiles is a non-indexing portable alternative to the standard "Search For Files And Folders" module of Windows. It allows you to easily search files in your system by wildcard, by last modified/created/last accessed time, by file attributes, by file content...

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Proprietary

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  5. TextSeek icon
     9 likes
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    TextSeek is a professional full-text desktop search tool for Windows and MacOS. It supports PDF, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, RTF and other formats.

    104 TextSeek alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Freemium (Pay once or Subscription)
    • Proprietary

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
     
    • TextSeek is the most popular Mac alternative to Windows Grep.

    • TextSeek is Freemium and ProprietaryWindows Grep is Paid and Proprietary
    • TextSeek is Privacy focused and LightweightWindows Grep is not according to our users
  6. Copy a direct link to this comment to your clipboard

    Find and Replace (FNR) is an open source tool to find and replace text in multiple files.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
  7. grep icon
     35 likes
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    grep is a command-line utility for searching plain-text data sets for lines matching a regular expression.

    43 grep alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
    • Haiku
     
    • grep is the most popular Linux alternative to Windows Grep.

    • grep is Free and Open SourceWindows Grep is Paid and Proprietary
  8.  2 likes
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    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

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Linux
    • Homebrew
    • MacPorts
    • Termux
    • BSD
    • FreeBSD
    • OpenBSD
    • NetBSD
    • Alpine Linux
    • Chocolatey
    • Windows
     
  9. Copy a direct link to this comment to your clipboard

    FAR is a simple tool for search and replace operations over multiple files. You can apply ordinary "word by word" replacement, or choose to use fully featured regular expressions.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Windows
    • Linux
     
  10. Copy a direct link to this comment to your clipboard

    Silver Searcher is a code search tool similar to ack that claims to be much faster. It's implemented in C and has some extra features such as ignoring files per .hignore, .gitignore contents.

    Cost / License

    • Free
    • Open Source

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Mac
    • Linux
    • BSD
     
  11. PowerGREP icon
     22 likes
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    PowerGREP is a powerful Windows grep tool. Quickly search through large numbers of files on your PC or network, including text and binary files, compressed archives, MS Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDF files, OpenOffice files, etc.

    82 PowerGREP alternatives

    Cost / License

    • Pay once
    • Proprietary

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
    • PowerGREP is the most popular commercial alternative to Windows Grep.

    • PowerGREP is Paid and ProprietaryWindows Grep is also Paid and Proprietary
  12. Copy a direct link to this comment to your clipboard

    Search files with smart queries as with Google, replace simple or multiline text in multiple files. The batch replace operation easily updates hundreds of different links in several files. Extremely fast, easy to use, with excellent help.

    Cost / License

    • Paid
    • Proprietary

    Application type

    Platforms

    • Windows
     
12 of 40 Windows Grep alternatives