StarHunt vs Juicebox (PeopleGPT): which one finds better engineers

What Juicebox does well

Juicebox, known for its PeopleGPT search, was one of the first tools to make natural-language people search actually work. You type the role the way you would explain it to a colleague and it parses that into a search over a very large aggregated index of public profiles. Around that search it has built projects, saved lists, contact enrichment, and AI agents that can run sourcing and outreach steps for you.

Two things follow from the size of that index. The first is genuine coverage: Juicebox works for a product designer, a paralegal or a field sales rep just as well as for a backend engineer, so one tool serves a whole recruiting team. The second is that a large index is assembled from profile text, the way people describe themselves, which is a very different raw material from a commit history.

What StarHunt does instead: start from the repositories

StarHunt never starts from a person. It starts from the repositories that define a technology ecosystem, pulls the people who really contribute to them, and only then ranks. The ranking uses building signals: contributions over the last 12 months, the languages in a developer's own repositories, their most starred project, and how recently they pushed code.

The practical consequence is a different floor on quality. On a profile index, the worst result in your list is someone whose bio contains the right words. On a repository index, the worst result is someone who has merged code into that ecosystem. You get fewer names, and you spend far less time deciding which ones are real.

The noise problem, and why it costs more than the subscription

A search engine built on 800 million profiles is optimized for recall. Ask it for Rust engineers and it will find everyone who has written the word Rust somewhere: people who read one tutorial, people who list it as an interest, people who wrote Rust in 2019 and moved on, recruiters who mention Rust in their own headline. Every one of them looks plausible in a list view, and the only way to tell them apart is to open the profile.

That review time is the real cost of sourcing. Sixty plausible profiles at two minutes each is two hours, and it repeats on every role. Repo-first search attacks that number directly: because the entry ticket is having shipped code in the ecosystem, a much larger share of the shortlist survives the first look. This is the single difference we would ask you to test, rather than take our word for.

Where Juicebox is the better choice

If you hire beyond engineering, this is not a close call. StarHunt has nothing to offer for a sales, finance or marketing role, and Juicebox handles all of them from the same search bar. The same goes for a recruiting team that wants one tool, one login and one invoice across every req, or one that wants agents to run outreach sequences off the back of a search.

Juicebox is also the better fit when the people you need mostly do not code in public: hardware, embedded work behind NDA, quantitative finance, and most enterprise back-office engineering leave very little public GitHub trace.

Where StarHunt is the better choice

If GitHub is where your candidates actually are, the ordering of results matters more than the size of the index, and that is what StarHunt optimizes. It also matters when you have to defend a shortlist to an engineering manager: every profile comes with the repositories, the languages and the recent activity behind it, so the answer to "why this person" is on the screen.

Budget is the other clear line. StarHunt is €24.99 per month with no credit system, so exporting a hundred profiles costs the same as exporting five. On a per-seat tool with contact credits, volume and price move together.

Pricing, side by side

Juicebox publishes per-seat tiers: a free plan, Starter at $119 per seat per month, Growth at $199 per seat per month, and a custom Business tier, with annual billing reducing the seat price by roughly 15 percent. Plans carry monthly contact and export credits, and AI agents are a separate add-on. The free plan is a look at the search, not a working seat, since it comes with no contact or export credits.

StarHunt has three lines: a Free plan at €0 with 5 searches and 3 exports, Pro at €24.99 per month, unlimited searches and exports, and Team from €150 per month for up to 10 recruiters. There are no credits and no add-ons, so the monthly figure is the whole cost.

What StarHunt does not do

Worth stating plainly, because it decides the comparison for some teams. StarHunt does not search LinkedIn, Stack Overflow or any source other than GitHub. It does not send email, run sequences or act as a CRM: you export a CSV and run outreach in whatever you already use. And a developer with no public code is invisible to it, however good they are.

Frequently asked questions

Is StarHunt a Juicebox alternative?

For engineering roles, yes: both take a plain-English brief and return a ranked list of people. For anything outside engineering, no. StarHunt only indexes GitHub, so a recruiting team hiring across functions would still need Juicebox or an equivalent.

Does Juicebox search GitHub?

Juicebox indexes public profiles from across the web, and GitHub profiles are part of that. The difference is not coverage but ranking: Juicebox scores how well a profile matches your query, while StarHunt scores what a developer has contributed to the repositories that define the technology.

Which one is cheaper?

StarHunt, by a wide margin at the entry level: €24.99 per month with unlimited searches and exports, against $119 per seat per month for Juicebox Starter plus credit limits and optional agent add-ons. They are not the same scope, so the fair comparison is cost per engineering hire sourced, not the sticker price.

Disclosure: StarHunt publishes this page. Facts about the other tool come from its public pages and public reviews, checked in August 2026. Vendors change their pricing, so check theirs before you buy. Juicebox