Hound vs Shebe
Hound
github.comShebe
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Hound | Shebe |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Code Search Tools | 7.7 (#16) | 7.8 (#12) |
| License | The repository provides Hound under the MIT License. | The GitHub organization lists the Shebe repository under the Apache-2.0 license. |
| Purpose | Hound is an extremely fast source code search engine with a React frontend and Go backend that maintains an index for each repository. | Shebe is a local code-search tool that uses BM25 full-text search for code repositories. |
| Support | The README describes platform support and setup guidance but does not specify a support service. | The project provides installation, configuration, troubleshooting, and MCP setup guides in its repository. |
Plans
In their own words
Hound
Hound is a free source code search engine that indexes repositories and offers a web interface and a minimal API. Its Go backend maintains a current index for each repository, while its static React frontend provides the web UI. Search uses regular-expression matching with a trigram index. Hound supports Git, Mercurial, SVN, Bazaar, and local repositories; private repositories can be indexed from local directories or reached through file or SSH-style URLs. By default, it checks configured repository URLs for updates every 30 seconds, with an interval that can be changed per repository. It can be built from source or run from the project's Docker image, and the web UI defaults to localhost:6080. Plugins are available for Sublime Text, Vim, Emacs, and Visual Studio Code. Hound is tested on macOS and CentOS and is expected to work on Unix-like systems, but Windows is not supported. It does not support TLS itself; the README suggests running it behind Apache or nginx. Hound uses the MIT license, and the latest listed release is v0.7.1, published May 3, 2023.
Shebe
Shebe is a local code-search tool that uses BM25 full-text search across code repositories. It ranks results and supports phrase searches, Boolean queries, and literal matching. Fourteen MCP tools serve coding agents with functions including search, repository indexing, file reading, and reference finding. Shebe runs without embeddings, a GPU, or a cloud service, but repositories must be cloned locally before indexing; remote repository URLs are not supported. Its text-based search does not provide semantic similarity, so related words such as “login” and “authenticate” may not match. Prebuilt binaries are listed for Linux x86_64 and macOS on Apple Silicon and Intel; Linux ARM64 is planned. Windows users need to build it from source. The installation guide covers MCP setup and Zed configuration and points to the organization for VS Code and other editor extensions. Shebe is free and licensed under Apache-2.0. The README reports 2 ms query latency and indexing rates from 1,928 to 11,210 files per second in its listed benchmarks.