Privacy Ratings in your terminal

Search every rating from the command line, with the same grades, picks, criteria and evidence as this site. Interactive search, plain output for scripts, JSON when you need it. Free and open source.

This is a live preview. Type to search the real ratings, use the arrow keys, and press Enter for a full rating.

Install

The macOS, Linux and Windows installers download a standalone binary from the latest GitHub release, check its SHA-256 checksum and install it. Node.js is not needed. The npm package needs Node.js 20 or newer, and npx privacyratings runs it without installing.

Use

privacyratings                          # interactive search
privacyratings "gmail alternatives"     # start with a query
privacyratings search vpn --picks       # print matching ratings
privacyratings show "Proton Mail"       # every criterion, with notes and evidence
privacyratings open bitwarden           # open a rating in your browser
privacyratings picks password-managers  # our picks in one category
privacyratings categories               # every category and its id
privacyratings search email --json      # JSON for scripts

Automatic updates

Once a day, a background process checks for a new release, so the command you ran is never slowed down. The standalone binary downloads the new version, checks its checksum and replaces itself. An npm install runs npm install -g privacyratings@latest. Run privacyratings update to update right away, or set PRIVACYRATINGS_NO_UPDATE=1 to turn updates off.

Privacy

No analytics and no telemetry. The tool only downloads ratings from this site's public API, cached for an hour so it also works offline, and checks the GitHub API for a new release once a day.

Source code on GitHub npm package