Geizhals – Tech Product Price Comparison and Tracking

https://geizhals.eu

by schleck8 • 5 years ago

296 105 5 years ago

geizhals.eu

rurban• 5 years ago

Proudly made with perl

corty• 5 years ago

From their job offers page for a sysadmin/devops position:

Angaben gemäß GlBG: Das KV-Mindestgrundgehalt für diese Position beträgt € 3,501 brutto monatlich (IT-Kollektivvertrag 2021, ST1 Erfahrungsstufe, Vollzeit = 38,5h), es besteht die Bereitschaft zur Überzahlung.

Seems they are even more stingy than their customers...

hrnn• 5 years ago

Seems based in Austria (surprised to see it here, I thought it was local only).

Minimum salary as per collective agreement must be displayed on the job listing, but for skilled workers it's a mere reference. I asked 40% more than what was advertised for my current job and got it.

invalidusernam3• 5 years ago

Also doesn't Austria do do that thing where employees get paid 14 times a year instead of the normal 12?

nxpnsv• 5 years ago

Yup, you certainly can argue for more…

c0l02• 5 years ago

I used to work there as Senior Sysadmin for several years. My pay was competitive with most offerings the Austrian IT market can be brought to bear.

boshomi• 5 years ago

"Mad Wuzzler Skills" required? (Wuzzler means table soccer in Austria.)

4ad• 5 years ago

That being said, competitive for Austria is low even compared to western Europe, and of course unfathomably lower than the US.

ginko• 5 years ago

It's an Austrian law thing. They have to list a salary so essentially all job offers show the legal Kollektivvertrag minimum salary which is obviously way too little. They then add "es besteht die Bereitschaft zur Überzahlung" saying they're willing to pay more than that.

So essentially just ignore the salaries in Austrian job offers.

cehrlich• 5 years ago

Just out of curiosity, how do typical ‘real’ dev salaries in Austria compare to KV values? What is a reasonable expectation for Junior, Senior, etc.?

the_mitsuhiko2• 5 years ago

Minimum salaries have to be quoted by law in Austria. Actual salaries are not disclosed. We're also only quoting the legal minimum we have to.

schleck88• 5 years ago

This and Idealo are what I use to track prices for products I don't need urgently, like harddrives, to get notified when the overall market price drops or a sale goes live

what i find really interesting is the 'search subscription' where you can filter products to your liking and then track the search as a whole. i only discovered that today so we'll see how it goes. the filters worked well for sure

moepstar3• 5 years ago

It works pretty well from my experience, however the following caveats apply:

- maximum reminder period is 6 months

- if your price target is not met, no reminder

- no, not even if your reminder period is up - no reminder to prolong

- i'd say about 30-50% of the time, if you happen to read the mail hours later, the price is already up again

Aside from potentially getting good deals it also saves one from impulse buys and sometimes i even got a surprise reminder i completely forgot setting..

mqus2• 5 years ago

I always go there not only when I need a cheap vendor, but especially when I don't know exactly what exists on the market because they have such a superior index and filter for finding the product you search for.

Especially Amazon is exceptionally bad, Even if I sort by price it isn't guaranteed they really show them in order and even if they do, the filters/search terms are often so broad that sorting from cheap to expensive just shows 100 pages of crap first.

Idealo is somewhat fine in terms of capabilities but I think the geizhals UI is far superior.

sdze• 5 years ago

Plus GH does not nag you about being a robot and please solve captchas like crazy when I am behind corporate VPN...

ganomi• 5 years ago

I usually do that as well. But sometimes the properties of a product are not maintained correctly and you might miss out on certain manufacturers completely. Last time this happened to me was when looking for a new TV. Sony was completely filtered out although some of their TVs had all the features i was looking for.

TLDR: The (wrong) filter settings might make you blind for the whole range of the market.

brnt2• 5 years ago

I use a local equivalent (Tweakers Pricewatch). I've been using this since what feels like the late 90ies, and like you, I never quite saw the appeal of Amazon. I've been buying online since the 90ies, and that experience is still the same. Amazon, or any other 'marketplace', has not improved on that. Their selection is of course wider, but it's just unpleasant and a huge time sink every time. But even that a local competitor (bol.com) does better.

smartbit• 5 years ago

GH is a different realm than tweakers.net, the number of many product attributes GH tracks and allow you to filter for is 10 fold of Tweakers.

smusamashah• 5 years ago

Any vendors who start selling Chinese stuff, is part of deal to not allow excluding items from search results?

Amazon do not have any options to excludes items that ship from China. https://daraz.pk, largest online shopping store in Pakistan bought by AliBaba recently, has done the same. There is only one checkbox named China to show only Chinese items but there is absolutely no way to exclude items shipping from China.

nsajko• 5 years ago

Doubtful, as Aliexpress does allow something like that (last time I checked).

Abishek_Muthian• 5 years ago

Especially Amazon is exceptionally bad, Even if I sort by price it isn't guaranteed they really show them in order and even if they do, the filters/search terms are often so broad that sorting from cheap to expensive just shows 100 pages of crap first.

Because Amazon shows what 'it wants to sell to us' (even 'Recommended' varies with users) and not what 'we need'. They have enough data to guess what we need, but they use it to sell what they want with enough gimmicks(What others bought, Fake ratings/reviews etc.) to make the average person think that's what they need.

marban2• 5 years ago

Why is this HN-worthy? It's been around since the late 90s and not only for tech stuff but down to a box of cereal bars.

Tenoke2• 5 years ago

I use them for tech parts but hadn't even occured to me to check for things like that there. Ironically your comment asking how this is HN-worthy is what's making this submission useful for me.

MandieD• 5 years ago

Despite living in Germany these past 15+ years, I was barely aware of them…

lamnk• 5 years ago

Could be. As far as i can tell they do not market themselves, word of mouth only work so far within their (German?) tech savvy audience. I was a student in Germany since 2003 and use Geizhals extensively for purchasing stuff, especially computer related stuff. Other price comparison engines like Idealo, Kelkoo etc. suck in compare to Geizhals.

lazyjones7• 5 years ago

Geizhals had a rough stance in Germany. Despite being very early on the market, it used the .at TLD (and later geizhals.cc and geizhals.net) because it was impossible to acquire the .de domain. It was later bought by a competitor who turned his deals website into a price comparison (geizkragen.de), which caused much confusion among german users. Eventually, Geizhals bought the domain (along with the .com, which it had gone to WIPO over and lost - https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/html/2005/d200... ), for a (AFAIK) record-setting 7-figure price for a .de domain. Said competitor went on to build bitcoin.de and was very successful with it.

getlawgdon• 5 years ago

How is it not HN worthy? A review of the comments indicates some love and appreciation for a company apparently doing many things right. The implication brings contrast to Amazon and others. It's a case study. I think it's exactly what belongs here.

Borrible• 5 years ago

I guess, because of 50 Karmapoints and 25 comments in about two hours.

It seems to please the interest of the HN crowd, which is conform to HN guidelines.

The interesting question for me is, why does it please it...

C19is20• 5 years ago

New to me, and interesting from a ui, dnt angle. I wish id known about it years ago....

Fnoord• 5 years ago

A very good (and proven/old) price comparison tracker from before Web 2.0. I find it a bit cumbersome to figure shops who deliver to my country (NL) but if you're in German-speaking Europe this is AFAIK (still) the go-to. In The Netherlands, we got Tweakers Pricewatch.

formerly_proven• 5 years ago

Geizhals is basically the opposite of modern advertising: Provides a very useful service to the customer but only costs the advertising party something for successful conversions. And it basically does not need any tracking beyond the outbound links associating a transaction with them.

k__• 5 years ago

I use their service since 2003, I think.

Usually they list the best offers, and if not it's at least a good starting point.

oezi2• 5 years ago

Lifehack: If you visit a store from Geizhals you get a better price in many cases than if you browse the store directly.

moepstar3• 5 years ago

Can you share an example where that is the case?

From what i figured in the past, they want you to believe that is the case as they earn their affiliate commission from you clicking through - however, years of ordering hardware especially avoiding to click and going the "extra mile" of going manually to the respective website and searching for the product there yielded exactly the same price as advertised on Geizhals.

caeruleus2• 5 years ago

One shop that I noticed was doing this is csv-direct.de. First visit a product page, e. g.:

https://www.csv-direct.de/artinfo.php?artnr=AGX1428619&KATEG... (758,93€)

then look at the geizhals price:

https://geizhals.de/ubiquiti-unifiswitch-enterprise-24-rackm... (748,09€)

After you have visited the page from geizhals, the lower price will stay even on direct links, for that product only (until you clear local data/cookies).

adrian_b• 5 years ago

I have experienced this a large number of times, that when coming from geizhals or from a few other price comparison sites I got a better price, some times even close to 10%, on various online shops for computer components.

For example a shop where I have seen this almost always was jacob.de.

However, I have not bought many computer parts during the last year, so I do not know if this still happens today.

A couple of years ago, it was certainly very frequent.

oezi2• 5 years ago

I realized with Bueromarkt Boettcher, because with them the price delta for some office supplies like printer toner is quite huge.

https://www.bueromarkt-ag.de/

purerandomness• 5 years ago

It's a common tactic for affiliate price comparison/aggregation sites, like pharmacy aggregators, also do that.

arendtio• 5 years ago

I like their index, as it helps me to find alternative products, but aside from tech products is isn't as complete as I would like to have it.

Do you know of any similar pages, maybe for the US or other countries?

schleck88• 5 years ago

idealo is similar (available in italy, france and spain additionally to DACH), someone mentioned kakaku for japan

TicklishTiger• 5 years ago

There is Product Chart [1], a site by a HN user.

But I think it has the focus more on the user interface than on a broad product index.

[1] https://www.productchart.com

bjornsing• 5 years ago

Prisjakt[1] is the Scandinavian version I guess.

1. https://prisjakt.nu https://prisjakt.no https://pricespy.co.uk etc

esel2k• 5 years ago

For Switzerland I go to http://www.toppreise.ch

Edited: Url to be clickable

h0nd• 5 years ago

Lovin' it

ysleepy2• 5 years ago

My main shopping site. Proof that UX and "pretty" aren't always the same, this page has the best experience by a mile.

You know there is a lot of optimization in the background for all the faceting and search, I'd be really interested how they implemented that.

A lot of the value also comes from meticulously integrating shop product datasets either by scraping or cooperating, combining offers etc.

Disruptive by putting in the hard work and keeping at it.

softgrow• 5 years ago

Looks pretty much like a clone of https://kakaku.com (Japanese language). Doesn't seem to have the nice price history graphs or the multi factor ratings. Compare 2.5" SSD https://kakaku.com/pc/ssd/itemlist.aspx?pdf_Spec102=2&lid=20... vs https://geizhals.eu/?cat=hdssd&xf=4832_1~4836_2

ysleepy2• 5 years ago

Geizhals is at it since 1997 and tables with a product image at the left is hardly something distinguishing.

schleck88• 5 years ago

1. It does have a pricy history, including markers for events like black friday, the first and last price as well as the median

2. You can sort the geizhals results by user ratings and it also displays review scores on the desktop version/mobile details page

3. Kakaku was established a year after Geizhals, according to their wiki entries and domain registry

eulenteufel• 5 years ago

The website respects DNT and informs the user with a small popup that disappears automatically. What a joy! The web could be such a nice place if it was like this everywhere.

solarkraft• 5 years ago

It’s pretty amazing. I think they could be much more popular with a little advertising and a bit of restyling.

fklp120• 5 years ago

Restyling does not improve the site in most cases. This UI is functional and works. Also, it gets way less on my nerves than the uniform flat style glitzy nonsense.

chess24.com is another example. A traditional UI that appears quirky in the beginning but is superior once you get used to it.

Many restylings replace something individual and special with bland uniformity. Just Like TV makeover shows.

mlang232• 5 years ago

Hehe, this sites exists since, well, a loooong time. I typically use it as a directory, to know whats available in a certain category. But I really wonder how this site made it onto the frontpage. This is a bit like posting "amazon.com" :-)

marban2• 5 years ago

Got downflamed for stating this below so you have my + ;)

fxtentacle• 5 years ago

I guess it's popular because people outside of Germany didn't know there is a better product search than amazon.com. And if we honestly compare the two, Geizhals beats Amazon in almost every regard, from better filters to less tracking...

rbanffy• 5 years ago

Pretty much anything is better than Amazon's search.

mlang232• 5 years ago

Well, I am "outside of Germany" and I know the site since at least 15 years. May I remind you that europe consists of more countries then just Germany?

step21• 5 years ago

You can also use them via heise.de/preisvergleich and thus also supporting good tech journalism.

schleck88• 5 years ago

they are part of the heise group, so heise profits either way i reckon

66fm472tjy7• 5 years ago

One of their most impressive features is how many product attributes they track and allow you to filter for. E.g. for mainboards you can filter for support for all generations of Ryzen CPU + at least M.2 slots + BIOS flashback (allows you to do BIOS updates without a CPU or RAM) + at least one USB-C + built in IO shield + at least 12 VRM phases + WiFi 6 + in stock: https://geizhals.eu/?cat=mbam4&v=k&hloc=at&hloc=de&hloc=pl&h...

baybal2• 5 years ago

In Russia, there is Yandex Market, they have almost the same, if not better granularity, and they don't use any scraping to generate product data — all human filled

n1000• 5 years ago

My favourite feature is sorting by price per GB

GordonS• 5 years ago

This is something that drives me nuts about Amazon, who are a giant that has the resources to do it properly - but don't. Their filters are usually useless, filtering out matching production, and including products that don't even match from their title.

josefx• 5 years ago

Not sure if that is a problem with Amazons search or the product listings themselves. Last time I was looking for a motherboard on Amazon it seemed as if half couldn't decide whether they had an AMD or Intel CPU socket. The descriptions, technical details and serial numbers where all over the place. Apparently the process of putting up thousands of products on Amazon is fairly automated and there are exactly zero humans checking if the result makes any sense.

zmix• 5 years ago

And they're super responsive, should something be wrong and correct it ASAP!

onede• 5 years ago

my secret tip is schottenland.de respectively hardwareschotte.de they’re on the market for a long time as well, they do have many many filters. kind of an underdog with much expertise.

schleck88• 5 years ago

thanks for the tip, looks good

LargoLasskhyfv• 5 years ago

While that can be good for getting an overview of what's available on the market, it can also lead to frustration.

For instance searching for RAM, mainboard, etc., then going to the site of the product just to discover there is already a new,

(supposedly) better edition available, but nobody is stocking that, or willing to do so.

Depending on your view it gives a distorted view of what is available, compared to what could be available.

Imagine they'd get their list directly from the OEMs, and show how lagging the merchants are.

Like a visualization of the supply-chain, the capacity of the channel, and how lagging and incomplete the merchants are.

Like a diff-view between what is available at the source, how it moves into the channel(s), an when it is available for you (if at all!)

I guess it depends on what is being tested by the countless hardware review sites, and what's known to the people.

Whereas I, scroogy as usual, from time to time have to source several dozen to about a hundred low-end systems,

and prefer to get stuff from the "also runs" like

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitegroup_Computer_Systems […] https://www.ecs.com.tw/en

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biostar […] https://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilk_Elektronik […] https://www.goodram.com/en/

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcend_Information […] https://transcend-info.com/

to run some form of Linux or BSD on it, for light office or remote desktop use.

Ghastly BIOS? Doesn't matter, is only used once during initial setup, and then after updates, if necessary.

No gaming Bling-Bling? Matters even less, since it has no useful function and is disabled, if it's there at all.

Bad VRMs or cooling of these? Does it matter when I don't overclock?

I'm doing this since about 15 years this way, and had no stress with this choices, at all.

All I did was checking the installation manual pdf of the mainboard for fan connectors, and choose them accordingly.

I'm too old-fashioned, I guess?

Anyway, enough of a rant.

Geizhals is the best we have, but it could be much better!

And thumbs-up for no-frills look&feel without dumbing it down!

HippoBaro• 5 years ago

I’ve been using this for years and it’s been extremely useful. The feature to plot the prices over time is great to gauge whether it’s a good time to buy something or if you’d rather wait.

forrestgumbc• 5 years ago

We're building something similar for ANY product at www.chestr.app

Our beta just opened so feel free to check it out :)

[We also just applied to YC W22 so fingers crossed!]

schleck88• 5 years ago

you definitely need a privacy policy for what the extension does

going to www.chestr.app doesn't work, only chestr.app does

mqus2• 5 years ago

similar? no.

At its base, geizhals is a database where much effort went into data quality. Chestr seems(to me) to be another social media site but focused on shopping.

Simple comparison (from the demo video): GH/Chestr Comparing prices:yes/no Filtering/sorting for a multitude of attributes:yes/no Social component:no(at most a rating/review)/yes Needs an account:no/yes Focusing on information over feelings:yes/no manually maintained entries:yes(at least I assume so, no one comes close)/no Getting a handle on everything that exists for a type of product:yes/no Inclusion of past prices:yes/no

To me, chestr is basically worthless. I don't care what others bought when I'm searching for something. What fits for them doesn't have to fit for me. I'm not starting from a specific shopping site but from the products itself, and then search for the perfect (price, reviews) shopping site.

For that matter, this seems like a great site for influencers and their audience. I very much doubt that the data quality required for building something like geizhals can be achieved in a "hack it together" startup context.

m3nu• 5 years ago

Is there something comparable for the US market? I sometimes drop ship hard drives to my colo partners, but didn't find good comparison sites.

schleck88• 5 years ago

someone said PCPartpicker

bildung• 5 years ago

A really wonderful site, great filters, great price tracking. The only thing I'd wish for would be the ability to exclude all those amazon.com shops from the results (everyone from amazons marketplace seems to be listed as a distinct shop there).

Tepix• 5 years ago

I agree, they are fantastic and i've used them for the last 16 years or so. Their product database is unmatched and many of my suggestions have been kindly accepted and implemented.

The only feature that's missing is a toggle that will show you all their products in the product database including those with no offers. Right now you will only find them when you search for their names but you can't list all 5k (5120x2880) monitors for example, only the very few models that are still being sold today.

kevindong• 5 years ago

Seems like a EU-centric version of PCPartPicker but with a much broader array of products that it tracks.

https://pcpartpicker.com

AegirLeet• 5 years ago

Love that site. The filters are amazing.

jh00ker• 5 years ago

https://www.camelcamelcamel.com works really well against Amazon products. There is also a 3rd-party tracking component, but it seems to mainly focus on Amazon prices.

deltron3030• 5 years ago

Build quite a few computers in the past based on their useful wishlist feature.

You can aggregate the parts you need and then find the best offers for all parts within a single shipment, or shipments from different sellers when something is unavailable or cheaper elsewhere.

Not sure about the UX though, it's nice to use if you more or less know what you want and need, to find the cheapest thing within a category or based on required specs and features.

franze• 5 years ago

Yeah, main office is in Vienna and they are the major Perl employers in this area. Perl, all the way down. Also the CTO was the first one who brought webperformance (meetups) into our community 10+ years ago.

tarr11• 5 years ago

Surprised to see rtx 3080s.

Where are people buying RTX 3080 graphics cards these days? All the prices I see (USA) are either 2500+ or out of stock.

Tenoke2• 5 years ago

For what is worth, when I got my 3070 earlier this year this gpu-specific site[0] was even more helpful than geizhals as they'd only list a couple at a time at okay prices and this seemed to update quicker.

Checking it now there are no 3080s actually avaible.

0. https://www.gputracker.eu/en

vmp• 5 years ago

I made a web-extension to add PassMark benchmark results to processors and mainboards with embedded CPUs to allow you to compare the best price per performance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sharkys-geizh...

It really helped me make some decent budget builds.

Tried to publish it to the chrome extension store as well but they removed it. Honestly just use Firefox, google is garbage.

longstation• 5 years ago

Does any one know if there's a North American equivalent?

lazyjones7• 5 years ago

pricewatch.com was the original inspiration for this website and pricegrabber.com was (apparently until some years ago) a close equivalent for many years.

Both have changed dramatically though.

hesk2• 5 years ago

How does geizhals compare to idealo?

lazyjones7• 5 years ago

Geizhals is much older, was mostly focused on IT/electronics for many years and is thus strongest in these categories. Idealo is broader (due to its much larger team/company) but sometimes lacking detail where Geizhals is good, and vice-versa. Geizhals also covers the Austrian market better while Idealo is stronger in Germany.

hesk2• 5 years ago

Thanks!

lazyjones7• 5 years ago

Funny that this is trending for the first time on HN after all these years.

FWIW, I was the original founder and developer. This started as a Perl script crawling 8 local merchants' price lists and writing a single HTML file (some time in 1997), then turned into a CGI script reading flat text files (i.e. no database), then into a mod_perl handler. No complete rewrites at least until 2014 when I left the company. Perl got really unwieldy at some point, would not recommend (and my code was universally hated I guess).

By the way, geizhals.at (the original domain) was in the top 2000 Alexa websites for a few years (somewhere around the years 2000-2004) AFAIR despite being from a very small country.

schleck88• 5 years ago

thanks for the insights!

jahnu• 5 years ago

I guess those first merchants included Academia and... I think one out Hietzing if I remember correctly.

Still one of the best sites on the internet. Kudos!

lazyjones7• 5 years ago

I don't remember all 8, but NRE, Krob, Plug, Birg, Actron, Academia were among them AFAIR. The earliest archive.org has proof for can be seen in the dropdown here: https://web.archive.org/web/19990508145612/http://www.geizha...

Aerroon• 5 years ago

I really like Geizhals. It provides a way better UX than Amazon for browsing computer hardware and other electronics.

My only gripe with it is how many stores only sell to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. I know that it's not geizhals' fault. Because of this, it's mostly an improved way to search Amazon for me.

It's a bit funny that if I were in a richer country, where people are paid more, the price of commuter hardware would be cheaper.

codethief• 5 years ago

Wow, I didn't know this site still existed! I seem to remember that ~15 years ago it regularly showed up in Google search results but it doesn't anymore. I'm wondering what happened – did they stop spending a ton of money on Adwords?

lazyjones7• 5 years ago

The .eu domain was never really pushed, it's been using NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW for many years to avoid duplicated content penalties from Google and double crawling. The .at/.de domains should still be very visible in Google, at least they were a few years ago when I checked regularly (I use Duckduckgo exclusively).

reirob• 5 years ago

Finally a website where i can filter for criteria I need, down to stuff like keyboard without number block, with Trackpoint (on the site it's called pointing stick). No other site i know does this, not even the vendors themselves.

butonic• 5 years ago

Please don't think they crawl the web. The shops listed on their page send them detailed catalogs in XML. It's a mess.

To my knowledge this is how it is done at geizhals, idealo and even google.

Geizhals – Tech Product Price Comparison and Tracking

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