Naukri vs Instahyre vs Hirist vs Shine: Which Indian Job Board API for Sourcing

None of India’s job boards publish an official API. Every one of Naukri, Instahyre, Hirist, Shine, CutShort and Foundit expects a browser and a human clicking through search results. That has not stopped six very different scraping approaches from existing to cover them, and it has not stopped the six platforms from covering six genuinely different audiences. Picking the wrong one does not just mean fewer listings. It means missing the segment of the market you actually needed.

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This post compares Naukri, Instahyre, Hirist, Shine, CutShort and Foundit on access method, salary coverage, and what each one is actually for.

What Each Platform Is Actually For

Naukri is India’s largest job board by volume, with 100,000 or more live listings spanning every industry and seniority at any given time. It is the default answer when the question is “get me the widest possible read on Indian hiring,” not the answer when the question is narrower than that.

Instahyre is tech and startup focused. What sets it apart is not the listings themselves but the firmographics riding along with every one: founding year, headcount, and a company tagline on each row. It is built for sourcing against company profile, not against salary, because salary and the full job description sit behind Instahyre’s own account wall and are never returned by the public feed.

Hirist is an IT vertical board that pairs each listing with a live AmbitionBox rating and review count for the employer. Nowhere else in this comparison does compensation data arrive next to an independent employer-reputation score in the same record.

Shine is the Times Group’s general board, covering IT, BPO, banking, retail and manufacturing. It is closer to Naukri in breadth than to any of the vertical boards, and it is the only one of the six that reliably returns the full job description alongside structured salary.

CutShort skews hard toward Indian startup engineering and product roles. Its own listing data is intentionally denser and narrower than Naukri’s: where Naukri returns a mixed feed across every industry, CutShort returns tech roles specifically, which matters if the question is skill demand in engineering rather than hiring in general.

Foundit is Monster India after its 2022 rebrand, and functions as a second general-purpose board alongside Naukri and Shine, useful mainly as an independent volume source to cross-check against the other two.

Access Method and Coverage

Platform	Official API	How it’s accessed	Salary in response	Company firmographics
Naukri	No	Live search results	Yes, normalised to lakhs	Not returned
Instahyre	No	Public JSON search feed, no browser	Never (account-gated on Instahyre)	Founded year, headcount, tagline
Hirist	No	Public JSON API (gladiator.hirist.tech), no browser	Sometimes, hidden by many listings	Live AmbitionBox rating per employer
Shine	No	Public JSON endpoint (/api/v2/search/simple/), no browser	Sometimes, marked [Salary Hidden] when withheld	Not returned
CutShort	No	Live search results, HTTP-only	Yes, as a range	Not returned
Foundit	No	Plain HTTP, no proxy required	Sometimes, flagged with salary_confidential	Not returned

Three of the six (Instahyre, Hirist, Shine) read the same internal JSON endpoint their own site’s front end calls, so there is no HTML to parse and no browser in the request path. Naukri, CutShort and Foundit work from live search result pages instead. Both approaches return clean structured data by the time an actor delivers it; the difference is invisible to the output and only shows up in run cost and reliability, since a JSON endpoint has less to break than a rendered page.

Instahyre is the one real outlier on data completeness. Every other platform in this table returns salary at least some of the time, when the employer chooses to publish it. Instahyre never does, on any listing, because salary lives behind its own login wall and the public feed simply does not carry it. That is not a scraping limitation, it is a source limitation, and it is worth knowing before building a compensation pipeline around it rather than after.

Pricing

Actor	Rate	Notes
Naukri Jobs Scraper	$1.40 per 1,000 jobs	Broadest coverage, all industries
Instahyre Jobs Scraper	$2.00 per 1,000 jobs	Firmographics included, market-snapshot record is unbilled
Hirist Jobs Scraper	$5.00 per 1,000 jobs	Includes live AmbitionBox employer rating
Shine Jobs Scraper	$1.00 per 1,000 jobs	Cheapest of the six, full description returned
CutShort Jobs Scraper	$1.80 per 1,000 jobs	HTTP-only, no browser cost passed through
Foundit Jobs Scraper	$1.50 per 1,000 jobs	Monitor mode bills only genuinely new postings

All six are pay-per-result. None charge for empty searches, and none require an Indian job board account, login, or API key to run.

Which One to Use

Use Naukri when the goal is the widest possible read on Indian hiring across every industry, or when volume matters more than any single enrichment field. It is the closest thing to a market-wide baseline in this comparison.

Use Instahyre when company context matters more than compensation. Firmographics on every row make it useful for building a startup hiring tracker or a funding-stage sourcing list, but not for a salary benchmarking project, since salary is the one field it structurally cannot return.

Use Hirist when the target is IT roles specifically and compensation benchmarking is the point. It is the only source here that pairs salary with an independent employer rating in the same record, at a materially higher per-record price than the others.

Use Shine when a second general-volume source is useful as a cross-check against Naukri, or when the full job description matters and Naukri’s normalised fields aren’t enough on their own.

Use CutShort when the question is specifically about startup engineering and product hiring, where its narrower, tech-only feed is a denser signal than pulling the same roles out of Naukri’s much wider mix.

Use Foundit when a third general board adds coverage Naukri and Shine miss individually. Foundit’s monitor mode also makes it a reasonable choice for a scheduled daily-new-jobs feed without re-paying for postings already seen.

If the target audience is blue-collar or gig work instead of corporate or tech hiring, none of the six above are the right fit. India’s blue-collar hiring runs through a different platform entirely; see the Apna Jobs Scraper for tier-2 and tier-3 city coverage across 50 job categories.

Combining Sources

No single board has full coverage of Indian corporate hiring, and the six do not deduplicate against each other automatically since none share a common job ID. A workable pattern is to run Naukri as the volume baseline, layer Hirist or CutShort in for tech-specific roles where salary or skill-demand detail matters more, and use Instahyre purely as a company-enrichment pass joined on company name rather than as a primary listings source. Tagging each dataset with a shared company key before merging is enough to build a usable cross-platform view without needing exact-match deduplication between listings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which Indian job board has the most listings?

Naukri, by a wide margin. It covers every industry and seniority level and typically carries 100,000 or more live listings, against a fraction of that on any of the vertical or startup-focused boards.

Which of these include salary data?

Naukri, Hirist, Shine, CutShort and Foundit all return salary when the employer has chosen to publish it, though coverage varies. Instahyre is the one exception: it never returns salary on any listing, because that field sits behind Instahyre’s own account wall and isn’t present in the public feed at all.

Do any of these require a login or a proxy?

No. All six work from public pages or public JSON endpoints with no account, API key, or proxy required to access the underlying source.

What’s the real difference between Hirist and Naukri for IT roles?

Naukri covers IT roles as part of its full market feed across every industry. Hirist covers IT exclusively and adds a live AmbitionBox employer rating to every listing, which Naukri does not provide. Hirist costs more per record; Naukri costs less but returns a much wider, less IT-specific mix.

Is CutShort worth running alongside Naukri if I already track tech hiring?

Often yes. Naukri’s tech listings are mixed into a much larger general feed, where CutShort returns startup engineering and product roles specifically. Running both and joining on company name gives a denser read on tech hiring than either alone, at a combined cost still well under Hirist’s per-record rate.