What is the difference between People by Sniff and Happenstance?

Both search your network in plain English. Happenstance connects email, calendar, contacts, LinkedIn, X and Instagram and lets you search friends’ networks through groups. People by Sniff focuses on LinkedIn and adds call prep from any profile, Who to tag for posts, team search and lead lists.

Is Happenstance cheaper than People by Sniff?

Yes. As of October 2026 Happenstance Pro is $24 a month billed yearly, and People by Sniff Pro is $99 a month or $990 a year. Both have a free plan.

Does Happenstance work with LinkedIn?

Yes. Happenstance’s LinkedIn page describes uploading your LinkedIn data export, after which your connections become searchable alongside its other sources.

Yes. They don’t conflict. Some people use a broad contact search for email and social relationships and People by Sniff for LinkedIn-specific work like call prep and who to tag.

People by Sniff vs. Happenstance: Which AI Network Search Fits You?

People by Sniff and Happenstance both turn your network into something you can search in plain English, with a warm path for each result. Happenstance pulls in more sources (email, calendar, X, Instagram) and costs less. People by Sniff stays focused on LinkedIn and adds workflows around it: call prep from any profile, who to tag in your posts, team search and lead lists.

I work on People by Sniff, so read this with that in mind. Every claim about Happenstance below links to its own public pages, checked on October 18, 2026. Prices and features change; check their site before you decide.

The short version

Choose Happenstance if your relationships live across Gmail, your calendar, X and LinkedIn, you want to search friends’ networks through shared groups, or you want an API, MCP server or iPhone app. Its Pro plan is $24 a month billed yearly.
Choose People by Sniff if LinkedIn is where your professional network lives and you want more than search on top of it: research on someone before a call, suggestions for who to tag in a post, alerts, and a lead list checked against your team’s networks. Pro is $99 a month, or $990 a year.

Both have a free plan, so the honest answer is to try both on your own network and see which results you’d actually act on.

Side by side

	People by Sniff	Happenstance
What you search	Your LinkedIn network, and your network’s network	Gmail, Google Contacts and Calendar, Outlook, LinkedIn, X and Instagram (source)
How LinkedIn gets in	Connect LinkedIn; connections are indexed with role, company, shared history and activity	Upload your LinkedIn data export, optionally with message headers (who and when, never content) (source)
Search style	Plain English, ranked, with a reason for every match	Plain English, ranked by how well you know each person, with the warm path (source)
Other people’s networks	Teammates on Pro, as one search that names who to ask	Friends and groups, free to share (source)
Research one person	Paste any LinkedIn profile, connected or not, for call prep from their posts and activity	Not described on its public pages
Posting help	Who to tag: paste a post, get the few people likely to engage	Not described on its public pages
Lead lists and contact info	Pro: upload a CSV and see who can get you to each lead; emails and phone numbers	Pro: export people from chat as CSV (source)
Where you use it	Web app	Web, iPhone, API, MCP, CLI, and inside ChatGPT and Claude (source)
Free plan	Yes, with a daily search allowance	Yes, with chat usage limits (source)
Paid plan	Pro $99/month or $990/year, team included	Pro $24/month billed yearly; Team $24/seat/month (source)

Where Happenstance is stronger

More of your relationships in one place. A lot of real relationships never show up as LinkedIn connections: the investor you email every quarter, the friend you only follow on X. Happenstance connects email, calendar, contacts and social accounts, so it can find those people too.

Searching friends’ networks. You can add friends or join groups and search their networks as well as yours, and sharing your network is always free.

Developer access and price. Happenstance offers an API, an MCP server and a CLI, and its paid plan costs a quarter of People by Sniff Pro.

Where People by Sniff is stronger

Work that starts on LinkedIn. Sniff is built around LinkedIn workflows rather than contact search alone. Paste a profile before a call and it reads their recent posts and activity, compares them with yours, and tells you what they care about and what to skip. That works for people you aren’t connected to.

Getting your posts seen. Who to tag reads a post you wrote and suggests the few people in your network most likely to engage with it, each with a reason. Sniff never writes the post. With organic reach down by about half, early engagement from the right people matters more.

Teams and lead lists. On Pro, teammates’ networks combine into one search, and every result names the teammate to ask. Upload a lead list and Sniff shows who can get you to each person, with emails and phone numbers for the people you want to reach.

Privacy

Both products say your network stays yours. Happenstance says your data is never used to train AI models and lists SOC 2 compliance; note that its public profiles show your named connections by default, which you can turn off. People by Sniff keeps your network graph visible only to you, and teammates see who can help with an ask, never each other’s contact lists.

Which should you pick?

If you want one search box over every place you know people from, start with Happenstance. If LinkedIn is your main professional network and you want help with intros, call prep and posting in the same place, start with People by Sniff. Many people will be happy with either; the free plans make it cheap to find out.

Sources

Happenstance: homepage, Happenstance for LinkedIn and pricing (checked Oct 18, 2026)
People by Sniff: pricing and use cases