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Anime Finders
Catalogues, seasonal charts and the reverse-image tool that identifies an episode from a single screenshot. Deeply well-built corner of the web.
14 sites
AniList's seasonal grid: everything airing this season in one scroll, sortable by popularity, score or start date.
- 2 min
Obsessively detailed database going down to individual episode credits and file hashes. Built for cataloguers, not for browsing.
- 10 min
- Desktop
Modern tracker with a genuinely good interface, per-episode progress and an open API a great many other tools build on.
- 10 min
Industry news since 1998, plus an encyclopedia with staff and voice credits that nothing else in the space matches.
- 10 min
Recommendation-led catalogue with if-you-liked-this chains going back to 2001, plus legal streaming links for each title.
- 10 min
Every opening and ending sequence in decent quality, searchable by series or by song. A dangerous tab to open at work.
- 10 min
- Sound on
Multilingual anime, manga and light novel database with unusually careful tagging and full regional release information.
- 10 min
Anime and manga tracker with a friendly interface and a public API, run as an open-source project rather than an ad business.
- 10 min
Seasonal chart of everything currently airing, with countdowns to the next episode and which service is carrying it.
- 2 min
The manga-side release tracker, covering scanlation status and licensing across tens of thousands of series since 2001.
- 10 min
- Desktop
The default anime and manga database and tracker since 2004, and the source of the scores everyone else ends up quoting.
- 1 hr+
Fast, minimal tracker that pings you the moment a followed episode airs. Open source and deliberately kept lightweight.
- 2 min
Archive of notable animation cuts, tagged by the individual animator who drew them. Studying the craft one sequence at a time.
- 1 hr+
- Desktop
Paste a single screenshot and it names the anime, the episode and the exact timestamp. Unreasonably accurate for something free.
- <1 min
How we picked these
Every entry in Detour is hand-sorted rather than scraped: filed under one category, given one to three moods, and placed in a time band for how quickly it pays off. The practical facts — cost, sign-up, sound, device and whether it is safe at a desk — are recorded per site and shown on every card, so you can rule things out before you click.
Anime Finders: questions
How many sites are in Anime Finders?
14 sites, each hand-sorted by category, mood and how long it takes to pay off.
Which of these sites are free with no sign-up?
14 of the 14 are free and need no account. None of them are paid.
Do these sites work on a phone, and are they safe for work?
11 of 14 work on a phone; the rest are desktop only. 14 are safe for work and 13 work with the sound off.