Website auditing tools are an essential weapon in any SEO professional's arsenal. Whether you're evaluating the performance of your own website or a client's, you want a crawler that produces the results you need and fits in well with your style of working. How do you make that decision?
OnCrawl is a popular technical SEO tool with impressive website auditing capabilities that can provide its users with in-depth reports and analysis. However, it’s not the only tool available in the market - far from it. There are several OnCrawl alternatives that can offer similar benefits - and a fair few that have totally unique features, the likes of which might make them the better choice for you.
First up, let’s see how Sitebulb Cloud compares…
Sitebulb is an independent company in every sense of the word. Free from investor pressure and not owned by an enormous enterprise operation, we can focus on products and customer happiness. Praised for usability and value for money, Sitebulb likes to strike the perfect balance between personal support and professional services, for all types of websites. Marketplace vendor Capterra gives Sitebulb a rating of 4.9 out of 5.
Founded in 2013, OnCrawl is a technical SEO platform that came to be as a result of its founders seeking to aid French e-commerce businesses in their technical SEO endeavours. Used worldwide, OnCrawl was acquired by enterprise platform Brightedge in 2022, and with this acquisition has come an unfortunate lack of transparency regarding their pricing. Capterra's rating of OnCrawl is 3.8 out of 5.
| Feature | Sitebulb | OnCrawl |
|---|---|---|
| On-page SEO analysis | ||
| Internal link analysis | ||
| Google Analytics Integration | ||
| Looker Studio Connector | ||
| Site Visualizations/Crawl Maps | ||
| Performance auditing | ||
| Mobile-friendly checks | ||
| No project limits | ||
| JavaScript crawling inc. for free |
Sitebulb Cloud is half the price of OnCrawl, starting at £195 a month. This price point even includes the desktop application as part of the package, so you get a hybrid solution - a cloud crawler and a desktop crawler.
OnCrawl operates on a "crawl credits" system, whereas Sitebulb Cloud pricing is based on a number of URLs – but you could crawl your chosen number of URLs at the start of the month, delete the data when it is no longer needed, and then crawl the same amount again. This wouldn’t be an option when using OnCrawl.
The main area in which Sitebulb Cloud stands out when held up against competitors is its lack of project limits. Being able to audit multiple client websites without having to pay extra to crawl them is invaluable, especially for freelance and agency SEOs.
Unfortunately for OnCrawl, the majority of its poor reviews mention that its customer service can be lacklustre. While they are contactable by both chatbot and email, judging by customer reviews these avenues can be unreliable. Sitebulb's customer service team, on the other hand, is described as "highly responsive and helpful" in its G2 reviews.
Formerly known as Deepcrawl, Lumar is the self-described “lightbulb moment” you’ve been waiting for. Lumar’s website intelligence platform helps you to identify and fix both structural and technical website issues you may be facing, focusing on which changes will help you to make the most impact to your site.
While some reviews claim it can be difficult to use their different products in tandem with each other, overall Lumar is hailed as a great data analysis tool, and a company that is quick to respond to any issues its users report. GetApp describes Lumar’s users as mainly large enterprises and mid-size businesses.
Find out more about Lumar as an alternative here.
Botify has an impressive list of partners, including Groupon and The New York Times, and as such is often described as an enterprise-level SEO tool. Botify aims to increase your website ROI and streamline workflows. Highly configurable, the amount of information Botify can process and provide you with makes it an excellent choice for large e-commerce sites. However, the high number of filters with which you can comb through this data can also take some time to get to grips with.
Botify has three levels of pricing; Essential, Pro, and Enterprise, and while there are no specific costs listed on their website, reviews do say that Botify is at the expensive end of the scale of website auditing tools. Find out more about Botify as an alternative here.
Next on the list is JetOctopus. Reviews praise this tool’s speed, even by cloud-based crawler standards. It has the ability to “crawl 200 pages per second and complete a 50,000 page website in just 5 minutes”. As of November 2022, JetOctopus can now integrate data from Google Analytics, a missing feature that was previously holding it back when it came to website auditing tool comparisons. This responsiveness might explain why reviewers prefer the “direction” of JetOctopus to OnCrawl when looking at feature updates and roadmaps.
Find out more about JetOctopus as an alternative here.
With plenty of 5-star reviews on Capterra, Screaming Frog has a lot of fans. A UK-based SEO agency, their SEO Spider Tool is straightforward and easy to use, and the dashboard presents its technical SEO suggestions all in one place. It’s a great crawler that can be used alongside tools such as GA and Semrush for a more powerful audit, though some reviewers feel that the need to use multiple tools to get the complete list of features they need makes it less appealing.
The key difference is that Screaming Frog is desktop only, with no cloud capabilities. This means it may not be a user’s first choice for crawling bigger websites or working collaboratively, as the crawl data lives on your desktop machine. There are also comments from reviewers about the interface being a little dated.
Audisto is a cloud-based crawler operating out of Germany, and caters to technically-focused SEOs. It has some useful features, such as its ability to group URLs into filtered clusters, which is a great time-saver and makes information easily decipherable when working in a large team.
Audisto Crawler has a scalable pricing plan starting from €99 a month depending on how many URLs you need to crawl, however to access benefits such as screen sharing and online training in how to get the most from the product, you need their Audisto Monitoring package, which is significantly more expensive. There also aren’t a lot of reviews of Audisto to be found online compared to its competitors, so opting for this tool may be more of a leap of faith.
Semrush is one of the most well-known names in the industry. While Semrush’s Site Audit tool is regarded as both robust and effective, it does have its limitations - especially as Semrush itself is not dedicated to website auditing, and their audit tool is only a smaller facet of the whole product.
The most obvious of these limitations is its restrictions on projects, and crawling both per month and per project. For example, if you wanted to crawl more than 100,000 pages a month, you would need to purchase the second tier of their pricing options. JavaScript rendering is also only available at the second tier pricing plan or higher.
For site auditing, Ahref’s packages are quite restrictive, operating on a monthly crawl credits system, and with easily frustrating limits on pages per project. You are able to get free access to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and Site Audit as a website owner, but their previous week-long free trial period has been discontinued. Pricing packages are clearly listed on their website, but Ahref’s relative expensiveness is the main dislike in the majority of its reviews. OnCrawl pricing may be difficult to obtain, but is not as universally identified as its weak point.
Where Ahrefs particularly shines is link-building, scoring 9.5 out of 10 in this area through this G2 comparison. One Gartner review describes it as the “best tool for analysing backlink data and internal links”.
Listed on Capterra’s list of Emerging Favourites (despite being founded nearly two decades ago) for Competitive Intelligence Software for 2023, Moz Pro has had skin in the SEO game for a long time. An end-to-end SEO solution, years of experience are evident in Moz Pro’s strong list of features. It also has the option of Moz Local for businesses with a fixed location and local marketing needs - something that many other SEO tools are lacking.
The auditing element to Moz is comparatively small, and while packages aren’t as limiting as some of the others on the list (you can crawl 400,000 pages per month on the lowest tier), it’s still not great.
Yearly-paid subscriptions are discounted which is always a nice feature, and there are different free trials and demos available depending on which product plan you would like to try.
SE Ranking is another all-in-one SEO solution, able to help with keyword suggestion and research, backlink monitoring, and group analysis, to name but a few features. It’s competitively easy to use, no matter your experience level, as the website audits are impressively actionable.
SE Ranking prices are explained clearly, with different plans described by which kind of users are most likely to make use of them. They are also able to provide custom product plans, and offer a free trial. SE Ranking is considered very good value for money, though recent price increases have rubbed some customers up the wrong way.
A free trial can make all the difference in finding out which website audit tool works best for you. Get a 14-day free trial of Sitebulb today to see if it’s right for you.
Alternatively, if you’d like to book a call to talk about Sitebulb Cloud, email [email protected].
Get advice from 20 of the world’s most well-respected SEOs, including Aleyda Solis and Barry Adams, on how to choose between all available cloud crawlers.
SEO Crawler Selection Guide