Screaming Frog vs Sitebulb
Both are seo tools. Here is what separates them.
| Screaming Frog | Sitebulb | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | SEO | SEO |
| Pricing model | freemium | paid |
| Price from | Freemium | Paid |
| Upvotes | 11 | 17 |
| What it does | A desktop crawler that finds what a site audit tool politely omits. | Technical audits that explain why each issue matters, not just that it exists. |
What Screaming Frog is
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler that fetches a site's URLs and reports technical SEO problems. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and checks for more than 300 distinct SEO issues. The crawler can render JavaScript, so client rendered pages are crawled as a browser would see them. Custom extraction pulls arbitrary data out of pages using XPath, CSS Path or regular expressions, spelling and grammar checking covers more than 25 languages, and crawls can be scheduled to run automatically. The crawler also connects to Google Analytics, Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights to pull their data in alongside the crawl data. Because the crawl runs on your own machine, that machine sets the ceiling. The application starts in database storage mode with 2GB of RAM allocated, which is generally sufficient for crawls under 200,000 URLs. Memory storage mode keeps the crawl in RAM instead and typically handles 10,000 to 100,000 URLs at the same 2GB default allocation. Crawling more than a million URLs is recommended on an SSD with 16GB of RAM or more, and the stated minimum is a 64 bit operating system with at least 4GB of RAM available. The free version stops each crawl at 500 URLs. A paid licence makes the crawl limit unlimited, bounded only by the machine's memory and disk, and costs 199 pounds per year. Licences are per user, so two people need two separate licences, and each licence runs for one year and must be renewed to continue working. Buying in volume lowers the rate to 189 pounds each for 5 to 9 licences, 179 pounds for 10 to 19 and 169 pounds for 20 or more. Prices can be displayed in pounds, US dollars or euros. The Log File Analyser is a separate product that ingests server logs, verifies search engine bots and reports which URLs those bots requested. It reads Apache logs, the W3C Extended Log File Format and the Amazon Elastic Load Balancing custom log format. The free version is limited to 1,000 log events and one project at a time, and a licence is listed at $139 per year.
What Sitebulb is
Sitebulb is a technical SEO auditing tool that crawls a website and explains what it found. It is built for consultants, agencies and in-house SEO teams who have to hand somebody a report they can act on. There are two versions. Sitebulb Desktop runs on your own machine and crawls up to 500,000 URLs per audit. Sitebulb Cloud runs the same audits without a machine to keep awake, handles up to 10 million URLs, and lets a team work on the same crawl data at once. Neither imposes project limits or crawl credits, so the cost is a fixed monthly figure rather than a meter. That is the difference the product leads with against the older cloud crawlers. An audit covers more than 300 issue types, starting with the ones that break indexing: broken links and redirects, overlapping or inconsistent robots directives, orphan pages missing from XML sitemaps, duplicate content, and hreflang. It renders JavaScript the way Googlebot does, so a site that assembles its content in the browser is audited as a search engine would see it rather than as raw HTML, and JavaScript crawling is in every plan rather than sold as an upgrade. Structured data is validated automatically, Core Web Vitals are collected, and the crawl also reports accessibility violations and security issues. The reporting is where it separates from a crawler that simply lists problems. Issues arrive prioritised, each with an explanation of why it matters, which is what makes the output usable by somebody who is not a technical SEO. Reports export to Google Sheets so the data stays shareable and current, and monitoring dashboards can be built across several projects in Google Data Studio. It connects to Google Search Console and GA4, pulling real traffic and engagement figures such as bounce rate and conversions into the audit. A technical issue can then be weighed against the pages that actually earn visits, rather than treated as equally urgent everywhere. Content extraction is customisable for anything the standard checks do not cover, and there is a dedicated report for auditing JavaScript. Sitebulb is paid, with a 14-day free trial. The Desktop version suits an individual consultant; Cloud suits teams, and anyone auditing sites large enough that a laptop is the bottleneck.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.