SEO
Screaming Frog vs Sitebulb
Screaming Frog if you know what you're looking for and want raw data fast. Sitebulb if you want the crawl to come back as a prioritised report with hints you can hand to a developer.
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Screaming Frog SEO Spider or Sitebulb — which should you use?
Screaming Frog if you know what you're looking for and want raw data fast. Sitebulb if you want the crawl to come back as a prioritised report with hints you can hand to a developer. Screaming Frog SEO Spider starts at Annual licence, around £199 per year (free tier: Free version crawls up to 500 URLs per site.); Sitebulb starts at Desktop licence billed monthly or annually per user (free tier: 14-day trial rather than a permanent free tier.). Prices are list prices and change, so check the vendor pages before buying.
Last updated 3 August 2026
Both crawl your site the way a search engine would and flag what's broken. Neither is a rank tracker or a keyword tool — they're plumbing inspectors.
The split is philosophical. Screaming Frog gives you a spreadsheet with every field. Sitebulb gives you an opinion, with the underlying data one click away.
Side by side
Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Sitebulb in short.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Desktop crawler, the default tool in most technical SEO workflows.
- Free
- Free version crawls up to 500 URLs per site.
- Paid from
- Annual licence, around £199 per year
Good at
- The free 500-URL tier is enough to audit most small sites completely
- Connects to Search Console, Analytics and PageSpeed APIs to blend data into the crawl
- Custom extraction with XPath — you can scrape any element from any page
Weak at
- Output is a spreadsheet; you supply the judgement
- Runs on your machine, so big crawls need memory
Sitebulb
Crawler that turns findings into prioritised, explained audit reports. Desktop and cloud versions.
- Free
- 14-day trial rather than a permanent free tier.
- Paid from
- Desktop licence billed monthly or annually per user
Good at
- Every issue comes with a plain-English explanation and a priority score
- Visual crawl maps and internal-link diagrams that make sense to non-specialists
- Cloud version for scheduled crawls without leaving a laptop on
Weak at
- No permanent free tier
- Smaller community, so fewer tutorials when you get stuck
The differences
Where they actually diverge.
| Feature | Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Sitebulb |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes, 500 URLs | Trial only |
| Output style | Raw data tables | Prioritised report with hints |
| Custom scraping | Yes, XPath and regex | Yes, more limited |
| Scheduled cloud crawls | Available via the licence and scheduling | Yes, in the cloud product |
| Best for | Practitioners | Handing findings to someone else |
Pick one
Which one fits you.
Choose Screaming Frog SEO Spider if
- You audit sites regularly and know what a hreflang error looks like
- You want to scrape custom fields as well as crawl
- The 500-URL free tier covers your site
Choose Sitebulb if
- You need a report a developer or client will act on
- You'd rather be told what to fix first
- Visual link maps help you argue for structural changes
When neither is the answer
For a ten-page site, Search Console's Pages report plus a manual look at your sitemap covers it. Crawlers earn their money past a few hundred URLs.
Questions
Common questions.
Do these replace Search Console?
No. A crawler sees what your site serves; Search Console shows what Google actually indexed and how people found it. Use both — and connect Search Console into the crawl if your tool supports it.
Which handles JavaScript sites better?
Both render JavaScript. Rendering is slower and heavier in either tool, so budget more time and memory for a single-page app.
Prices are list prices published by each vendor and change often — check the linked pricing pages before you buy. We take no affiliate commission and nobody pays to appear here.
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