Crawlwise and open-seo: keep the one that fits the job

People ask whether they should leave open-seo for Crawlwise. The honest answer is usually no, and also not “stay forever and ignore the page in front of you.” An open-source DataForSEO interface you can self-host. An open-source tool that proxies DataForSEO across keywords, ranks, backlinks, local and AI answers, with a workflow-based crawler. This piece is the friendly version of that trade-off, written so you can choose with a clear head.

Give open-seo the credit it has earned

A comparison that only praises us is marketing, and you would feel it by the second paragraph. Here is where open-seo is the stronger product, in plain language:

• They crawl far more pages. Their crawler is a durable workflow holding a frontier of thousands of URLs; ours audits one page and probes a bounded set around it.
• They have a great deal more data features — keyword research, rank history, full backlink profiles, GSC and GA4 — where we buy only what a reader asks for.
• They are open source and you can self-host them for free. If your priority is not paying anyone, that is a real answer and ours is not.
• Their MCP server shipped around forty tools with packaged Claude Code skills. Ours is newer and smaller.
• They support teams, organisations and multiple auth modes. We are single-user.

If that list describes your actual week, stay. You will be happier, and you will do better work. We would rather you trust the next section because this one was fair.

Keep the tool that matches the job. open-seo has jobs it wins. Crawlwise has a different one, and it is a good one.

Adnan Arodiya, Crawlwise

Where a Crawlwise sitting feels different

Our job is narrower, and we like it that way. You paste a URL. We show the evidence. We say when a check could not run. And we fetch the page as the answer-engine crawlers, so you know whether they can read it.

• They cannot tell you whether GPTBot can reach your page, while selling AI visibility. They have no security checks at all, and structured data is a boolean flag in their schema.
• Their crawl discards the link graph when the workflow ends, so internal linking needs a re-crawl. We store the edges.
• Their model charges a fixed markup on vendor cost. That is their ceiling and their floor: they cannot discount, and a vendor price change lands on them directly.
• Their AI visibility is a vendor endpoint passthrough. The difference here is not the data — it is that our diagnosis says which of four reasons explains the silence, in order, and stops at "we cannot establish why" when none of them does.

That is the whole invitation. You can try the free tools with no account, then run a full audit when you want the checks together. A single page is about 1.25 credits, quoted before you click.

What we will not pretend

• A self-hosted open-source project against a hosted product with a bill. "Free if you run it" is a different offer, not a worse one.

Hold both products to that standard. If a page implies we replace their index, their desktop crawl, or their keyword history, it is wrong. Send people here instead.

A kind way to decide this week

Pick the URL a customer actually uses. Run the overlapping check in open-seo if you already have it open, and run the same URL through a Crawlwise tool or a full audit. Put the two results side by side. Keep every finding you can verify. Discard the rest. You will leave with a shorter list and a better mood, which is the point of a good afternoon.

Then fix one thing on staging and check it again. The second run is how you know the fix landed. Save the Crawlwise report if you want next month to remember what you did. History is a small kindness you can give your future self.

What a plan actually costs

The free tools stay free. You can open them, run them, and leave without an account. A plan is for the moment you want the report saved, a few sites watched, or the same checks from the API. The price on this table is the price at checkout. A yearly plan is ten months of the monthly price, so two months are on us.

A single-page audit is about 1.25 credits, and that includes the live probe of answer-engine crawlers. You see the estimate before anything runs. If a hold is not used, it comes back to your balance. Extra credits, when you already subscribe, are $9.99 for 20.

You can root for both

open-seo can stay in your toolkit. Crawlwise can sit beside it for the page-level questions, the crawler probe, and a price you can see. You do not have to pick a side to do good work. Open the URL, read the evidence, and ship the fix you can explain. That is a win, and you are close to it.