Crawlwise and Sitebulb: keep the one that fits the job

People ask whether they should leave Sitebulb for Crawlwise. The honest answer is usually no, and also not “stay forever and ignore the page in front of you.” A desktop crawler built around prioritised hints and visual reports. A crawler you install on Windows or Mac, sold as Lite (10,000 URLs per audit) and Pro (500,000 by default), with a browser-based Sitebulb Cloud for very large sites and teams. This piece is the friendly version of that trade-off, written so you can choose with a clear head.

Give Sitebulb 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 Sitebulb is the stronger product, in plain language:

• It crawls far more pages. Pro audits 500,000 URLs by default and can be raised to two million; our largest plan caps a site crawl at 10,000 pages.
• It crawls with JavaScript rendering at no extra cost. Our checks read the HTML the server returns, so a client-rendered page looks thin to us and fine to it.
• Its hints — over 300 on Pro — come with crawl maps, customised PDF reports and Google Analytics, Search Console and Sheets integrations. It is a deeper audit than ours.
• It already has an MCP connection for Claude and other AI tools on every plan, and Pro runs scheduled audits.
• A desktop licence has no per-audit cost. Re-crawling a big site every week costs nothing extra; on Crawlwise every crawled page spends credits.

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. Sitebulb 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.

• Nothing to install and no machine to leave running. Desktop crawl size depends on your computer; ours runs from a URL in the browser, an API call or an MCP tool.
• We fetch the page as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended and report whether each one actually got through, not only what robots.txt says.
• The free tools need no account and no trial. Their trial is 14 days; ours has no end date because the tools are simply free.
• The entry price is lower. Starter is $4.99 a month; Sitebulb Lite is $18 (£12.50) a month for one user, and Pro is $42 (£30).

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 desktop crawler priced per seat against a hosted audit priced per credit. If you crawl hundreds of thousands of URLs, their model is cheaper and ours is the wrong tool.

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 Sitebulb 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

Sitebulb 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.