How to use squirrelscan beside Crawlwise

You might already live in squirrelscan. That is a good sign. It means you care enough about the site to use a serious tool. This guide is here so you can keep that tool and still know, calmly, where Crawlwise fits beside it. A single-binary command-line auditor, MIT licensed, with an agent skill for Claude Code and Cursor, a local MCP server and a credit-based cloud. It covers SEO, performance, security, accessibility and what it calls agent experience.

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

• The CLI is free and open source, and it crawls locally with no account. Our free tier audits a single page; a site crawl needs a paid plan.
• It runs far more rules: the site lists 297+ across 21 categories, against our roughly seventy checks.
• Its cloud can render pages in a headless browser for JavaScript-heavy sites and SPAs. We read the HTML the server returns, so a client-rendered page looks thin to us.
• It checks llms.txt and LLM parsability as part of its agent-experience rules. We deliberately retired our llms.txt check, so if that file matters to you, they look at it and we do not.
• It fingerprints 385 technologies and writes seven output formats, including a self-contained HTML report.

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. squirrelscan 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.

• We fetch the page as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and 14 other AI crawlers and report whether each one actually got through, so a CDN or firewall block shows up even when robots.txt allows the crawler.
• We do not reduce a site to a health score or a letter grade. Every finding cites its check, and anything we could not measure is marked not measured rather than counted for or against you.
• Beyond the audit, the paid plans add rank tracking, backlinks, Search Console and GA4 data, local SEO and AI visibility tracking in the same account.
• The entry price is lower: Starter is $4.99 a month, against $19 a month for squirrelscan Pro cloud.

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 free local CLI against a hosted service with a credit balance. If you want an auditor inside your terminal and CI at no cost, theirs is the more natural fit.

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 squirrelscan 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

squirrelscan 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.