crawlwise vs open-seo

What it is

An open-source tool that proxies DataForSEO across keywords, ranks, backlinks, local and AI answers, with a workflow-based crawler.

Where open-seo is better

This section is the reason to read the page. A comparison that only lists our wins is marketing, and you would know it was.

• 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.

Where we differ

• 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.

What cannot be compared

• 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.

Judge it yourself without paying either of us

Run the free ai crawler checker on your own site — no account, no credit, no email. Then audit one page, which the trial credit covers, and read the limits page to see what it will not tell you before you spend anything.