# Crawlwise vs open-seo

> Crawlwise vs open-seo: an honest comparison. Where open-seo is better, where Crawlwise differs, and what cannot be compared.

Canonical: https://crawlwise.site/vs/open-seo

Comparison · honest

Crawlwise vs open-seo: an honest SEO audit tool comparison. An open-source DataForSEO interface you can self-host.

**Price:** Crawlwise plans start at $14.99 a month, and the free tools need no account. [Compare plans](https://crawlwise.site/plans).

## 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.

- Their crawler is built for size: a durable workflow holding a frontier of thousands of URLs. Ours crawls only on a paid plan and stops at a fixed cap per crawl — 250, 2,500 or 10,000 pages from Starter to Agency — and the free tier audits a single page.
- 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](https://crawlwise.site/tools/ai-crawler-check) on your own site — no account, no credit, no email. Then [audit one page](https://crawlwise.site/), which the trial credit covers, and read the [limits page](https://crawlwise.site/limits) to see what it will not tell you before you spend anything.