Sitebulb alternatives, and how Sitebulb compares to Screaming Frog

Sitebulb is good software. The reasons people look for an alternative are usually specific: there is no free tier, the desktop plans are priced by crawl size and a site has outgrown Lite, or the output is written for a person to read when it needs to feed a pipeline.

Prices below were read from each vendor's own site on 10 September 2026.

The alternatives

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

The closest competitor and the most common swap. A desktop application with builds for Windows, macOS on Apple Silicon and Intel, and Linux, checking over 300 SEO issues with an integrated Chromium renderer for Angular, React and Vue sites. Custom extraction pulls any field out of the HTML with XPath, CSS selectors or regex. Crawl comparison diffs two runs. External link metrics arrive from Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz alongside the Google Analytics, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights APIs. Newer versions run custom AI prompts against pages mid-crawl using OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama or Anthropic.

The free version caps a crawl at 500 URLs. A licence costs £199 per user per year, dropping to £189 at five licences, £179 at ten and £169 at twenty or more. Licences are per user.

It suits someone who wants to interrogate a crawl in depth.

SiteOne Crawler

SiteOne Crawler is the option for a crawler you can script. MIT-licensed and free, it ships as a CLI with around 200 options plus a desktop GUI, and installs via Homebrew, apt, dnf, zypper or apk as well as manual setup on Windows, macOS and Linux. Its scope runs past crawling into offline site cloning, sitemap generation, HTML to Markdown conversion aimed at LLM input, SSL and security analysis, WCAG accessibility auditing, performance and stress testing, scheduled email reports, and CI/CD integration with quality gates.

Developers and QA teams get more out of it than a reporting workflow does.

LibreCrawl

LibreCrawl is the other free, open-source option: MIT-licensed, self-hosted, and presenting as a web interface you run on your own infrastructure. It covers meta tag analysis, schema validation, JavaScript rendering for React, Vue and Angular, broken links, duplicate content, hreflang and Core Web Vitals, exporting to CSV, JSON and XML. It is a young project, so treat it as promising rather than proven.

The case for it is a hard requirement that crawl data stays on your own machines.

JetOctopus

A cloud platform built around log file analysis rather than treating it as an add-on. Crawling, logs, Search Console and GA4 sit in one place, aimed at sites large enough for server logs to be the interesting data. In-house Pro is $689 a month, or $549 a month billed annually, covering 500,000 to 1 million crawled URLs a month and 5 million log lines. Ultra is $1,369 a month, $1,089 annually. Agency pricing starts lower at $509 a month. The trial runs 7 days with full module access, up to 10,000 URLs, and no card required.

Reach for it once your crawl questions have turned into log questions.

Lumar

Formerly Deepcrawl, at the enterprise end of the category. Four apps rather than one tool: Analyze for crawling with 250+ reports, Monitor for multi-domain dashboards and alerts, Protect for pipeline QA with 350+ automated tests that can stop a build below your health threshold, and Impact for reporting value to stakeholders. Accessibility is first class, aligned to WCAG 2.2 across levels A to AAA, and the platform publishes GEO and AEO metrics for AI search visibility. Pricing is a contact form with no published tiers.

The buyer here is an organization with a procurement process.

squirrelscan

Ours, so weigh it accordingly. squirrel is a command-line binary that crawls a site and scores it against 260+ audit rules spanning SEO, performance, security, accessibility, content and agent experience, with output written for a coding agent to read. Local audits are free on every plan. Pro is $19 a month and includes 3,000 cloud credits, which pay for browser rendering and the cloud-backed rules. Publishing a report costs nothing.

It fits when CI or an agent is the thing acting on the findings.

Everything compared

Sitebulb's desktop prices are for one user: Lite is $18 a month with 10,000 URLs per audit, Pro is $42 a month with 500,000 URLs per audit and $11 a month for each extra user. Sitebulb Cloud starts at $125 a month for two or more users. The pricing page shows prices in your local currency, so the numbers you see may differ; these are the US dollar figures on 2026-09-10.

Sitebulb vs Screaming Frog

Sitebulb puts its effort into explanation. It calls its checks Hints, 300+ of them, automatically checked and prioritised, and it works to convey why a finding matters rather than only that it exists. The reporting follows the same priority: customised PDF reports built for clients and stakeholders, plus spreadsheet exports and integrations with Google Analytics, Search Console, Google Sheets and Data Studio. JavaScript crawling carries no extra cost. Desktop Lite allows 10,000 URLs per audit; Pro allows 500,000 and adds advanced configuration, scheduled audits and PDF reports. Sitebulb also ships an MCP server that connects Claude or ChatGPT to your audit data. Their own FAQ describes it as read-only: it reads finished audits and does not start crawls.

Screaming Frog goes deeper on interrogation. Custom extraction with XPath, CSS selectors and regex retrieves any field off any page. Crawl comparison diffs two runs. The link-metric integrations bring third-party authority data into the same table. Someone who already knows what they are hunting gets there faster.

That difference in priority decides the fit. A deliverable someone else reads points at Sitebulb. An answer you dig out yourself points at Screaming Frog. The pricing follows the same split: Screaming Frog charges one flat per-user licence, while Sitebulb tiers on crawl size, which holds until a site crosses 10,000 URLs and Lite stops being an option.

Where a CLI belongs

Three of the tools above already produce machine-consumed output. SiteOne Crawler exits non-zero on a failed quality gate, Lumar Protect blocks a build, and squirrelscan does both. None of them removes the step that comes after the report.

The slow part of a technical audit is rarely the crawl. It is the translation: someone reads a finding, works out which template produces it, opens the code and edits it. A coding agent can take that step, given findings in a form it can consume and a way to re-run the check afterwards.

curl -fsSL https://install.squirrelscan.com | bash
squirrel audit https://example.com --format llm

Being a binary rather than an application has two consequences. It runs in CI as itself, and --fail-on 'score<90' exits non-zero when a threshold trips, so a build step reads the outcome directly. It also runs inside the agent: with the squirrelscan skill or MCP server installed, Claude Code, Cursor or Codex can audit the site, read the findings, edit the templates and audit again in one session.

Sitebulb's MCP is the closest equivalent in this list, and it is a genuine step. The difference is what the agent can start. Sitebulb describes theirs as read-only, so it reads a finished audit. An agent that can also start the next audit verifies its own fix instead of asserting it.

Staying on Sitebulb, or not

A deliverable that a client reads is a reason to stay. Nothing else in this list presents a finding as well, and the prioritised Hints save real time when the person receiving the explanation does not want the technical version.

The case for adding something else is a recurring question about whether a deploy broke anything. That work runs unattended and repeats often, which is a poor match for a per-seat desktop application whatever its checks cover. SiteOne Crawler, Lumar Protect and squirrelscan all handle it. Pick on how the output is meant to be consumed.

The Screaming Frog alternatives roundup covers the desktop field in more depth, and Screaming Frog vs Deepcrawl covers the enterprise end. For the agent loop, fixing audit issues with an AI agent walks through it on a real site.