Sitebulb
A technical crawler that explains the problem instead of handing you a spreadsheet
Sitebulb is a technical SEO crawler and site auditor, sold as a desktop application from about $18 per month and a hosted cloud version from around £95 per month, that crawls up to 500,000 URLs per audit on the desktop Pro plan, renders JavaScript, and reports findings as several hundred prioritised Hints, each explaining what the issue is, why it matters, and how to fix it.
Overview
Sitebulb was built in 2017 by Patrick Hathaway and Gareth Brown, the pair behind URL Profiler, and it exists because of a specific frustration with the tools that came before it. A crawler that returns two hundred thousand rows of raw data has technically done its job and practically done nothing, because the analyst still has to know which columns matter, which combinations indicate a real problem, and which problems are worth anyone's time. Sitebulb's answer is the Hint: a named finding with a severity, an explanation of why it matters, and instructions for fixing it, presented in priority order rather than as a data dump.
That design decision is the whole product. The desktop Lite plan ships more than a hundred Hints and Pro ships over three hundred, covering crawlability, indexability, redirects, internal linking, structured data, hreflang, page speed and Core Web Vitals, accessibility, security headers, JavaScript rendering differences, and content duplication. The visual reporting is unusually good for a technical tool: crawl maps, internal link graphs, and depth visualisations that make an information architecture problem obvious to a client who would never read a table.
Commercially it is the cheapest serious crawler in the category. Desktop Lite is about $18 per month for 10,000 URLs per audit, desktop Pro about $42 for 500,000 URLs per audit with a documented path to two million, and additional users cost from around £7 per month, which is roughly a tenth of what Ahrefs and Semrush charge per seat. Sitebulb Cloud, for teams that want scheduled crawls running on someone else's infrastructure with shared access, starts around £95 per month and scales into four-figure annual contracts for large teams. Every plan begins with a 14-day free trial of Pro-level features and no card required.
The company is bootstrapped, based in Kent, and roughly nine people. It has taken no venture funding, which shows up as a roadmap of steady technical releases rather than a scramble to bolt an AI layer onto everything. That is worth weighing in both directions: you get a focused, well-maintained tool from people who use it themselves, and you do not get keyword research, rank tracking, backlink data, or AI search visibility tracking, because Sitebulb has never tried to be a suite and says so plainly.
Best for
SEO consultants, agencies, and in-house specialists who audit sites regularly and want findings they can hand to a developer without rewriting them, plus anyone who needs a crawler powerful enough for a large site without a per-seat suite subscription attached.
Not the right fit for
- Anyone looking for an all-in-one SEO tool; Sitebulb has no keyword research, no rank tracking, no backlink index, and no content optimisation, and it will not become one.
- Small business owners with a fifty-page brochure site, who will get most of the same value from Seobility's free tier or Google Search Console without learning what a hreflang conflict is.
- Teams that need crawls running unattended on a schedule without a workstation involved, unless they are prepared to pay for Sitebulb Cloud at roughly five times the desktop price.
- Buyers who need AI search visibility tracking, which Sitebulb does not offer in any form and has not signalled any intention to build.
- Anyone on Linux, since the desktop application ships for Windows and macOS only and the cloud product is the only alternative.
How it works
- 1
You install the desktop application on Windows or macOS and point it at a domain. Sitebulb crawls the site using either the HTML crawler or a Chrome-based renderer if JavaScript matters, respecting or ignoring robots rules as configured, and stores the crawl locally on your own machine rather than on a vendor's servers.
- 2
When the crawl completes, Sitebulb produces an audit score and a prioritised list of Hints grouped by category. Each Hint states the issue, how many URLs it affects, why it matters to search engines, and what to do about it, with the affected URLs one click away. This is the difference between a crawler and an auditor, and it is why non-specialists can act on a Sitebulb report without an SEO sitting next to them.
- 3
The visual layer sits alongside the Hints. Crawl maps render the site's structure as a graph, internal link visualisations show where authority pools and where it does not reach, and depth charts expose pages buried too many clicks from the homepage. These are the reports that get pasted into client decks, because a picture of an orphaned section is more persuasive than a count of orphaned URLs.
- 4
Audits can be scheduled to repeat on Pro and on Cloud, and consecutive crawls can be compared directly, so you see what changed rather than re-reading the same report. Crawl data can be exported to CSV or Excel, connected to Google Analytics and Search Console to layer traffic and impression data onto crawl findings, and pushed to Looker Studio for reporting.
Feature breakdown
28 features in 5 modulesCrawling engine
The part that has to be right before anything else matters.- URL limits by plan
- Desktop Lite handles 10,000 URLs per audit and desktop Pro handles 500,000, with a documented path to raise Pro to two million URLs for genuinely large sites.
- JavaScript rendering
- A Chrome-based renderer crawls sites that build their content client-side, and can compare the rendered DOM against the raw HTML to show exactly what a non-rendering crawler would miss.
- Local crawl storage
- Desktop crawls are stored on your own machine rather than a vendor server, which matters for client confidentiality and means crawl history is not hostage to a subscription lapse.
- Configurable crawl rules
- Include and exclude patterns, robots handling, user agent selection, crawl speed limits, authentication for staging environments, and parameter handling, all set before the crawl rather than filtered after it.
- Sitemap and list mode crawling
- Crawl an XML sitemap, a supplied URL list, or the live site, and cross-reference the three to find pages in the sitemap that do not exist and pages that exist but are not in the sitemap.
- Scheduled recurring audits
- Pro and Cloud can repeat crawls automatically so regressions surface on their own instead of at the next manual audit.
Hints and prioritisation
The feature the product is named for in spirit, if not in fact.- Over 300 Hints on Pro
- Lite ships more than 100 prioritised Hints and Pro more than 300, each naming an issue, its severity, the number of affected URLs, why it matters, and how to fix it.
- Severity-ordered reporting
- Findings are ranked by likely impact rather than listed alphabetically, which is the difference between an audit someone acts on and an audit someone files.
- Audit score
- A single headline score per crawl, useful for showing a client or a board that the site got measurably better between March and June.
- Crawl comparison
- Compares consecutive audits directly, showing which issues were resolved, which are new, and which have quietly grown.
- Developer-ready explanations
- Each Hint's explanation is written to be forwarded to an engineer without translation, which removes a step that usually costs a consultant an hour per audit.
Technical coverage
What the Hints actually check.- Indexability and crawlability
- Robots directives, canonical conflicts, noindex handling, redirect chains and loops, and the interactions between them that produce pages nobody meant to hide.
- Core Web Vitals and page speed
- Performance data is layered onto the crawl, including field and lab measures, so slow pages are identified in the same report as the technical debt causing them.
- Structured data validation
- Parses and validates schema markup across the crawl, flagging invalid and incomplete implementations rather than only reporting whether markup exists.
- Hreflang auditing
- Checks return-tag reciprocity, language and region code validity, and conflicts with canonicals, which is the area most international sites get quietly wrong.
- Accessibility checks
- WCAG-oriented checks run alongside the SEO crawl, which increasingly matters commercially as accessibility obligations tighten in the UK and EU.
- Security and headers
- HTTPS implementation, mixed content, security headers, and certificate issues reported as part of the same audit.
- Duplicate and thin content detection
- Identifies near-duplicate pages and thin content across the crawl rather than only exact duplicates.
Visualisation and reporting
The part clients actually look at.- Crawl maps
- Renders the site as a navigable graph so structural problems, orphan clusters, and over-deep sections become visible rather than inferred from a table.
- Internal link analysis
- Shows where internal authority concentrates and which important pages are starved of internal links, with the link graph rendered visually.
- Crawl depth reporting
- Charts how many clicks each page sits from the homepage, which is the fastest way to explain an architecture problem to a non-specialist.
- Exportable reports
- CSV and Excel export of any report, plus PDF-style audit output suitable for client delivery.
- Looker Studio connector
- Crawl data can be pushed into Looker Studio for teams that report everything through one dashboard.
Data connections and team access
Where crawl data meets performance data.- Google Search Console integration
- Layers impressions, clicks, and position data onto crawled URLs, which is how you tell an important broken page from an unimportant one.
- Google Analytics integration
- Adds session and engagement data to the crawl so technical findings can be sorted by business impact.
- PageSpeed Insights integration
- Pulls performance data at scale rather than testing pages one at a time.
- Additional desktop users
- Extra seats on desktop Pro cost from around £7 per user per month, roughly a tenth of what the major suites charge per seat.
- Sitebulb Cloud shared access
- The cloud product runs crawls on hosted infrastructure with shared team access and scheduled audits, starting around £95 per month for a small team.
Use cases
4 documentedSEO consultant delivering a technical audit
A client is paying for a one-off audit and expects a document their developers can execute, not a spreadsheet with forty thousand rows and no interpretation.
Sitebulb's prioritised Hints become the audit's structure, each with an explanation the developer can act on directly, and the crawl maps carry the architecture argument in the presentation.
In-house SEO at a mid-sized ecommerce site
Two hundred thousand URLs, a faceted navigation that generates infinite variations, and a suspicion that most of the site is not being crawled properly.
Desktop Pro crawls the full site at 500,000 URLs, parameter and exclusion rules isolate the facet explosion, and crawl depth reporting shows exactly which category pages sit too deep to be reached.
Agency with four technical specialists
Four people need crawler access, and adding four seats to an Ahrefs or Semrush subscription would cost more than the entire technical toolchain.
Four desktop Pro licences at around $42 with additional users from about £7 come to a fraction of one enterprise suite seat, and every specialist keeps their own local crawl history.
Developer inheriting a legacy site
A React application was handed over with no documentation and nobody knows what search engines can actually see.
The JavaScript renderer crawls the rendered DOM and compares it against raw HTML, producing a concrete list of content that only exists after render, which is the answer the developer needed and could not get from a log file.
Pricing
from About $18 per month for desktop LiteSelf-serve subscription with two desktop tiers licensed per user and a separately priced hosted cloud product, billed monthly or annually.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Desktop Lite | About $18 per month, roughly $13.50 per month billed annually |
The 10,000-URL cap is the constraint. Fine for small sites and single-section audits, not for ecommerce. |
| Desktop Pro | About $42 per month, roughly $35 per month billed annually |
The plan almost every professional should be on. The jump from Lite is the largest capability increase in the range for about $24. |
| Sitebulb Cloud | From about £95 per month for a small team |
Roughly five times the desktop price. Worth it only when unattended scheduled crawling and shared access are genuine requirements. |
Add-ons
- Additional desktop user (From about £7 per user per month)
- Raised URL limit on desktop Pro (Available on request): Lifts the per-audit cap from 500,000 URLs toward 2 million for genuinely large properties.
Billing notes
- Annual billing takes roughly fifteen percent off desktop plans and is charged up front; monthly billing is available on every tier with no minimum term.
- The desktop licence is per user, but additional users cost from around £7 per month, which is about a tenth of the $40 to $80 per seat charged by Ahrefs and Semrush and cheaper even than SE Ranking's roughly fourteen euro.
- The meter here is URLs per audit rather than credits per month. Nothing is consumed by opening a report, and there is no monthly pool to exhaust; the only question is whether a single crawl fits inside the cap.
- Exceeding the URL cap does not incur an overage charge. The crawl simply stops at the limit, which is a safer failure mode than a surprise bill but means sizing matters up front.
- Sitebulb Cloud is priced separately and is not a discount on desktop. A team wanting both pays for both.
- Yearly plans accept purchase orders, which is unusual at this price and helpful for agencies invoicing through procurement.
- The 14-day trial is a genuine trial of Pro features with no card required, which is rare in this category where most vendors either offer no trial or gate it behind payment details.
Value assessment: Desktop Pro at about $42 per month is the best value in technical SEO by a wide margin. Five hundred thousand URLs per audit, JavaScript rendering, three hundred-plus explained Hints, scheduled crawls, audit comparison, and additional seats at around £7 is capability that costs several times more inside any all-in-one suite, and the suites' crawlers are worse. The obvious comparison is Screaming Frog, which is licensed annually and beloved by specialists but hands you data rather than conclusions; Sitebulb costs similar money and does the interpretation. The value case weakens only at Cloud, where roughly £95 buys convenience rather than capability, and for buyers who wanted a suite and are now shopping for three tools instead of one.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- The Hint model turns crawl data into prioritised, explained findings that a developer can action without an SEO translating them, which is the single most valuable thing a crawler can do.
- JavaScript rendering with an explicit comparison between rendered DOM and raw HTML, which answers the question modern sites actually have.
- Visual crawl maps and internal link graphs that make architecture problems obvious to non-specialists and consistently earn their place in client decks.
- Crawls are stored locally on desktop, so client data does not sit on a vendor's servers and crawl history survives a lapsed subscription.
- Seat pricing from about £7 per additional user, roughly a tenth of the major suites, which makes equipping a four-person technical team genuinely affordable.
- A real 14-day trial of Pro features with no credit card, in a category where evaluation is usually gated behind payment.
- Bootstrapped and profitable since 2017 with a roadmap of steady technical releases rather than feature bloat chasing whatever is fashionable.
Limitations
- Single-purpose by design: no keyword research, no rank tracking, no backlink index, no content optimisation, so it is always one of three or four tools rather than the tool.
- No AI search visibility tracking of any kind, in a year when that is one of the fastest-moving buying criteria in the category.
- Desktop crawls consume your own machine's memory and CPU, and a five hundred thousand URL crawl with rendering enabled will make a laptop unusable for hours.
- Windows and macOS only on desktop; there is no Linux build, so Linux users must buy Cloud.
- Sitebulb Cloud at roughly £95 and up is a large step from about $42, and what you get for it is infrastructure and sharing rather than better crawling.
- The Lite tier's 10,000-URL cap is low enough that most commercial sites will exceed it, which makes the real entry price about $42 rather than $18.
- The volume of Hints can overwhelm a first-time user, and while they are prioritised, an inexperienced operator can still spend a week on findings that do not matter.
Head-to-head comparisons
5 alternativesSitebulb vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider
from Free up to 500 URLs, then $279 per licence per yearThe defining comparison in technical SEO. Screaming Frog is faster, more configurable, and licensed annually, and it hands you raw data that a specialist can slice however they like. Sitebulb crawls the same site and tells you what is wrong and why in prioritised, explained terms, with far better visualisation. Experienced technical SEOs often run both; if you are choosing one, take Screaming Frog if you already know what you are looking for and Sitebulb if you have to explain the findings to somebody else.
Full Sitebulb vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider comparisonSitebulb vs Seobility
from Free, then €49.90 per monthSeobility is a much lighter on-page and technical checker with a genuinely useful free tier and Premium at €49.90, aimed at site owners rather than specialists. Sitebulb is a professional crawler with rendering, three hundred-plus Hints, and half a million URLs per audit. A small business that wants to know what is broken should start with Seobility free; a consultant auditing client sites needs Sitebulb and will find Seobility far too shallow.
Full Sitebulb vs Seobility comparisonSitebulb vs Ahrefs
from $29 per month (Starter), or $129 per month for LiteAhrefs Site Audit is a competent crawler bundled into an expensive suite and metered by crawl credits, from 100,000 pages a month on Lite. Sitebulb crawls 500,000 URLs per audit for about $42 with no credit meter and does far more technical checking. If you already pay for Ahrefs, its auditor covers the basics; if technical work is your actual job, Sitebulb is better at it for a fraction of the money and Ahrefs stays for the link and keyword data.
Full Sitebulb vs Ahrefs comparisonSitebulb vs SE Ranking
from 87.20 euros per month billed annually (Core), or 109 euros billed monthlySE Ranking is a full agency suite with a serviceable auditor, white-label reporting, and per-seat pricing around fourteen euro. Sitebulb does one thing far better and nothing else at all. The realistic small-agency stack is SE Ranking for research, tracking, and client reporting plus Sitebulb desktop Pro for the technical work, which together still cost less than one seat of a top-tier suite.
Full Sitebulb vs SE Ranking comparisonSitebulb vs SISTRIX
from 119 EUR per month (START)Sistrix is a visibility-index and market-analysis platform, strongest in German-speaking markets, that answers whether a domain is winning or losing over time. Sitebulb answers why a specific site is broken. They overlap barely at all: Sistrix tells you the patient has a fever and Sitebulb tells you which organ. Buy Sistrix for market intelligence and Sitebulb for diagnosis.
Full Sitebulb vs SISTRIX comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- Under half an hour on desktop. Download, install, point at a domain, start a crawl. Connecting Search Console and Analytics adds ten minutes and roughly doubles the usefulness of every report afterwards.
- Learning curve
- Moderate, and front-loaded. The interface is straightforward but the sheer number of Hints means a first-time user needs a couple of audits before they stop treating every finding as urgent. Anyone who has run a crawler before will be productive within an hour; anyone who has not will need the documentation, which is unusually good.
- Onboarding
- Fully self-serve on desktop with a 14-day Pro trial and no card. Sitebulb Cloud involves more setup and account configuration but is still bought without a sales process at the entry level. The vendor publishes a large library of technical guides that double as SEO education rather than product tutorials.
- Migration notes
- Nothing to migrate in; crawls are generated fresh against the live site. Coming from Screaming Frog, expect the same underlying findings presented very differently, and expect your existing saved configurations not to transfer. Crawl history on desktop lives on your machine, so moving workstations means moving the local project files deliberately.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Windows desktopmacOS desktopSitebulb Cloud web application
- API
- No public REST API on the desktop product. Data leaves through CSV and Excel export and a Looker Studio connector; Cloud offers additional programmatic access options for team workflows.
- Compliance
- GDPRUK data protection
- Data residency
- Desktop crawls are stored locally on the user's own machine and never sent to the vendor. Sitebulb Cloud runs on hosted infrastructure operated by the vendor.
- SSO
- Available within Sitebulb Cloud team arrangements; not applicable to the per-user desktop licence.
- Security notes
- The local-storage model on desktop is a meaningful advantage for consultants handling client sites under NDA, because crawl data of a client's staging environment never leaves the analyst's machine. Crawls of authenticated or staging environments are supported with credentials configured per project.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email supportIn-app support requestsDirect contact with the development team, which is small enough to reach
- Documentation
- An exceptionally deep documentation library, including technical SEO guides that stand on their own as education rather than as product manuals, plus a well-regarded blog and a regular technical newsletter.
- Community
- Active in the technical SEO community, frequent conference presence, and a user base of practitioners who are vocal about the product on professional networks.
Company
- Founded
- 2017
- Headquarters
- Biddenden, Kent, United Kingdom
- Ownership
- Privately held and bootstrapped; Sitebulb Limited, directed by its two founders
- Founders
- Patrick Hathaway, Gareth Brown
- Employees
- Approximately 9
- Funding
- No venture capital or outside investment. Sitebulb has been funded entirely from revenue since launch and reached roughly $990,000 in annual revenue with a nine-person team.
Timeline
- 2017Patrick Hathaway and Gareth Brown launch Sitebulb, applying lessons from their earlier tool URL Profiler to build a crawler that explains findings rather than exporting them.
- 2018The Hint system expands substantially and crawl map visualisation becomes the feature practitioners most often cite when recommending the tool.
- 2020JavaScript rendering via a Chrome-based crawler is added, along with the ability to compare the rendered DOM against raw HTML.
- 2022Core Web Vitals, accessibility checks, and expanded structured data validation broaden the audit beyond classic technical SEO.
- 2023Sitebulb Cloud launches, offering hosted scheduled crawling and shared team access for agencies that had outgrown desktop-only working.
- 2026Still bootstrapped and independent with a nine-person team, shipping desktop Pro at around $42 per month with 500,000 URLs per audit and additional seats from about £7.
Integrations
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
- Google PageSpeed Insights
- Looker Studio
- CSV and Excel export
- XML sitemap and URL list import
- Staging environment authentication
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat is Sitebulb?
Sitebulb is a technical SEO crawler and site auditor available as a desktop application for Windows and macOS and as a hosted cloud service. It crawls a website, renders JavaScript where needed, and reports findings as several hundred prioritised Hints, each explaining what the issue is, why it matters, and how to fix it, alongside visual crawl maps and internal link graphs.
How much does Sitebulb cost?
Desktop Lite is about $18 per month for 10,000 URLs per audit and desktop Pro is about $42 for 500,000 URLs per audit, with roughly fifteen percent off for annual billing. Additional desktop users cost from around £7 per month each. Sitebulb Cloud starts around £95 per month for a small team and scales into four-figure annual contracts. Every plan starts with a 14-day free trial of Pro features with no credit card.
How many URLs can Sitebulb crawl?
Desktop Lite crawls up to 10,000 URLs per audit and desktop Pro up to 500,000, with a documented path to raise Pro toward two million for genuinely large properties. The limit is per audit rather than a monthly pool, so nothing is consumed by opening reports. Exceeding the cap does not produce an overage charge; the crawl simply stops at the limit.
What is the difference between Sitebulb Desktop and Sitebulb Cloud?
Desktop runs the crawl on your own machine and stores the data locally, which is cheaper and keeps client data off vendor servers but ties up your computer during large crawls. Cloud runs crawls on hosted infrastructure with shared team access and scheduling, starting around £95 per month. Cloud buys convenience and collaboration rather than better crawling.
Does Sitebulb charge extra for additional users?
Yes, but barely. Additional desktop users cost from around £7 per month each, which is roughly a tenth of the $40 to $80 per seat that Ahrefs and Semrush charge and cheaper than SE Ranking's roughly fourteen euro. This is one of the few tools in the category where equipping a four-person team is not a budgeting problem.
Does Sitebulb do keyword research or rank tracking?
No. Sitebulb has no keyword database, no rank tracker, no backlink index, and no content optimisation features. It is a technical crawler and site auditor only. You will need something else for research and tracking, such as Serpstat, SE Ranking, or Nightwatch, and Sitebulb sits alongside them rather than replacing them.
Does Sitebulb track AI search visibility?
No, and there is no announced plan to. If tracking whether your brand appears in ChatGPT or Google AI Overviews is a buying criterion, you need a dedicated tool such as Otterly.AI or Peec AI, or a suite that bundles it such as Moz, Semrush from $199, or Serpstat from $100. Sitebulb has stayed deliberately within technical crawling.
How does Sitebulb compare to Screaming Frog?
Screaming Frog is faster and more configurable and gives you raw crawl data to interpret yourself. Sitebulb crawls the same site and delivers prioritised, explained findings plus much better visualisation. Experienced technical SEOs often own both. If you have to pick one, Screaming Frog suits someone who already knows what they are looking for, and Sitebulb suits anyone who has to hand the results to a client or a developer.
Can Sitebulb crawl JavaScript-heavy sites?
Yes. A Chrome-based renderer crawls client-side rendered content and can compare the rendered DOM against the raw HTML, showing precisely what a non-rendering crawler would miss. This is the standard way to audit a React, Vue, or Angular site and is included on both desktop tiers rather than gated to the expensive one.
Who owns Sitebulb?
Sitebulb Limited is privately held and bootstrapped, founded in 2017 by Patrick Hathaway and Gareth Brown, who previously built URL Profiler, and based in Biddenden, Kent. It has taken no outside investment and operates with a team of around nine people, which shows in a roadmap of steady technical releases rather than feature expansion into adjacent categories.
Editorial verdict
Sitebulb desktop Pro at about $42 per month is the best-value technical SEO purchase available, and the case for it is not close. Half a million URLs per audit, JavaScript rendering with rendered-versus-raw comparison, three hundred-plus explained Hints, scheduled crawls, audit comparison, local data storage, and extra seats at around £7 is a configuration that costs several times as much inside any suite whose crawler is also worse. The Hint model is the real product: it is the difference between an audit that gets filed and an audit that gets fixed. Buy it knowing exactly what it is not, because Sitebulb makes no attempt to be a suite. There is no keyword research, no rank tracking, no link index, and no AI visibility tracking, so budget for two or three tools rather than one. Skip Lite, whose 10,000-URL cap most real sites will breach, and treat Cloud as a convenience purchase rather than a capability one.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.