Best-of list · by use case
A crawler walks your site like a search engine and lists what's broken: redirects, duplicate titles, missing canonicals, orphan pages, slow templates. Which one you need depends mostly on your site's size and who reads the audit.
Grouped by use case, not ranked. Prices are from each vendor's own site, at the time of writing (September 2026). We don't sell a crawler; none of these is ours.
Grouped by use case; order within a group is not a ranking. Prices at the time of writing (September 2026).
| Tool | Use case | Best for | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Free and low-cost desktop audits | Anyone doing their own audits; small sites can stay on the free version. | Free up to 500 URLs; £199 / $279 per user per year |
| Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (Ahrefs Free) | Free and low-cost desktop audits | A free cloud audit without installing anything. | Free for verified sites |
| Sitebulb | Guided audits and client reports | Consultants and learners who want each issue explained, with a 14-day Pro trial and no card. | Desktop Lite $18/mo, Pro $42/mo; Cloud from $125/mo |
| JetOctopus | Cloud crawling with log analysis | Mid-size and large sites that want crawl and log data together. | From $349/mo billed annually (500K URLs, 2M log lines a month) |
| Screaming Frog Log File Analyser | Cloud crawling with log analysis | Log analysis on a budget, alongside the SEO Spider. | Free up to 1,000 log lines; £99 per year |
| Lumar | Enterprise crawling and monitoring | Large sites that need SEO checks before every release. | Quote only |
| Conductor Monitoring | Enterprise crawling and monitoring | Teams that need to know the moment something changes on a large site. | Quote only (usage-based) |
Run on your own computer. Great value; size is limited by your machine.
Free up to 500 URLs; £199 / $279 per user per year
The standard desktop crawler for Windows, macOS and Linux, with custom extraction, JavaScript rendering, scheduling and Search Console, Analytics and PageSpeed integrations on the paid licence.
Free for verified sites
Cloud site audit with 170+ checks and 5,000 crawl credits a month per project, plus backlink and keyword data for your own sites.
When the audit needs explaining, prioritising and presenting.
Desktop Lite $18/mo, Pro $42/mo; Cloud from $125/mo
Crawler that turns findings into prioritised Hints with explanations, crawl maps and customisable PDF reports (Pro). MCP access on all plans.
For sites too large for a laptop, or when you want crawls, logs and Search Console joined up.
From $349/mo billed annually (500K URLs, 2M log lines a month)
Cloud crawler with log analysis, Search Console and GA4 data, JavaScript rendering, and bot tracking for Googlebot, GPTBot and 40+ others. Unlimited projects and seats.
Free up to 1,000 log lines; £99 per year
Desktop log analyser that verifies search and AI bots, shows crawl frequency, errors and orphan URLs, and imports crawl data to compare.
Quote-only platforms for large sites and SEO teams.
Quote only
Cloud platform (formerly Deepcrawl) with analysis, monitoring, CI/CD QA and WCAG 2.2 accessibility reporting; claims up to 450 URLs a second non-rendered.
Quote only (usage-based)
24/7 website monitoring from the ContentKing acquisition, with real-time alerts and up to 60 months of change history, inside Conductor's SEO platform.
Screaming Frog's free version, for sites up to 500 URLs. For a cloud option, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools audits verified sites free within its monthly crawl credits.
Desktop is cheaper and flexible, but limited by your machine. Cloud crawlers handle very large sites, schedule crawls and share data with a team, for a higher price.
You or a developer. If nobody has time, our Done-for-you service includes technical SEO fixes by hand.
Checked on their own sites on 23 September 2026. Prices and terms change, so check before you buy. Domain ratings are approximate third-party estimates.