Screaming Frog SEO Spider vs Sitebulb

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

This is a diagnostic engine, not a checklist: no page cap beyond your own hardware via a disk-based storage engine, Chromium rendering, 300+ issues typed and prioritised by estimated impact, structured-data validation, canonical/indexation diagnosis, and crawl comparison with staging-vs-production URL mapping that makes regressions and their cause inferable. Log-file analysis and explicit crawl-budget analysis are the only absent pieces from the top anchor.

Sitebulb

This is the product's centre of gravity and it shows: 300+ hints checked and prioritised with built-in education, JavaScript rendering via headless Chrome, scheduled daily-to-monthly crawls at up to 500,000 URLs on desktop and ten million in the cloud, and Search Console integration that layers real Google performance data into the audit. Canonical diagnosis, robots directives checked across the head, HTTP header and robots.txt for conflicts, an Indexability report with granular indexing rules, and structured-data and hreflang reports push it past the middle of the scale, with audit comparisons and a 'Response vs Render' view edging toward genuinely diagnostic territory. We found no public information on crawl-budget analysis or on tying regressions between crawls to the deploy that caused them.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

No keyword research exists here at all — no volumes, intent, difficulty or SERP features anywhere in the evidence, which is below even a bare volume list. The only content-adjacent capability is exact/near-duplicate and low-content detection plus link-metric 'content audits', which catches cannibalisation at page level but never at keyword level; topic clusters and briefs simply do not exist.

Sitebulb

Everything keyword-shaped here is the customer's own Search Console data, sliced by device, brand versus non-brand and HTML template — genuinely useful for seeing which templates own which terms, with a clicks-and-CTR-by-position chart for the top 10 rankings — but it is analysis of what you already rank for, not research. We found no public information on keyword discovery, volumes, difficulty or intent classification, SERP feature data, German-language coverage, or any topic clustering, content briefs or cannibalisation detection.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

The Spider has no proprietary data to be accountable for: rank tracking is absent entirely, and the only link metrics are pulled from Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz APIs — somebody else's index. Nothing documented about their own collection methodology, because there isn't any.

Sitebulb

Rankings appear only as Search Console-derived views with desktop, mobile and tablet splits, and we found no public information on any proprietary rank tracking, backlink index, update frequency or data collection methodology. What the vendor does document about its own data is crawl-based index quality in real depth — indexable versus non-indexable categorisation, canonical diagnosis down to duplicate declarations and canonicals pointing at noindexed URLs, and every robots.txt-affected URL with the triggering rule.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Decent out-path: spreadsheet export, scheduled crawls with auto-export to Google Sheets or any location, Looker Studio crawl reports, and GA/Search Console/PageSpeed integrations, plus command-line automation. But there is no documented outbound API of the vendor's own with stated limits — the advertised 'API integrations' are the tool calling other people's APIs — so it sits between the scheduled-export and real-API anchors.

Sitebulb

The reporting chain is strong for agencies: customised PDF reports, a live Data Studio connector that refreshes dashboards on every crawl, client dashboards viewable without a Sitebulb login, multi-client portfolio templates with deltas since the previous audit, and automated S3 exports. What holds it back is the programmatic side — the MCP that pulls crawl data into Claude and ChatGPT is evidenced, but we found no public information on a documented API with stated limits or per-endpoint costs, and the S3 export sits behind a contact-sales add-on on certain Cloud plans.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Crawls are saved and reopened locally, bulk-exportable to spreadsheet, and auto-exported on a schedule, with zero credit metering anywhere. The archive physically lives on the customer's disk, so it survives cancellation in practice — but saving crawls is a paid feature, post-lapse behaviour is undocumented, and there is no API sufficient to mirror data continuously.

Sitebulb

Exit is unusually well served here: bulk export of the full historical audit data across all 271 metrics as CSV and XLSX, exports auto-saved to a folder or shared drive on every scheduled crawl, S3 exports that go beyond the one-million-row standard limit, and a share file containing the entire audit that any other Sitebulb user can import, plus project transfer between machines. The gaps are that the S3 route is a priced add-on gated to certain Cloud plans, and we found no public information on a retention period after cancellation or on API access sufficient to mirror the archive continuously.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

The contracting entity is English (company 07277243, English governing law), account and licence data are stored in the UK and US with an acknowledged transfer outside the EEA, and no subprocessor list is published — only an assurance that DPAs 'have been requested'. The desktop model keeps the actual crawl data on the customer's own machine, which limits real exposure, but on entity, hosting and subprocessors this is anchor-0 territory.

Sitebulb

The contracting entity is published and transparent — Sitebulb Limited of Biddenden, Kent, company number 12125600 — but the United Kingdom sits outside the EU, and the tool's integrations run through Google Search Console and Google Analytics. We found no public information on where account or crawl data is hosted, on any subprocessor list, or on safeguards for that Google chain, which lands this near the bottom of the scale with only the published legal identity as a saving grace.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

The annual invoice is nearly computable from public pages: £199 per licence per year, explicitly per-user, with published volume tiers (189/179/169), a one-year term, unlimited crawl URLs and free technical support. VAT treatment is unstated and renewal pricing is implied rather than spelled out, which is the only thing keeping it off the top anchor.

Sitebulb

The desktop plans are close to fully computable: Lite at $18 /month for one user and 10,000 URLs per audit, Pro at 500,000 URLs per audit, an additional user at $11 per month, a stated 15% yearly discount and published payment terms including purchase order on yearly plans. Cloud pricing starts at £95/month and reaches 'in excess of £20k/year' for big teams, with the tiers between those points not itemised on the public pages, and the S3 export feature priced only via sales contact; we found no public information on VAT treatment or overage rates.