Screaming Frog vs Sitebulb is less a contest than a choice of working style. Both are desktop crawlers that request every URL they can reach and record what comes back. Pick Screaming Frog if you want raw tables and fine control over the crawl. Pick Sitebulb if you want an audit that ranks issues by importance and explains them in reports you can show a client.
The practical constraints, URL limits and the availability of a free option, settle the question for many people before working style even comes into it. So start there.
Screaming Frog vs Sitebulb at a glance
The pricing page on Sitebulb’s website lists two desktop plans and a cloud product. Screaming Frog sells a single licence on top of a free version. The figures below are as listed at the time of writing (October 2026); both vendors change them, so check before you buy.
| Screaming Frog | Sitebulb | |
|---|---|---|
| Permanent free version | Yes, up to 500 URLs per crawl | No |
| Trial | Not needed: the free version is the trial | 14 day free trial with Pro features, no credit card |
| Entry paid tier | Licence at £199 per year, removes the 500 URL limit | Lite: 10,000 URLs per audit |
| Higher tier | One licence level | Pro: 500,000 URLs per audit, can increase to 2 million |
| Extra users | Not compared here | Additional Pro users at £7 per month each |
| Cloud option | Desktop tool for Windows, macOS and Linux | Cloud plans from 2+ users, unlimited crawling |
Sitebulb’s page does not show Lite or Pro prices in plain text, so we have not quoted them here. Cloud plan prices are not listed on the page either.
Is Sitebulb free?
No. Sitebulb has no permanent free version. What it offers is a “14 day free trial”, with “No credit card and no up-front commitment”, and the trial runs with Pro features rather than a cut-down set. Two weeks is enough to audit a few sites properly and decide whether the reports suit you.
Screaming Frog takes the opposite approach. Its free version never expires but stops at 500 URLs per crawl and locks features such as JavaScript rendering, saved crawls and API connections. We cover exactly what that tier can do in our guide to the free version of Screaming Frog.
The upshot: if you need an ongoing free crawler for a small site, Screaming Frog is the only one of the two that gives you one. If you have a large site to audit this month and no budget yet, Sitebulb’s trial lets you crawl far more than 500 URLs for two weeks.
How they present an audit
This is where the tools genuinely differ, and it is a matter of general positioning rather than anything either vendor would put in a single quote.
Screaming Frog is built around data. Each crawl produces tabs of URLs with columns of attributes: status codes, titles, canonicals, directives, response times. You filter, sort and export. The tool assumes you know what you are looking for, and it rewards that knowledge with almost unlimited configuration. If you want to crawl with a particular user agent, exclude a set of parameters or extract one element from every page, it is designed to let you.
Sitebulb is built around hints. After a crawl it groups findings into prioritised issues, explains why each one matters and shows charts of how problems are distributed across the site. You still get the underlying URL lists, but the default view tells you what to fix first. For someone newer to technical audits, or someone who has to explain findings to a client, that saves real time.
Neither approach is better in the abstract. An experienced technical SEO often finds prioritised hints get in the way; a consultant presenting to a marketing team often finds raw tabs need a day of translation. Our SEO audit checklist works with either, because the checks are the same even if the presentation is not.
Scale, teams and the cloud
On scale, the limits are clear enough. Sitebulb Lite caps an audit at 10,000 URLs, which rules it out for large ecommerce or publishing sites. Pro raises that to 500,000 URLs per audit, with an option to go to 2 million. Screaming Frog’s paid licence removes its 500 URL limit, so the crawl size stops being a plan setting and becomes a question of how much you can sensibly process on one desktop.
Teams are where Sitebulb’s cloud product comes in. Cloud plans start at two or more users and offer unlimited crawling, which moves the crawl off a laptop and onto shared infrastructure. For an agency with several people auditing the same client sites, that is a different product category from a single desktop licence, not just a bigger plan.
Desktop Pro also allows extra users at £7 per month each, which suits a small team that wants shared access without a full cloud setup.
How to choose and how to start
A short decision rule covers most cases. If your sites are small and your budget is zero, use Screaming Frog’s free version. If you are comfortable with raw data and want one inexpensive licence, buy Screaming Frog. If you want a guided audit with prioritised issues and reports you can hand over, trial Sitebulb on a real project and see whether the hints match your own judgement.
When you start with Sitebulb, set up the first audit on a site you know well. You will spot quickly whether its priorities agree with yours, and that tells you more than any comparison table. Run the same site through Screaming Frog and compare the issue lists; differences usually come from crawl settings, not from one tool being wrong.
Use the 14 days deliberately. Plan three things before the trial starts: one site you know inside out, one site large enough to test the URL limits you would actually buy, and one report you would normally build by hand for a client or manager. If Sitebulb produces that report faster and you trust its priorities on the site you know, the trial has answered the question. If you find yourself exporting everything to a spreadsheet anyway, you are probably a Screaming Frog user.
Here is the limitation of any crawler comparison. Both tools only see what a link-following crawl can reach. Neither shows you what Googlebot actually requested, which pages it ignores, or how often it returns. For that you need server logs, and our guide to log file analysis for SEO explains how to combine a crawl with them.
Many experienced SEOs end up running both: Screaming Frog for quick checks and custom extraction, Sitebulb for full audits and client reporting. If that sounds expensive, start with whichever matches your current work and add the other only when you notice a gap. The broader technical SEO checklist is a useful test of whether your chosen tool covers the checks you run most often.
Frequently asked questions
Is Sitebulb free?
No. Sitebulb offers a 14 day free trial with Pro features and no credit card, but there is no permanent free version.
What is a free Sitebulb alternative?
Screaming Frog’s free version crawls up to 500 URLs per crawl at no cost, with some features restricted.
How many URLs can Sitebulb crawl?
At the time of writing, Lite allows 10,000 URLs per audit and Pro 500,000, which can be increased to 2 million. Cloud plans offer unlimited crawling.
Which is better for beginners?
Sitebulb’s prioritised hints are generally easier to act on at first. Screaming Frog rewards users who already know what they are checking.
The takeaway Screaming Frog gives you raw data, deep configuration and a free tier. Sitebulb gives you prioritised, explained audits and scales to teams through the cloud. Choose by how you work, then trial it on a site you know.
