Sitebulb vs OnCrawl for enterprise audits

Google’s crawl budget guide is written for sites with 1 million or more unique pages that change weekly, sites with 10,000 or more pages that change daily, and sites with a large share of URLs sitting at “Discovered - currently not indexed” in Search Console. It is on Google Search Central if you want the exact wording. That threshold decides most of this comparison. Below it, you need a good crawler. Above it, you also need to know what Googlebot is doing on your servers, and that is where these two tools split.

Sitebulb is a desktop crawler for Windows and Mac from a UK team, with a hosted version, Sitebulb Cloud, added later. It is cheap, it explains what it finds, and one person can run it. OnCrawl is a French cloud platform that crawls your site, ingests your server logs, and lines both up against Search Console and analytics data. It is built for teams and priced that way.

My verdicts, short version. Sitebulb wins for consultants, agencies and pre-launch checks. OnCrawl wins on very large sites, log file work, and anyone who wants crawl data flowing into their own reporting. On keyword databases, backlink indexes and rank tracking, neither tool has one. I say that plainly because the category label lumps them in with rank trackers and content optimizers, so those three axes below are mostly empty for both. One limit up front: most of what I audit is small static and content sites, not a retailer with several million URLs. Where I lean on vendor documentation instead of my own runs at scale, I say so.

TL;DR comparison table

Area	Sitebulb	OnCrawl
Pricing	Per-user licence. Lite and Pro tiers, last list prices I saw were around $13.50 and $35 a month on annual billing. Cloud is priced separately	Tiered by crawl volume and features, enterprise plans quoted by sales. I have no price I trust enough to print
Deployment	Desktop app for Windows and Mac, plus Sitebulb Cloud	Cloud only
Log file analysis	None that I know of	Core feature, cross-referenced with crawl data
Audit depth	A few hundred prioritised Hints with explanations, strong visuals	Deep segmentation and cross-source analysis, less hand-holding
Keyword database, backlink index, rank tracking	None. Imports Search Console and third-party link data	None. Imports Search Console and third-party link data
API	No public API I can point to	Documented API
Exports	CSV, Excel, PDF and white-label reports	CSV, API and reporting connectors
Team seats	Per-user licences	Shared accounts, seats and roles set by plan
Support	Email support, documentation and video training	Documentation and support, with onboarding on larger plans (confirm with sales)
Target user	Freelancers, agencies, small in-house teams	Large in-house SEO teams, publishers, marketplaces, big e-commerce

Prices and plan limits change, so check both vendor pages before you buy. The rest of our comparisons live on the blog.

Sitebulb at a glance

Sitebulb runs on your own machine. It renders JavaScript through its own copy of Chrome, stores the audit locally, and hands you a report when the crawl ends. Sitebulb Cloud moves the crawl to hosted servers so a big job does not tie up your laptop. I have not used the cloud version on anything large enough to have an opinion on its ceiling.

What Sitebulb does well is explain. It has a few hundred Hints, each one a check with a priority, a plain description of why it matters, and guidance on what to do next. Crawl maps and tree diagrams show site structure in a form you can screenshot into a slide. Its internal link metric, Link Score, gives a rough view of which pages collect internal equity. It connects to Google Analytics, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights, and can bring in link metrics from third-party providers using your own keys. The PDF reports are good enough that a client will open them, which is the bar that matters.

Where it strains:

a big desktop crawl is bound by your RAM and disk, not by the software
no server log analysis that I know of
no public API that I can point to
licences are per user, so a team of five means five licences
audits live on one machine unless you use Cloud

If you want the crawler-versus-crawler view, I compared the desktop tool with its closest rival in Screaming Frog vs Sitebulb for technical audits.

OnCrawl at a glance

OnCrawl is cloud only. You set up a project, run crawls on their servers, and connect other data: server logs, Search Console, analytics, backlink data from an external provider. All of it sits in one data set keyed by URL. Then you segment by page type (products, categories, blog, filtered URLs) and ask questions across sources. Which segment does Googlebot hit most? Which crawled pages get no organic traffic? Which pages did Googlebot fetch that your crawl never found through links?

That last one is the orphan page question, and it is the cleanest example of why logs matter. A crawler only finds what your internal links expose. Logs show what bots actually requested. Real analysis has to separate genuine Googlebot from scrapers pretending to be it, and Google documents how to verify Googlebot requests with reverse DNS lookups in its crawling docs. OnCrawl also has its own internal link metric, InRank, and an API, which I cover below.

Where it strains:

setup is front-loaded, because you connect logs and define segments or you get a flat view
the log side depends on getting files out of your CDN or hosting team, which in a big company is a project on its own
plans set URL and crawl quotas, so check them before you schedule weekly full crawls
pricing is not something I could put in a table with a straight face

Head-to-head

Keyword database size

Neither tool has one. Both crawl your site and pull query data from Search Console, which only covers queries your own property already gets impressions for. That helps an audit and does nothing for finding topics you do not rank for yet. Any keyword figure you see inside either product is impressions and clicks from Search Console, not search volume. For an actual keyword database you are shopping in a different aisle, and Semrush vs Moz for small teams covers two of the usual candidates.

Backlink index freshness

Neither runs its own index. Both import link data from third parties, so freshness is whatever your provider’s crawl gives you. As I understand it, Sitebulb can connect to sources such as Ahrefs, Majestic and Moz with your own API keys, and OnCrawl accepts backlink data from external sources too. Check the current connector list for your plan. If you are choosing the provider, Majestic vs Ahrefs for backlink data is the comparison to read. And before you trust any imported score, read what a backlink spam score means.

Rank tracker accuracy

Neither tracks rankings. Search Console’s average position is an average across queries, countries and devices, so it cannot tell you where you rank for one keyword in Singapore on mobile this morning. Don’t call it a rank tracker. Tracking at scale is its own project, and I wrote up the proxy side of it in how to track rankings at scale with proxies.

Site audit depth

This is the axis that matters, and the two tools go deep in different directions.

Sitebulb goes deep on findings. Its Hints cover crawlability, indexability, redirects, internal links, duplicate content, international setup and page speed through Google’s PageSpeed Insights, and each one is prioritised so you know what to fix first. OnCrawl goes deep on data. Its checks come with less hand-holding, but you can cut any metric by segment and set it beside log data. That lets you ask “is Googlebot spending its visits on the filtered URLs we meant to block?” That is a crawl budget question, and only logs can answer it. Both tools render JavaScript, though I would check whether OnCrawl’s JavaScript crawling is included in your plan or metered separately.

Each also has an internal link metric, Sitebulb’s Link Score and OnCrawl’s InRank. They are estimates of internal link equity, not Google’s numbers. The caveat I would attach to both is in what audit tools can and cannot see: a crawler sees what it can fetch, not what Google chose to index.

Here is the opinion you can argue with. If you cannot get server logs out of your infrastructure team within a quarter, OnCrawl’s biggest advantage sits unused. Sitebulb plus a Search Console export does most of the job for far less money.

UI/UX

Sitebulb feels like opening a report. You run an audit, land on an overview, and click into Hints that explain themselves. It is friendlier to someone who has never run a technical audit. On a huge crawl the desktop app competes with everything else on your machine for memory.

OnCrawl is a web app of dashboards and filters. It is powerful once segments are configured and fairly flat before that. Expect real setup time and a steeper learning curve.

API availability

OnCrawl documents an API for pulling crawl and log data into your own reporting, which is what enterprise teams tend to ask for. Sitebulb has no public API that I can point to. Its scheduling covers some automation, but if your plan involves a script pulling crawl data every night, read both sets of docs before promising it to anyone. I could be wrong about Sitebulb here, and vendors add things.

Exporting

Sitebulb exports lists to CSV and Excel and produces PDF reports, with white-label options on the Pro tier as I understand it. OnCrawl exports CSV, exposes data through its API, and has reporting connectors, including one for Looker Studio. One boring fact matters at scale: Excel stops at 1,048,576 rows, so a multi-million URL export is a database job, not a spreadsheet job. If you want to push exports through an LLM for summaries, our sister site AI Tool Gazette is where the AI tooling posts live.

Team seats

Sitebulb licenses per user. Five people means five licences, and audits live on the machine that ran them unless you use Cloud. Sharing means a PDF, a folder or a Cloud link. OnCrawl works on shared accounts where everyone sees the same projects and data, with seat counts and roles set by plan.

For one consultant that difference is irrelevant. For a team of eight arguing about the same crawl it is the whole point. If you are hiring into that team, hiring an SEO and what to ask has the questions I would put to a candidate, including which of these tools they have run at your scale.

Use-case verdicts

Consultant or agency delivering client audits

Winner: Sitebulb. The cost per client is low, findings arrive pre-explained, and the PDF is nearly ready to send. OnCrawl’s price and setup only pay back if you keep the same large client for months and can get their logs.

Site over a million URLs with crawl budget problems

Winner: OnCrawl. Crawl budget questions are log questions, and Sitebulb cannot answer them. This is the clearest win in the article.

In-house team feeding crawl data into dashboards

Winner: OnCrawl. The API, shared accounts and connectors are what this job needs. The caveat is that someone has to own the pipeline. A dashboard nobody opens is the most expensive export of all.

Pre-launch and migration checks

Winner: tie, split by phase. Sitebulb is the faster and cheaper way to crawl staging and compare an audit against an earlier one before go-live. OnCrawl earns its place after launch, when logs show whether Googlebot is still requesting the old URLs.

Who should pick Sitebulb

freelancers and agencies who need client-ready reports without a per-client software bill
in-house teams whose sites sit well under the crawl budget threshold above
anyone learning technical SEO, since the Hints explain the reasoning as well as the finding
anyone who wants to test before paying, because Sitebulb has offered a free trial (check its length on the site)

It is a poor fit if you need logs, an API or shared cloud access as a hard requirement.

Who should pick OnCrawl

large e-commerce, marketplace and publisher sites with millions of URLs
teams that can deliver server logs and have a named person to own the analysis
in-house groups that want crawl data inside their own reporting
organisations where five or more people need the same live view of a crawl

It is a poor fit for a 20,000 page site with no logs. I would not sign a cloud contract for that.

Verdict overall

It depends, and the dividing line is logs. If you can get them and your site is over Google’s threshold, OnCrawl is the better tool and Sitebulb cannot stand in for it. If you cannot, or you sit below that line, Sitebulb gives you more explained audit per dollar and I would start there. I have not tested either at multi-million URL scale, so treat the enterprise half of this as informed reading, not a benchmark. Run both on the same site before you sign anything, and ask OnCrawl for the price in writing.

Written by Xavier Fok

disclosure: this article may contain affiliate links. if you buy through them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. verdicts are independent of payouts. last reviewed by Xavier Fok on 2026-09-19.