Screaming Frog vs. Sitebulb: Technical Audit Pricing Playbook

A technical SEO audit has two halves and the two best-known desktop crawlers split them unevenly. The first half is the crawl: what the site serves, what breaks, what duplicates, what renders. The second half is the server log: what Googlebot actually requested, how often, and where the crawl budget went. Screaming Frog sells the crawl as a flat annual licence and the log analysis as a second licence. Sitebulb sells the crawl as a monthly subscription with prioritized findings and no log analysis. The comparison is a pricing structure against a workflow, priced here from the vendors' own pages.

The two price lists, side by side

Screaming Frog prices in pounds sterling, one licence per user, one year per licence. Prices read from the vendor's own pricing page on November 15, 2026:

Sitebulb prices by the month, per user, with the annual option cutting roughly a sixth off the bill. The prices below come from Sitebulb's own pricing page and the price endpoint the page itself calls, read November 15, 2026:

Three structural facts fall out of that table before any math. First, Screaming Frog has no tiers — one licence, one price, everything included except logs. Sitebulb has three tiers and the cap is the product: Lite is a 10,000-URL audit, Pro is a 500,000-URL audit, Cloud is uncapped team crawling. Second, the free tiers are not equivalent: Sitebulb Lite is a paid tier with a low cap, while Screaming Frog's free tier is a permanent 500-URL crawler that keeps the core checks and drops the workflow features. Third, neither vendor bundles log analysis into its crawler price.

What the free tiers actually cover

A free tier is useful in proportion to the share of the site it can see — the cap divided by the site size — and the two free tiers sit an order of magnitude apart:

On a 2,000-page site, Screaming Frog free covers 500 of 2,000 pages — 25% — and every percentage in the report describes only that quarter. Sitebulb Lite is not free, but at $18 a month it covers the same site at 100%, and on a 50,000-page site it covers 10,000 of 50,000 — 20% — where Screaming Frog free covers 1%. The practical reading: Screaming Frog free is a complete audit tool for sites under 500 URLs and a sampling tool above it; Sitebulb Lite is a complete audit tool for sites under 10,000 URLs and a sampling tool above it. Neither is a trial with an expiry date — Screaming Frog's free version is permanent, and Sitebulb's trial is a separate 14-day Pro-equivalent window with no credit card. The rank-tracking suite pricing playbook covers the subscription suites these crawlers sit beside; the content optimization pricing comparison covers the tools that consume the crawl findings.

JavaScript rendering: the cheapest door

JavaScript rendering is the one capability where the price lists invert. Sitebulb includes it on every plan, including Lite at $18 a month, with no extra charge on Cloud. Screaming Frog reserves it for the paid licence: the vendor's own crawling guide states the licence "provides access to the configuration, saving & opening crawls, and advanced features such as — JavaScript rendering, custom search, custom extraction, Google Analytics integration, Google Search Console integration, PageSpeed Insights integration, scheduling and much more." The free version crawls the served HTML only, which on a React, Angular, or Vue site is often a shell or a loading spinner.

The entry price of a rendered audit is therefore £199 a year on Screaming Frog against $180 a year on Sitebulb Lite (annual billing) or $216 month-to-month. That is the narrowest price gap in the whole comparison, and it decides the purchase for any JavaScript-heavy site before the crawl caps matter: if the site renders client-side, the free Screaming Frog tier cannot audit it at all, while the cheapest Sitebulb tier can. The rendering uses an integrated Chromium engine on Screaming Frog's side and the same headless-browser approach on Sitebulb's; the difference is the paywall, not the engine.

Log file analysis: the capability only one side sells

Server logs answer the question no crawl can: what did Googlebot actually do? A crawl simulates the bot; the log records it. Screaming Frog's Log File Analyser verifies search engine and AI bots, shows the most and least crawled URLs, bot crawl frequency and IP activity, large and slow URLs, and uncrawled and orphan URLs — pages the crawl found that the bot never visited, and pages the bot visited that the crawl never found. Its free tier allows 1,000 log events in a single project; the paid licence at £99 a year removes the event and project limits, with the maximum bounded by hard drive capacity.

Sitebulb has no equivalent. Its own FAQ: "Sitebulb doesn't yet do log file analysis — but this is in the build pipeline and will be available soon!" Until that ships, a Sitebulb operator who needs log work buys a second tool, and the obvious candidate is the Screaming Frog analyser itself. The cost of the gap is measurable in wasted crawl budget. If the logs show Googlebot making 100,000 hits a month and 30% land on non-indexable URLs — 404s, redirect chains, parameter pages, blocked resources — the waste is:

That is 30,000 wasted hits a month in the example, and the fix list — the redirect chains to collapse, the parameter URLs to block, the orphan pages to link or remove — comes from matching the log against the crawl. Without the log, the operator knows the site's structure and guesses at the bot's behaviour; with it, the operator knows both.

The per-audit and per-seat math

The flat licence and the subscription cross at different volumes, so the comparison needs the per-audit cost, not the headline price. Take an agency running 24 site audits a year — two a month — on one seat:

Screaming Frog SEO Spider at £199 a year costs £8.29 per audit. Sitebulb Pro at $425 a year costs $17.71 per audit, or $21.00 on monthly billing at $504 a year. Add the Log File Analyser and the combined annual cost is £298 — £12.42 per audit for the crawl plus the logs. The flat licence wins on per-audit cost at any volume above a handful of audits a year: the subscription charges for the calendar, the licence for the seat. The subscription wins only when the audit count is low and the seat count is one: a freelancer doing four audits a year pays $42 a month for the months they audit and cancels between them, while the licence holder pays £199 whether they audit or not.

The seat math runs the other way. A second Screaming Frog licence costs the full £199 — two licences are £398 a year. A second Sitebulb Pro user costs $11 more a month: $53 a month for two users, or $540.60 a year on annual billing. Per seat per year, that is £199 on Screaming Frog against $270.30 on Sitebulb annual billing — but the marginal second seat is £199 against $115.60 a year. Our editorial analysis found the crossover sits at the second seat: the first seat is cheaper on Screaming Frog, the second cheaper on Sitebulb, and a five-person team pays £945 a year on Screaming Frog at the £189 bulk tier against Sitebulb Pro's per-seat scaling. The Search Console audit playbook covers the free Google-side data both tools integrate with.

Guided findings against raw data

The price difference buys a different workflow, and the workflow is where most buyers feel it. Sitebulb turns a crawl into 300+ prioritized Hints on Pro (100+ on Lite), each with a plain-language explanation of why the issue matters, grouped by severity and category, with audit comparisons, scheduled audits, and customized PDF reports. The Pro-only feature list — Performance and Mobile Friendly, Structured Data, International and Hreflang, Spell Checker, Accessibility, AMP, Scheduling, auto-export to Google Sheets — is the reporting layer. Screaming Frog turns a crawl into raw data: every URL, every status code, every title and directive, filterable and exportable, with site visualisations, crawl comparison, near-duplicate detection, and custom extraction — and the analyst decides what matters. It also carries deeper extraction tooling: custom JavaScript, custom search, and an MCP server for connecting crawls to AI tools, which Sitebulb matches with its own MCP access on all plans.

Neither workflow is wrong; they serve different operators. The analyst who lives in the crawl and builds their own prioritization gets more from Screaming Frog's data density per pound. The consultant who must hand a client a report the client can act on without a walkthrough gets more from Sitebulb's hints and PDFs. The mistake is buying one and expecting the other's workflow — paying £199 for a client report the tool does not write, or $42 a month for raw extraction the tool does not expose.

Who should not buy either

Four operators should stop before the checklist. The first is the site under 500 URLs with no JavaScript rendering need: Screaming Frog free audits it completely, forever. The second is the operator whose only question is log files: buy the Log File Analyser alone at £99 a year. The third is the team that needs log analysis and client reports together: neither tool does both, so the honest purchase is Screaming Frog Spider plus Log File Analyser for the diagnosis and a reporting pass built from the exports — or Sitebulb for the reports plus the analyser for the logs. The fourth is the enterprise team crawling millions of URLs with scheduled, collaborative audits: that is Sitebulb Cloud territory from $125 a month, not a desktop licence.

Execution checklist

Buy in this order:

1. Count the site: total indexable URLs from the sitemap and Search Console; compare with the 500, 10,000, and 500,000 caps before choosing a tier.
2. Check the rendering: if the site is client-rendered, confirm the tool renders JavaScript at the tier you would buy — Screaming Frog free does not.
3. Price the seat count, not the headline: one seat favours Screaming Frog at £199; the second seat favours Sitebulb at $11 a month extra.
4. Decide the log question separately: if crawl budget matters, add the £99 Log File Analyser to the Screaming Frog side; Sitebulb has no log option.

• [x] Run the 14-day Sitebulb trial: Pro-equivalent, no credit card; crawl the largest site and check the 500,000 cap against the real count.
• [x] Run the Screaming Frog free crawl: 500 URLs, permanent; check whether the workflow fits before paying £199.
• [x] Compute the per-audit cost: annual cost divided by audits per year, at the team's real audit volume.
• [x] Verify the reporting need: if a client must act on the report alone, confirm the PDF and Hints workflow on Sitebulb; if the analyst owns the findings, confirm the extraction depth.
• [x] Re-price annually: Screaming Frog's licence renews yearly, Sitebulb's subscription monthly or annually — and the per-audit math moves with the price.

Related reading: the rank-tracking suite pricing playbook prices the suites these crawlers sit beside; the content optimization pricing comparison prices the tools that consume crawl findings; and the Search Console audit playbook covers the free Google-side data both tools integrate with. Run the per-audit math at your own volume and seat count through the pricing calculator before buying either licence.