Pros and Cons For 4 Most Used Website Crawler Tools
Important Notes
-The ideas below belong to our Contributor Emrecan Şanlı‘s point of view.
-The crawler tools are listed randomly as the rank does not indicate that it is better.
We all want to use the most effective tools with a bunch of features and a low price. It may be quite hard to choose a tool that is handy for crawling. In this article, I’m briefly explaining on some of the pros and cons of each tool mentioned below. Hopefully, this would guide you to choose the one that allows you to perform cost-efficient and performance-based SEO.
#1 Netpeak
I just discovered this tool recently! The main advantage of Netpeak is low system resource usage which allows us to crawl big websites serving millions of URLs. The crawl speed is also impressive when Netpeak is compared with Screaming Frog. If your computer slows down when facing millions of URLs, it’s still OK for you since you can continue crawling on another PC/desktop.
‘Filter’ and ‘Export’ options make this tool really easy to create reports. Also with Netpeak’s dashboard, you can have a grasp on good amount of information about your website with its user-friendly design.
In addition, Netpeak spider calculates internal PageRank for you to improve website linking structure. It is tested and verified: Netpeak spider works quite well to crawl websites and shows accurate results when compared with other spiders.
So what are the drawbacks of the tool? Well… First of all, you need to pay :). However, it is only around 120 $ per year. Also, JS crawling is not as efficient as Screaming Frog’s.
Advantages of Netpeak:
– Not consuming System Resources
– Decent Crawl Speed
– Filter and Export Features
– Good Report Visualization
Disadvantages of Netpeak:
– Cannot execute JS Crawl
– Missing Backlink/Log Data Integration
#2 Sitebulb
Sitebulb is one of the newest tools in the industry. Despite it is new, day by day more and more people are starting to use this tool. So why do people prefer Sitebulb? The answer is that it’s easy to use. You can easily find the problems under the ‘Hint’ section.
Other advantages of Sitebulb are data visualization and the fact that it’s not restricted desktop resources.
One huge advantage of Sitebulb is that it can detect JS and CSS problems such as unnecessary codes. Plus, crawl customizations and scheduled crawling make Sitebulb more appealing than other desktop crawlers. Sitebulb’s developers have really nice communication with their clients. Listening to their clients feedback sincerely leads them to improve their tool continuously.
Crawl map is also a good feature to visualize crawl depth and internal linking.
When it comes to the disadvantages of Sitebulb, first thing can be considered as high CPU usage. Though, you may also want to try for yourself since it’s free to try for the first 14 days.
The second disadvantage is the crawl capability. It is not quite good when compared with its competitors’ capabilities. To wrap up, I can say that it’s still in the early stage of development and step by step it’s definitely getting better. The monthly price for Sitebulb that needed to be paid is 35$ after the first 14 days of trial.
Advantages of Sitebulb:
– Code review
– Enabling Page speed for crawled URLs
– Crawl Map
– Content-Sentiment Analysis
Disadvantages of Sitebulb:
– Consuming System Resources
– No LogFile Upload
#3 DeepCrawl
I believe it’s so easy to follow that most of us know how to use DeepCrawl by birth. The insights and automatized crawls really help us to keep track of our clients’ websites.
While DeepCrawl crawls websites, it doesn’t use your system resources. Simply, you can set up a crawl within minutes and continue to do your work at your PC/desktop.
You can integrate DeepCrawl API with your tools and you can create special dashboards for your customers. The latest integration with Zapier looks quite exciting. With Zapier, you can send your crawl data to Google Sheets and by connecting Google Sheets to Google Data Studio, you can create automated reports when the crawl ends.
DeepCrawl’s crawl ability is also quite powerful and you can compare your crawl with previous ones to see the changes. Also, you can connect other tools to DeepCrawl like Majestic, Google Search Console and so on.
One of the great features of this tool is that you can upload your log file and compare with the crawl result. You’ll only need to get the log file for your or your client’s website and DeepCrawl will do the trick.
In terms of drawback, the pricing may be considered as much higher than other crawlers we mentioned (though it depends on the URL limit and the number of websites package you’ll choose).
Advantages of DeepCrawl:
– Logfile upload
– Scheduled Crawls
– Not Consuming System Resources
– API Usage
– Zapier
Disadvantages of DeepCrawl:
– High Price
– Data Visualization
#4 Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is the market leader within all these tools, almost every SEO knows and uses it. Screaming Frog provides a quick way to test out a website or certain directory.
While Screaming Frog almost answers any technical question you may have, you need to take some time to search within Screaming Frog by exporting CSV file(s) and filtering them.
With the latest update that released you can crawl huge websites with the help of the system storage. In general, Screaming Frog comes with all necessary crawl features. Plus, since the tool is made to be SEO-friendly, it follows Google’s AJAX (Francis) standard for web crawling.
You can connect Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic, Google Analytics and Google Search Console to Screaming Frog. And the price? Screaming Frog costs around £149.00 per year.
The disadvantages of Screaming Frogs are consumption of system resources, lack of data visualization and no comparison feature among the crawls.
Advantages of Screaming Frog:
– JS Crawl
– Plenty of features for crawl configuration
– Ongoing Tool Updates
– Easy to start a quick crawl
Disadvantages of Screaming Frog:
– Consuming System Resources
– Data Visualization
– Comparison with the Previous Crawl
General Comparison
| Items | Screaming Frog | Sitebulb | Netpeak | Deepcrawl |
| Actionable Hints | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Backlink Data Integration | ✔ | ✔ | x | ✔ |
| Comparable crawl data | x | ✔ | x | ✔ |
| Crawl large websites (average PC) | x | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Crawl unlimited domains | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | x |
| Internal Page Rank | x | x | ✔ | x |
| JavaScript crawling | ✔ | ✔ | x | ✔ |
| Log File Upload | x | x | x | ✔ |
| Page Speed | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| PDF Reporting | x | ✔ | x | ✔ |
| Realtime crawl feedback | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | x |
| Scheduled Crawls | x | x | x | ✔ |
| Sentiment Analysis | x | ✔ | x | ✔ |
| Sitemap Audit | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Tool Integration | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
| Visual reporting | x | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ |
