SEO by Daniel vs Heritrix

Heritrix is the Internet Archive's crawler. It captures pages at high fidelity and writes WARC files you can store for decades. It is free, open source and runs on your own hardware. SEO by Daniel is the opposite shape: hosted, instant, and built to produce a score and a report rather than a preservation copy. Both fetch pages. Only one of them is trying to keep them.

Where Heritrix wins

• It is free and open source. No subscription, no per-crawl fee, no account. For a developer, that is a tool you own.
• You control the crawl. Run it where you want, for as long as you want, against whatever scope you define. No vendor limits and no data leaving your infrastructure.
• Built for archival fidelity. Heritrix exists to capture pages faithfully as WARC output. It is the crawler behind the Internet Archive, and it is designed for large, long-running jobs.
• Respectable at scale. If the requirement is a multi-million-URL archival capture, this is a category where off-the-shelf SEO scanners do not compete.

Where SEO by Daniel wins

• Instant and hosted. A 0-100 homepage score in about two seconds from one URL. Heritrix needs installing, configuring and a crawl before it produces anything, and the output is not a score.
• Sitemap auto-discovery. We find every page via robots.txt, nested sitemap indexes and gzipped sitemaps without you writing a scope file. Heritrix is pointed at seeds and rules you set by hand.
• A client-ready report. Executive summary, issues grouped by severity and CSV export. Heritrix gives you WARC files, which are the right format for an archive and the wrong one for a client. The audit checklist is a different output entirely.
• SEO logic is built in. We evaluate the pages for search issues. Heritrix captures them faithfully and leaves the judgement to you.
• It runs without infrastructure. No storage plan, no job server, no operating it. That is a real convenience cost you are choosing to pay for either way.

A real example

A developer works on a small digital-preservation team at a university library. A regional government site is about to be replaced, and the team wants a faithful snapshot of it before the old version disappears. They run Heritrix with a scope tuned to the domain, let it crawl over a weekend, and store the WARC output in the archive. This is Heritrix doing the one job it was built for, and no SEO tool is a substitute.

Months later the same developer is asked a different question. The library's own site is being reorganised, and the web team wants to know whether the changes will hurt search visibility. Nobody on the team is an SEO, and Heritrix would happily capture the site again without telling them anything about it. So they run the domain through SEO by Daniel instead and get a 0-100 score in about two seconds, with the issues ranked by severity and a CSV they can pass to the web team.

The two tools share almost nothing beyond a user agent. Heritrix is for preservation when you have the hardware and the time. SEO by Daniel is for the day you need an answer about search health and no report exists yet. If you want another open-source crawler comparison, Heritrix against Scrapy is the closer read.

The verdict

| | Heritrix | SEO by Daniel | |---|---|---| | Cost | Free, open source | Free scan, €19/mo paid | | Where it runs | Your infrastructure | Hosted | | Output | WARC archive files | Scored PDF-style report + CSV | | Homepage score | No | 0-100 in about two seconds | | Setup | Install, configure, run a job | Paste a domain | | Built for | Archival capture | SEO analysis |

When to pick which

Pick Heritrix when the goal is preservation: a faithful, self-hosted capture you will store and control. If you already run the infrastructure, free and open source is the right answer.

Pick SEO by Daniel when the goal is a scored answer about search health, delivered now, with no crawl to babysit and no archive to manage. For a developer handed an SEO question with no audit budget, the hosted scan is the honest shortcut.

FAQ

Is Heritrix an SEO tool? No. It is an archival crawler that writes WARC files. It captures pages faithfully but does not score them or report on search issues.

What does Heritrix cost? It is free and open source. You supply the server, storage and time. SEO by Daniel has a free scan and paid plans from €19 per month.

Can I use Heritrix to audit a site? You can crawl the site with it, but you would be building the analysis yourself. SEO by Daniel does the scoring and the report in one hosted step.

Run a free scan and get the report a WARC file will never give you.