SEO by Daniel vs Sitebulb

Sitebulb is the crawler that made technical SEO audits look good. The prioritised hints and the visualisations explain a crawl in a way a spreadsheet never will. That is a different job from ours. SEO by Daniel is a one-shot scored report, built to be handed over. The two overlap less than the category suggests: Sitebulb is a tool you work in, SEO by Daniel is a document you send.

Where Sitebulb wins

• Education. Every issue is explained in the app with guidance on why it matters and how to fix it. That makes it a genuine teaching tool for a junior on your team, not just a list of failed checks.
• Visualisations. The best-looking reports in the crawler category. Crawl depth, link relationships and priorities are rendered well enough to put in front of a client without rework.
• Depth. Hundreds of prioritised hints, JavaScript crawling, and a ceiling in the hundreds of thousands of URLs per audit. For a large site that headroom is real, and most freelancers will never reach it.
• Desktop trial. A fully featured 14-day trial with no credit card. You can evaluate the actual product before you commit.

Where SEO by Daniel wins

• Instant and no-account. No install, no trial, no licence. A 0-100 score in about two seconds. Sitebulb still needs a download, a project and a crawl before you see anything.
• Sitemap auto-discovery. We find every page via robots.txt, nested sitemap indexes and gzipped files. Sitebulb crawls from the links and sitemaps you give it. Hand us a bare domain and the whole site is covered; Sitebulb wants you to configure it first.
• One client artifact. Sitebulb produces deep reports you then edit down. We produce a 0-100 scored report with an executive summary and CSV, ready to send. If you want to understand what a technical audit should cover, Sitebulb teaches it. If you want the finished document, we make it.
• Price. Sitebulb's cloud starts around £95/month. Ours starts at €19/month with monitoring included. For a freelancer, that is a different budget line. The desktop route is cheaper, but it is still on your machine and still needs you to drive it.

A real example

A two-person SEO consultancy in Rotterdam takes on a homeware retailer migrating from a hosted platform to a headless build. The site has 3,200 URLs, and the migration is the risk: if redirects or canonicals break, the retailer loses the category pages that carry its revenue. The consultancy uses Sitebulb for the migration crawl. It walks the redirect chains, flags 480 of them, and shows the orphaned product pages in a way the client's developer can act on. That part is Sitebulb doing what it is best at.

The weekly status call is a different audience. The retail marketing manager does not want a crawl graph. She wants to know whether the site is getting better or worse while the migration runs. So the consultancy pastes the staging domain into SEO by Daniel before the call and reads out the number: 54 on the old template, 61 on the new one, with the remaining drags listed by severity. The CSV is attached to the call notes, and the score line becomes the one metric in the manager's update to her director.

Neither tool replaces the other here. Sitebulb found the 480 redirect chains; SEO by Daniel turned the same week's crawl into a number a non-technical manager can track. The consultancy keeps both, and the split in spend is roughly five to one in Sitebulb's favour, which is the honest cost of working at that depth. If you are weighing the two desktop crawlers instead, Sitebulb against Screaming Frog is the comparison that matters.

The verdict

| | Sitebulb | SEO by Daniel | |---|---|---| | Install | Desktop, or pricey cloud | Browser | | Education and visuals | Best in class | Simple | | Instant no-account score | No | About two seconds | | Sitemap auto-discovery | Partial | Yes | | Report you can send as-is | No | Yes | | Entry price | Free desktop trial / £95+ cloud | €19/mo |

When to pick which

Pick Sitebulb when the deliverable is a deep technical audit you will present yourself, and you want the tool to teach while it crawls. If you are training a junior or explaining redirect chains to an in-house developer, that education is worth the setup and the cloud price.

Pick SEO by Daniel when you need an instant scored report, sitemap auto-discovery, and a price that fits a freelancer's margins. If the client reads a number before they read a crawl, we are the shorter path. The freelancer roundup puts the two in the same shortlist for different rows.

FAQ

Is Sitebulb free? The desktop version has a fully featured 14-day trial with no credit card. The cloud product starts around £95/month, so evaluate on the trial before you commit.

Do I need Sitebulb to use SEO by Daniel? No. SEO by Daniel is browser-based and needs no account for a scan, and its €19/month plan includes continuous monitoring. You would only add Sitebulb for deep desktop crawls.

Can I use both? Yes. Sitebulb is a strong choice for the occasional deep technical audit you present yourself, while SEO by Daniel handles the instant scores, sitemap discovery and ongoing monitoring across your client list.

Run a free scan and see the report a client would get before you configure a single crawl.