SEO and marketing decision
Sitebulb
A useful self-hosted crawler/auditor limited to core checks is realistic (open-source projects already cover the core loop), but recreating Sitebulb’s full polished product (300+ prioritized hints, cloud scale, team collaboration, and support) is a larger effort better served by keeping the paid product for production/enterprise needs.
Visit website↗Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need — the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship.
What a replacement has to do
- Crawl a site (including JS rendering), detect common technical SEO issues, prioritise them, and export/share reports.
What it still won’t have
- Polished, production-grade UI and UX
- Complete set of 300+ prioritized hints and built-in educational content
- Managed cloud crawling at large scale and real-time team collaboration
- Official support, SLAs, and continuous product polish
- Native integrations and pre-built PDF report templates
What remains hard
- Brand trust
Trusted and loved by 5,000+ SEOs across the globe.
First-year cost
Keep paying
Paying is—cheaper in year one.
On cash alone, building overtakes the subscription at 1 seat.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a self-hosted website crawler and basic SEO audit web app using Node.js + Playwright (Chromium) for rendering, Express + SQLite/Postgres for storage, and React for a minimal frontend. In scope: (1) a crawler that discovers URLs and renders JS, (2) a rule engine implementing ~20 high-value SEO checks (status codes, canonical, meta title/description issues, hreflang, structured data presence, sitemap/X-Robots), (3) persistent storage of pages & issues, (4) CSV export and a simple PDF report template, (5) a scheduler for recurring crawls and a small UI to view results and run crawls. Out of scope: multi-tenant SaaS, full parity with Sitebulb's 300+ hints, enterprise-scale cloud crawling, and team collaboration features. Include logging, retry/backoff for crawling, basic error handling, and unit/integration tests for the crawler and rule engine.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Partly verdict base52
- An open-source build was found+5
- 5 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score67
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time — so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 5
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productSitebulb homepage
- official pricingSitebulb pricing
- official docsSitebulb features
- open sourceNaiboWang/EasySpider
- open sourcegetmaxun/maxun
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
