You typed “Deepcrawl” into Google, clicked through, and landed on a site called Lumar asking you to book a demo. No price. No free plan. Just a form.
Sound familiar?
If you’re hunting for alternatives to Deepcrawl, you’re usually in one of two spots. Either you’re paying enterprise money to crawl a site that honestly isn’t that big, or you never made it past that pricing form in the first place. Both are fair reasons to shop around.
So here’s what this post covers: what actually happened to Deepcrawl, how to pick a replacement without overbuying, and 10 crawlers from free to enterprise, with prices I checked in October 2026. I’ll also cover the AI search angle that almost every comparison list skips.
The Short Answer: Which Deepcrawl Alternative Should You Pick?
Short on time? Here’s where I’d start, based on your situation:
- Small to mid-size site, tight budget: Screaming Frog SEO Spider. Free up to 500 URLs, $279 a year after that.
- Agency that sends reports to clients: Sitebulb.
- Large site that needs cloud crawling and log files, without enterprise pricing: JetOctopus.
- Enterprise site with a dedicated SEO team: Botify or Oncrawl.
- You need an alert the minute something breaks: Conductor Monitoring (formerly ContentKing).
- You want audits and automated on-page fixes in one dashboard: Search Atlas.
- Zero budget: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, plus Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Already paying for Ahrefs or Semrush: use the site audit you already have before buying anything new.
Now let’s get into why, because the “best” tool depends a lot more on your site than on any ranking list.
Wait, What Happened to Deepcrawl?
Nothing dramatic. Deepcrawl didn’t shut down. It rebranded to Lumar in late September 2022.
The company said the new name comes from the idea of “illumination” and reflects a shift from a pure technical SEO platform to what it calls website intelligence, built for marketing, engineering, product and SEO teams together. The apps got new names too: Analytics Hub became Analyze, Monitor Hub became Monitor, Automation Hub became Protect, and a new app called Impact was added. Fun detail: at launch, the crawler’s user agent still referenced Deepcrawl, so nobody had to update their firewall allowlists.
Today, Lumar’s pricing page talks about GEO (AI search) metrics, site speed, web accessibility and custom analytics. What it doesn’t show is a single price. You fill in a form and wait for a sales call.
So think of it this way: Deepcrawl grew up, moved into a bigger office, and stopped putting prices on the door.
Here’s the thing, though. The rebrand itself isn’t a reason to leave. Lumar is still a serious crawler. People usually leave for more practical reasons:
- They can’t get a price without a sales call.
- Their site is too small to justify an enterprise contract.
- They want more hands-on control over each crawl.
- They want crawl data and log files in one place at a lower cost.
If one of those sounds like you, keep reading. If not, the next section might save you a painful migration.
Before You Switch: Do You Even Need To?
Picking a crawler is a lot like hiring a home inspector. A two-bedroom flat doesn’t need a twelve-person crew with drones and thermal cameras. But a shopping mall does, and sending one guy with a torch would be a disaster.
So be honest about which building you own.
If your site has millions of URLs, several teams working on it, and you actually use Protect (the automated testing app that used to be Automation Hub), switching could cost you more in lost workflow than you save on the invoice. Get a renewal quote first and compare it properly.
If your site has a few thousand to a few hundred thousand URLs, you’re very likely paying for capacity you don’t use. A desktop crawler or a mid-tier cloud tool will do the job.
If you only run a full audit once a quarter, you don’t need a cloud platform running all year. Seriously. That’s like paying rent on a warehouse to store one bicycle.
Let me tell you what my own setup looks like, because it’s a lot less fancy than people expect.
For most client sites, I run Screaming Frog for the audit and keep Google Search Console open in the next tab. When a client needs a report they can actually read, I’ll use Sitebulb. That’s it. No enterprise contract.
And one audit taught me exactly why the rendering setting matters.
A while back, I was auditing an eCommerce store in the UAE with roughly 6,000 product pages. (They were paying for a big enterprise cloud crawler for a site that size, but that’s a rant for another day.) My first crawl looked fine. Titles were there, content was there, internal links were there. Honestly, I was about to send a clean report and feel pretty good about myself.
Then, on a hunch, I ran a second crawl with JavaScript rendering switched off.
Most of the product descriptions vanished. So did the “related products” links. The store’s theme was loading all of it with JavaScript after the page opened. Google could still see it, because Googlebot renders pages. But anything that only reads the raw HTML was getting an almost empty product page. Basically a shop window with the lights off.
We worked with their developer to move the descriptions and key links into the server-rendered HTML. Not a glamorous fix. But now every bot that visits sees the same page a customer does.
Crawling twice is now part of every audit I do. And it’s exactly why the next section matters.
How to Choose a Deepcrawl Replacement: 5 Questions
Most comparison lists jump straight to features. I’d rather you answer these five questions first, because they’ll cut the list down in about two minutes.
- How many URLs do you really have? Not pages in your CMS, crawlable URLs. Let me give you an example: an online store with 2,000 products can easily turn into tens of thousands of URLs once filters, sorting options and pagination start creating parameter URLs. Crawl a sample first and look at the real number.
- Desktop or cloud? A desktop crawler runs on your computer, so its limit is your RAM and storage. A cloud crawler runs on the vendor’s servers, which means scheduling, shared access and no laptop fans screaming at 2am.
- Do you need log file analysis? Crawl data shows what could be crawled. Log files show what Googlebot (and AI bots) actually crawled. If you manage a big site, you want both.
- Does your site depend on JavaScript? If key content or links only appear after JavaScript runs, your crawler must render it. More on why this matters for AI search below.
- Who reads the reports? An SEO specialist is happy with raw exports. A client or a CMO wants something they can understand in five minutes.
Got your answers? Good. Now the list will actually mean something.
10 Best Alternatives to Deepcrawl in 2026
Here’s the quick comparison. Prices are from each tool’s official pricing page, checked in October 2026. Prices change, so confirm before you buy.
| Tool | Type | Best for | Starting price (Oct 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Desktop | Hands-on technical audits | Free up to 500 URLs, then $279/year |
| Sitebulb | Desktop and cloud | Agencies and visual reports | 14-day free trial; Cloud from £95/month |
| JetOctopus | Cloud | Large sites, crawl plus logs | From $349/month, billed annually |
| Oncrawl | Cloud | Data-heavy enterprise SEO | Custom quote |
| Botify | Cloud platform | Enterprise and AI search visibility | Custom quote |
| Conductor Monitoring | Cloud monitoring | 24/7 change alerts | Custom quote, free trial |
| Ahrefs Site Audit | Cloud (part of a suite) | Free audits of sites you own | Free via Webmaster Tools; Lite $129/month |
| Semrush Site Audit | Cloud (part of a suite) | Teams already on Semrush | 100 pages free; paid SEO Toolkit plans |
| Search Atlas | Cloud (part of a suite) | Audits plus automated on-page fixes | From $99/month, 7-day free trial |
| Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster Tools | Search engine tools | Crawl health straight from the source | Free |
1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
If you’ve done any technical SEO, you’ve probably heard of this one. It’s a desktop crawler, and it’s the closest thing the industry has to a standard tool.
The free version crawls up to 500 URLs and holds back the advanced features, like JavaScript rendering. A paid licence costs $279 a year per user (£199 in the UK), which works out to about $23 a month. With a licence, the crawl limit is “unlimited,” but in practice it depends on how much memory and storage your machine has. You also get scheduling, crawl comparison, custom extraction, Google Analytics and Search Console integrations, and even OpenAI and Gemini integrations.
Need logs too? Their separate Log File Analyser costs £99 a year, and the free version handles 1,000 log lines.
The catch: your computer does all the work. Crawling a few million URLs means a powerful machine (or a cloud server you set up yourself), and sharing results with non-SEO teammates is clunky.
My take: for most sites under a few hundred thousand URLs, this is the first alternative to Deepcrawl I’d try. It’s hard to argue with the price.
Check Screaming Frog SEO Spider pricing
2. Sitebulb
Sitebulb is what you pick when the person reading the audit doesn’t speak fluent “canonical.” It’s known for explaining issues in plain language and ranking them by priority, so your client sees what to fix first instead of a wall of 4,000 warnings.
It comes in two flavors. The desktop version has a Lite plan (up to 10,000 URLs per audit) and a Pro plan (500,000 URLs per audit by default, which can be raised to 2 million). There’s a 14-day free trial of Pro, no credit card needed. Then there’s Sitebulb Cloud, a browser-based version starting from £95 a month, with no project limits.
The catch: the Lite plan’s 10,000-URL cap is small for anything beyond a brochure site. If you’re replacing Lumar on a big site, Cloud is the version to look at.
My take: great for agencies and consultants who need audits that clients can actually read. Sitebulb Cloud is also a sensible middle ground if you want cloud crawling without enterprise pricing.
See Sitebulb desktop and cloud pricing
3. JetOctopus
JetOctopus is a cloud crawler with log file analysis and Search Console data built in. That combination is exactly what a lot of people liked about Deepcrawl in the first place.
Plans start at $349 a month on annual billing. That Growth plan includes 500,000 crawled URLs and 2 million log lines per month. There’s a 7-day free trial with no credit card, capped at 10,000 crawled URLs.
The catch: you’re working with monthly quotas. If you crawl a big site every week, those 500,000 URLs disappear fast, and the next plan up is a big jump.
My take: if you want a Lumar-style cloud setup with logs, and you’d rather see a price before talking to sales, this is the one to trial first.
Compare JetOctopus pricing plans
4. Oncrawl
Oncrawl is a cloud crawler built for large, complex sites, and it’s especially popular with SEOs who love data. Think crawl data, log files and analytics combined, then sliced into segments so you can see exactly which section of the site is wasting crawl budget.
It’s been part of BrightEdge since February 2022, and pricing isn’t published. You’ll need to talk to sales.
The catch: there’s a learning curve, and you won’t know the cost until you’re in a sales conversation (which is the same complaint people have about Lumar, to be fair).
My take: a strong pick for in-house teams on big sites who want to dig deep into the data. If you just want a quick audit, it’s more tool than you need.
5. Botify
Botify is the heavyweight here. Its customer list is full of big retail brands, and these days its pitch is heavily about AI search: tracking visibility in AI answers, analyzing and managing AI bots, and automating fixes like internal linking and indexation.
There’s no public pricing. Every path leads to “Get a Demo.”
The catch: it’s built and priced for enterprises. Moving from Lumar to Botify is a sideways move in budget, not a downgrade.
My take: if you run a massive eCommerce site and AI search visibility is a boardroom topic, it belongs on your shortlist. Everyone else can skip it.
6. Conductor Monitoring (Formerly ContentKing)
This one is different. It’s not built for one big audit. It watches your site 24/7 and tells you when something changes. Conductor agreed to acquire ContentKing in February 2022, and the product now lives inside the Conductor platform.
Picture this: a developer pushes a release on Friday evening and accidentally adds a noindex tag to your category pages. A quarterly audit finds that in three months. A monitoring tool flags it the same evening.
Conductor doesn’t publish prices, but its plans are clear on scale: Essentials monitors up to 100,000 pages across 3 websites, Growth goes up to 500,000 pages, and Enterprise covers sites of any size. There’s a free trial.
The catch: it’s a monitoring tool, not a deep-dive crawler. You’ll still want something like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb for full audits.
My take: if what you loved about Lumar was its Monitor app, this pairing (a desktop crawler for audits plus Conductor for alerts) can replace it nicely.
View Conductor Monitoring plans
7. Ahrefs Site Audit (and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools)
Here’s the best free deal on this list, and a lot of people don’t know about it. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives you Site Audit for free on websites you verify, with 5,000 crawl credits per verified project per month. It checks for 170+ technical and on-page issues.
If you need more, the paid Lite plan is $129 a month and includes 100,000 crawl credits, with up to 25,000 pages per project.
The catch: that per-project page cap on the cheaper plans is tight for large sites, and it’s less configurable than a dedicated crawler.
My take: for a small business site you own, start here before spending a cent. If you already pay for Ahrefs, use its Site Audit first and only add a crawler if you hit its limits.
See Ahrefs pricing or start free with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools
8. Semrush Site Audit
Quick question before you buy anything: are you already paying for Semrush? Because if you are, you might already own a decent Deepcrawl replacement and not know it.
Semrush has a cloud Site Audit built into its SEO Toolkit. Without a toolkit subscription, you can audit just 100 pages. The Pro toolkit lets you crawl 20,000 pages per audit and 100,000 per month, while the Business toolkit goes up to 100,000 pages per audit and 1 million per month.
Worth knowing: Adobe completed its acquisition of Semrush in April 2026, so expect the product to keep changing as the two integrate.
The catch: page caps, and it’s an all-in-one suite, so you’re paying for keyword research, content tools and more, not just crawling.
My take: if your team already lives in Semrush, use it. I wouldn’t buy Semrush just to replace Deepcrawl.
Compare Semrush SEO Toolkit pricing
9. Search Atlas
Search Atlas is an all-in-one SEO platform, so it sits in the same bucket as Ahrefs and Semrush: a suite with a site auditor built in, not a dedicated enterprise crawler.
The Site Auditor supports JavaScript rendering, can recrawl your site every week and alert you when your health score changes, and flags Core Web Vitals issues alongside the usual technical problems. Each issue comes with a how-to-fix guide, which is nice when you’re not sure what a warning even means.
What makes it different is OTTO SEO. You add a pixel (a small script) to your site, OTTO suggests fixes like title tags, meta descriptions, canonical tags, schema and broken links, and once you approve them, they go live without waiting on a developer. If your dev queue moves at the speed of a government office, you’ll see the appeal.
Plans start at $99 a month. The Starter plan includes 50,000 crawled pages a month across 5 Site Auditor projects, and there’s a 7-day free trial.
The catch: the pricing page caps audits at 10,000 pages per site on every plan except Agency ($999 a month, 100,000 pages per site), even though the Site Auditor page talks about crawling up to a million pages. Ask them to clear that up before you buy for a big site. Log file analysis isn’t mentioned either.
And here’s one most people miss. Fixes delivered through the pixel only exist after the script runs. Search Atlas’s own help docs admit its Site Auditor may show your original titles instead of the OTTO-deployed ones when you use the pixel. Now connect that to the AI crawler research I cover further down. If you rely on OTTO, ask about a server-side setup (Search Atlas mentions a Cloudflare option), and export your changes before you ever remove the pixel, because pixel-based fixes can disappear with it.
My take: a good fit for small business sites and agencies that want audits and quick on-page fixes in one dashboard. For a large site, it’s not a like-for-like replacement for Lumar.
See Search Atlas pricing and plans
10. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools
Every third-party crawler on this list is making an educated guess about how Google sees your site. These two don’t have to guess.
They aren’t crawlers in the same sense, but they show you something no other tool can: how search engines actually crawl your site.
Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report shows total crawl requests, response times, host status and which Googlebot type visited. It only works for root-level properties, and Google itself says sites with fewer than a thousand pages usually don’t need it. Bing Webmaster Tools has a free Site Scan feature that runs an on-demand audit and sorts issues into errors, warnings and notices.
The catch: limited depth and very little control over how the crawl runs.
My take: these should be running no matter which tool you choose. Think of them as a free second opinion from the people who actually rank your site.
Set up Google Search Console for free and sign up for Bing Webmaster Tools
[Wahaj: add your experience here if you have one, e.g. which crawler you use on client sites and why]
The AI Search Angle Most Deepcrawl Comparisons Skip
Here’s something almost none of the “Deepcrawl alternatives” lists talk about: your crawler choice now affects how well you can check your visibility in AI search.
A December 2024 study by Vercel and MERJ found that none of the major AI crawlers they tracked rendered JavaScript. That included OpenAI’s crawlers, Anthropic’s ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot. They downloaded JavaScript files but didn’t run them. The exceptions were Gemini, which uses Google’s infrastructure, and AppleBot.
So what does that mean for you? If your product details, prices or main content only appear after JavaScript runs, many AI crawlers may simply not see them.
Bots change, so don’t treat a 2024 study as gospel. Test your own site instead:
- Crawl it twice. Once with JavaScript rendering on, once as plain HTML. Screaming Frog and Sitebulb both let you switch modes.
- Compare the two crawls. Look at word count, internal links and titles. If important content only shows up in the rendered crawl, that’s your problem area.
- Check your robots.txt. Make sure you’re not blocking AI bots you actually want visiting (like GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot or PerplexityBot), and blocking the ones you don’t.
- Read your logs. A log analyzer (JetOctopus, Oncrawl, Botify or Screaming Frog’s Log File Analyser) shows whether those bots are visiting at all, and which pages they hit.
One more thing. Lumar and Botify both sell AI search metrics now. If that’s a big reason you bought Lumar, make sure your replacement covers it, or that you’ve got a manual process like the one above.
How to Move Off Lumar Without Losing Your History
This is the part nobody writes about, and it’s where switches go wrong. Before you cancel anything, do this:
- Export your crawl history. Your trend data won’t follow you to a new tool, and you shouldn’t assume you’ll have access once the contract ends. Export the reports you rely on now.
- Write down your custom setup. Custom extractions, segments, URL rewrite rules, authentication settings, crawl speed limits. It’s surprisingly easy to forget how much you configured over the years.
- Tell your dev or IT team about the new crawler. It’ll have a different user agent and IP addresses. Remember, Lumar’s crawler user agent kept the Deepcrawl name (at least at launch), so your firewall or CDN rules might be labeled “Deepcrawl” and look like something safe to delete. Don’t let anyone delete them until the new tool is set up and allowed through.
- Run both tools side by side for one crawl cycle. Expect different numbers. Crawlers count URLs differently depending on rendering, parameters and settings. A different total doesn’t mean one tool is wrong. Figure out why they differ before you panic.
- Rebuild alerts and scheduled crawls first, pretty reports second. The alert that catches a site-wide noindex matters more than a nice dashboard.
- Replace Protect before you lose it. If your developers used Lumar’s automated pre-release tests, line up a replacement first. Otherwise you’ve quietly removed the safety net from every deployment.
Deepcrawl Alternatives: Frequently Asked Questions
Is Deepcrawl the same as Lumar?
Yes. Deepcrawl rebranded to Lumar in September 2022. It’s the same company and the same platform, with renamed apps and a broader focus beyond SEO.
How much does Lumar cost?
Lumar doesn’t publish prices. You choose the features you want and request a quote through Lumar’s pricing page. You’ll find guesses online, but they vary a lot, so the only reliable number is the one in your quote.
What’s the best free alternative to Deepcrawl?
For small sites, the free version of Screaming Frog (500 URLs) and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (5,000 crawl credits per verified project each month) are the best options. Add Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools on top, since they’re free and show crawl data straight from the search engines.
Can Screaming Frog replace Deepcrawl for large sites?
It can, with some effort. The paid version’s crawl limit depends on your machine’s memory and storage, so millions of URLs needs serious hardware. If you crawl huge sites regularly or need shared, scheduled crawls, a cloud tool like JetOctopus or Sitebulb Cloud is easier to live with.
Which Deepcrawl alternative is best for log file analysis?
JetOctopus, Oncrawl and Botify all combine crawl and log data. On a budget, Screaming Frog’s Log File Analyser costs £99 a year and has a free version for up to 1,000 log lines.
Final Thoughts
Here’s my honest advice: buy a crawler for the site you have, not the site you hope to have one day.
Most small businesses and growing sites don’t need an enterprise platform. A desktop crawler like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb, plus Google Search Console, covers about everything they’ll ever need. Add a monitoring tool if releases keep breaking things.
And if you’re running a genuinely huge site, don’t switch just because Lumar’s pricing page annoyed you. Get quotes from two or three cloud tools, trial them on the same section of your site, and compare what each one finds.
The best alternative to Deepcrawl is the one you’ll actually open every week.
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