Sitebulb vs JetOctopus vs Oncrawl: Cloud SEO Crawlers Compared

Desktop crawlers get compared constantly — we’ve done Sitebulb vs Screaming Frog ourselves. But once your site outgrows a desktop app, or you need to know what Googlebot actually does rather than what a simulated crawl predicts, you end up comparing the cloud platforms: Sitebulb Cloud, JetOctopus, and Oncrawl. There’s surprisingly little independent writing on this matchup — mostly auto-generated compare pages and the vendors reviewing each other — so here’s an honest comparison with facts checked in July 2026, and a clear note on when none of the three is the right spend.

The three at a glance (verified July 2026)

All three vendors change pricing and packaging over time — confirm on their own sites before committing. Everything above was checked against official pricing pages and current third-party data in July 2026.

Sitebulb Cloud: the guided one

Sitebulb built its reputation on the desktop app’s prioritised “Hints” — each issue explained in plain language with a severity and a recommended fix — and Sitebulb Cloud (from £95/month) moves that experience into the browser: no project limits, automated recurring crawls, shared crawl data for teams, and JavaScript crawling with evergreen Chromium at no extra cost. Crawls scale into the millions of URLs. The pitch is interpretation: where the other two hand you datasets, Sitebulb tells you what’s wrong, how much it matters, and produces a report you can put in front of a client the same day. What it doesn’t centre is server-log analysis — if logs are the reason you’re going cloud, the other two are built around them.

JetOctopus: the fast, transparent one

JetOctopus is a cloud crawler and log analyzer with an unusually self-serve posture for this category: prices on the pricing page, configurable by volume, no project, user, simultaneous-crawl, or export limits. It advertises crawling at up to 250 pages per second, and its log analyzer bills only validated Googlebot and Bingbot lines while analysing 40+ bots — so you can overlay what your crawl predicts with what search bots actually do, plus 16 months of Search Console data and a Google Analytics module in the same interface. The advertised 1-million-page configuration (with 1M log lines, one GSC and one GA property) runs about $383/month billed annually; smaller and larger packages scale from there. Two costs to note honestly: JavaScript crawling counts one JS page as two HTML pages, effectively doubling per-page cost on JS-heavy sites, and the 7-day trial caps crawls at 10,000 URLs with limited exports — enough to evaluate, not to audit.

Oncrawl: the enterprise data platform

Oncrawl sits furthest up-market. It combines a crawler and a log analyzer with a data-science framing: dynamic segmentation, machine-learning-driven analysis, BI and API integrations, and log processing it markets at over 500 million lines per day. Customers it cites include Rakuten and Forbes, which tells you the intended buyer. The trade-off is opacity: Oncrawl no longer publishes flat pricing — plans are quote-based, and third-party procurement data indicates typical contracts land well into four or five figures annually depending on volume. That’s not a criticism so much as a category marker: Oncrawl is bought like enterprise software, with a sales conversation, onboarding, and a data team ready to use it. If that sentence describes your organisation, it belongs on your shortlist; if it doesn’t, you’ll likely be happier with one of the other two.

How to choose between them

• Pick Sitebulb Cloud if you want the platform to interpret findings for you, produce client-ready reports, and include JavaScript crawling without surcharges — and log analysis isn’t your driving need. The natural home for agencies.
• Pick JetOctopus if you want speed, transparent self-serve pricing, and crawl-plus-logs analysis on a large site without an enterprise procurement cycle. The natural home for hands-on technical SEOs.
• Pick Oncrawl if you’re an enterprise team that will feed crawl and log data into BI dashboards and custom analysis, and a quoted contract is normal for how you buy software.

And if you’re choosing between cloud and desktop in the first place: the fork is site size and logs. Under a few hundred thousand URLs with no log-analysis need, a desktop tool is dramatically cheaper — see our Sitebulb vs Screaming Frog comparison for that decision.

When none of the three is the right spend

All three are serious platforms priced for serious scope. Plenty of real situations need less. If your site is small, a desktop crawler — or Screaming Frog’s free 500-URL tier — covers a full technical audit. And if the question in front of you is specifically “is my internal linking holding pages back?” — the orphans, the pages buried too deep, the weak hubs — you don’t need a cloud subscription to find out. Crawlmouse crawls your live site in the browser, maps the internal-link graph, and grades the structure for free, with nothing to install. It does one job, not three hundred — it won’t replace any of these platforms for a full audit or log analysis — but for the internal-linking question it’s the fastest way to an answer. Because it reads raw server HTML without executing JavaScript, it also shows the version of your site that non-rendering AI crawlers actually see.

The practical move: run the free grade first. If internal linking is the problem, you’ve answered it for nothing. If the audit points somewhere broader — crawl budget, logs, rendering at scale — you now know which of the three platforms above fits, and you’ll walk into the trial knowing what to test.