Best tools, by job
Which tool to use, by the job you are actually doing. Every claim about a named product here was read from that product's own documentation and is dated on the page, because a recommendation that cannot be checked is an advertisement.
$59once
For Macs with Apple silicon or Intel, macOS 12 or later, and 64-bit Windows
Priced in US dollars. Checkout shows your currency and any local tax.
On a Mac? Get the Mac version.
On your phone?
Launch price: $29.50 once, through 30 November. From 1 December: $59. Buy applies the code FOUNDINGDOCKET for you; if the checkout shows $59, enter it under ‘Have a discount code?’.
Screaming Frog is $279 a year. Ahrefs plans with Site Audit run $129–$449 a month. Check Engine is $59 once. Screaming Frog’s price read 4 November 2026, Ahrefs’ 9 November 2026.
30 days, no conditions, no questions asked. Refund policy
Intel Mac? Get the Intel version
Free SEO audit tools
Three genuinely free tools cover most of what a small site needs, and two of them are made by Google. What each does, the limits its own documentation states, and the three specific points where paying starts to help. The best free SEO audit tools →
Screaming Frog alternatives
Crawlers and audit tools for Mac and Windows, set beside Screaming Frog: what each costs, which computers it runs on, how much it crawls, and when it is the better choice. Ours is one of them and is labelled as ours. Screaming Frog alternatives for Mac and Windows →
White-label SEO audit tools
The tools that put your own name on an audit report, with what the white-label part of each one is, what a year of it costs, and when each is the better choice. Ours is one of them and is labelled as ours. White-label SEO audit tools for agencies →
How a tool gets onto one of these pages
There is no scoring formula and no ranking here, because a number invented to order a list is still invented. A guide gets written when there is a job worth choosing a tool for, and it names the tool that does that job best, which is regularly not ours.
- Every capability claim comes from the vendor. Not from a review, not from a comparison table someone else built, and not from memory. Where a page says a tool does or does not do something, it is reading that tool's own documentation or published feature list, with a link and the date it was read. Documentation changes; an undated claim is one you cannot check.
- A missing feature is written up as a missing claim. If a vendor's own pages never mention something, that is what the page says, not that the product is incapable of it. Those are different statements, and only one of them is evidence.
- Prices are the vendor's, in the vendor's own terms. Taken from their pricing page, in the currency and billing period that page states, and dated like everything else.
- No link on this site earns a commission. There are no affiliate parameters on any outbound link here, and nothing paid to be listed.
We make one of the tools
Check Engine is ours, which is exactly why every sentence about it deserves checking, so the method above is pointed back at us too. Every comparison page on this site names what the other tool does better than Check Engine. One of them says plainly that a competitor is cheaper. Where Check Engine has no answer at all (rendering at scale, Core Web Vitals, backlinks, rank tracking), the page covering that tool says so before it makes any case in our favour. A page here that reads like an advertisement is a bug in the page.
More coming
Further guides are being written, one per job worth choosing a tool for.