Check Engine vs Scrutiny
Scrutiny is a macOS desktop SEO tool sold for a one-time fee, which makes it the closest thing to Check Engine on the market: no account, no subscription, runs on your own computer. If you are choosing between the two, the honest summary is that Check Engine costs less, and Scrutiny does several things Check Engine does not do at all.
What Scrutiny does that Check Engine does not
Its published feature list names link checking, HTML validation, XML sitemap generation, SEO, spell checking and site search. Three of those Check Engine has no answer to:
- Spell checking. Check Engine does not check spelling, in any language. If proofreading a site is the job in front of you, Check Engine is the wrong purchase.
- HTML validation. Check Engine checks specific structural things (headings, canonicals, structured data) and does not validate markup against the specification.
- Site search. Check Engine has no equivalent of searching your own crawled content.
On price, Check Engine is the cheaper of the two: $59 against Scrutiny's $149 USD, both paid once.
What Check Engine does that Scrutiny's feature list does not name
The list above names SEO as a single item. What Check Engine adds is not "more SEO checks" but categories that list does not cover: whether your landing pages give a visitor a reason and a route to act, whether your brand is presented consistently, whether a local business has the markup local results need, and whether AI crawlers can reach you at all.
That last one is the axis Check Engine is actually built on, and it is worth being
precise about what it means. Reading robots.txt tells you what a
site permits. Check Engine asks the server, as each crawler, with that
crawler's documented user-agent, and compares the answer. The two disagree more
often than anyone expects: a CDN or WAF rule refuses a crawler your
robots.txt explicitly allows, and nothing in the file will ever tell
you.
Which one to pick
Choose Scrutiny if you want link checking and spell checking on a Mac for less money, or if validation and site search are what you actually need. It has been developed for years, it is macOS-native, and for those jobs Check Engine has nothing to offer you.
Choose Check Engine if you want a ranked fix plan rather than a dataset, a client-ready report, and the AI-visibility and conversion checks that Scrutiny's feature list does not name.
Both run on your own machine and neither wants a subscription, which is more than most of this market can say. If buying once is the part that matters, CrawlRaven is the other name worth knowing about. It sells mainly by the month now, with a lifetime plan beside it, and its pricing page includes a technical audit within a monthly page allowance.
Checked 19 October 2026. The factual claims about this product were read from its own pages on that date: the vendor's own product schema gives operatingSystem "MacOS", with "There are no plans" for Windows (source); that schema's offer states a price of 149 USD (source); its published featureList is "Link checking, html validation, XML Sitemap generation, SEO, spell checking, site search" (source). Products change and pricing changes; if something here has gone out of date, tell us and it will be corrected. Everything else on this page is a comparison of approach, not a claim about their roadmap.
Check Engine is a one-time purchase for Mac and Windows: no account, no crawl credits, and the crawl runs
on your machine. Five optional checks fetch data it cannot produce alone; --offline
turns all five off.
$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
Common questions
Is Check Engine a Scrutiny alternative?
Partly. Both are one-time purchases that run locally on a Mac (Check Engine also runs on Windows). Scrutiny does spell checking, HTML validation and site search, none of which Check Engine does. Check Engine adds AI-crawler access, conversion and local-business checks, and produces a ranked fix plan.
Which is cheaper?
Check Engine, at $59 against Scrutiny's $149 USD. Both are one-time purchases rather than subscriptions.
Does Scrutiny run on Windows?
No. Its product page says there are no plans for Windows. Check Engine's desktop app has an installer for 64-bit Windows as well as the Mac app, and its audit engine also ships as a Linux command-line build.