Check Engine vs Sitebulb

By Matt Kerr·Published 6 August 2026·Updated 19 October 2026

Sitebulb and Check Engine are aiming at the same problem from different sides. Sitebulb turns crawl data into visual reports an agency can present. Check Engine turns it into an ordered list of work. If you need an interactive crawl map, Sitebulb is the better fit. If you need to know what to do on Monday, Check Engine is more direct about it.

Sitebulb's real advantage: an interactive crawl map

Sitebulb's interactive crawl map is a feature Check Engine does not have. It draws the site as an interactive map: isolated content clusters, pages buried too deep, link equity pooling in the wrong places. Some structural problems are genuinely easier to see than to read, and a client will understand a picture of their own site faster than a table about it.

Check Engine draws a static structure map in its HTML report: pages in rings by click depth, sized by link equity. It also compares audits with checkengine diff, writes client PDFs with your agency's name and logo, and runs scheduled monitoring while the app is open. The map is not interactive, so that remains a reason to choose Sitebulb.

Where Check Engine is more useful

Sitebulb prioritises issues and explains them in plain English, which is why it is the friendlier of the two established crawlers. The remaining complaint in reviews is that its hints still need experienced judgement to filter, particularly on large or programmatic sites, where the volume of surfaced issues is itself the problem.

Check Engine's answer is to be conservative about what it reports and explicit about what it does not know:

• An area that does not apply to your site is marked not applicable, never scored 100. A software company with a head office is not told to put a city in its titles.
• If a crawl is rate-limited or only reaches a fraction of the site, findings that claim something is missing site-wide are withheld, and the report says they are unknown rather than passing.
• Copy-quality checks are English-only and stand down on other languages instead of reporting every English phrase as absent.

Side by side

One difference worth drawing out: Check Engine splits a site into sections itself, inferring them from URL structure, on the theory that the people who most need the feature will not sit down and write rules. Sitebulb's features page describes a Custom URL explorer where you choose the columns, filters and sort, configuring the view rather than having it inferred. That is a trade, and the report says so: inferred sections are less precise than ones you define.

Which one to pick

Choose Sitebulb if visual reporting is how you sell work, if you need the interactive crawl map, if your clients' sites are JavaScript-heavy, or if a team needs shared access.

Choose Check Engine if you want the audit to cover marketing and AI visibility as well as technical SEO, if you would rather own the tool than rent it, or if you want a report that is careful about the difference between "we checked and it is fine" and "we could not check".

Checked 19 October 2026. The factual claims about this product were read from its own pages on that date: "crawl maps" as an interactive visualisation (source); "Prioritized Hints": a prioritised, categorised issue list where each entry explains the issue and why it matters (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.