Making the work
Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover seo & discovery. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Exploding Topics | Sitebulb | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $39 | From $18 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Free trial, then paid | Paid subscription |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | 7 days | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
| Data export |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Trends spotted before they peak
Exploding Topics watches search and social signals and surfaces subjects on the way up, which is a different job from a keyword tool that tells you what is already big. For somebody choosing what to make next, early is the whole value. It is now a Semrush product, and the cheapest plan holds back the CSV export.
Our note
The $39 plan cannot export, so the research stays in their interface. If the point is feeding a content calendar or a spreadsheet, the real entry price is $99.
Only on this side
A crawler that explains what it found
Sitebulb crawls a site and returns prioritised issues with an explanation of why each one matters, which is the difference between this and a spreadsheet of URLs. Crawl maps draw the structure of a site as a picture. JavaScript rendering is on every plan rather than reserved for the dearest. The desktop product audits ten thousand URLs at the entry tier, so anybody auditing a large site is looking at the cloud version instead.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.
| Not stated |
| Their cut | None | None |
|---|
| Runs on (they differ) | Web | macOS, Windows |
|---|
| Covers | Research & Trends, SEO & Discovery | SEO & Discovery |
|---|
| Works with | Nothing in particular | Nothing in particular |
|---|
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
|---|
| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
|---|
| Live deals | 1 | None right now |
|---|
Our note
Check your URL count before choosing Lite, because 10,000 sounds generous and a site with faceted navigation or a large archive passes it without anybody noticing. The explanations are the reason to buy this over a cheaper crawler, and they are worth most to whoever is still learning what the findings mean.