Sitebulb vs Surfer Comparison 2026
Both cover seo & discovery. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
At a glance
- Sitebulb starts cheaper, at $18.
- Neither has a free tier.
Side by side
Sitebulb | Surfer | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $18 | From $49 |
| Pricing model | Paid subscription | Paid subscription |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Billing | Monthly or annual | Not stated |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
| Their cut | None | None |
| Runs on (they differ) | macOS, Windows | Web |
| Covers | SEO & Discovery |
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.
Sitebulb
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.
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.
Surfer
Write the page against what is already ranking
Surfer reads what currently ranks for a term and turns it into instructions while a draft is being written: length, headings, and the terms the page is missing. It now tracks how often a brand appears in AI answers alongside its position in search. The cheapest tier exists to test the workflow on a small number of documents. Anybody expecting a rank tracker or a crawler is buying the wrong tool, because this is aimed at the writing rather than the site.
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.