Audra as a Semrush Site Audit alternative

Semrush Site Audit is one module of a marketing suite priced monthly, with cloud crawling, scheduling, issue tracking and white-label client reporting. Audra audits technical health only — Lighthouse, 14 HTML SEO checks, axe-core accessibility, broken links and 8 AI-visibility checks — locally on macOS or Windows for $19 once. It is a cost-and-privacy alternative to one module, not a feature-for-feature replacement for the suite.

Last updated 2026-07-28

Is Audra actually an alternative to Semrush?

Only to its Site Audit module, and only for on-demand audits. Semrush spans keyword research, competitor analysis, advertising data, content tools, rank tracking and now AI prompt tracking; Audra does one crawl-and-report job on your own machine.

That makes the comparison worth having in exactly one situation: you subscribed largely to audit client sites, and the rest of the suite goes mostly unopened. Buying a suite for one module is an expensive way to buy one feature — but if you use three modules, none of this applies and you should keep the subscription.

Semrush restructured its plan naming during the 2025–26 cycle, with SEO, Starter, Pro+ and Advanced replacing the older Pro, Guru and Business names, and AI prompt tracking as a headline metric. That is itself a signal that answer-engine visibility has become a mainstream concern rather than a niche one.

How do the two compare on price, crawling and privacy?

Semrush is cloud-crawled, subscription-priced and continuously monitoring, with a 7-day free trial; Audra is locally crawled, $19 once, on-demand, with a free 7-day trial. Semrush wins on breadth and automation; Audra wins on cost shape, privacy, and the ability to audit sites that are not publicly reachable.

Competitor pricing below was checked against each vendor's own pricing page in July 2026. Pricing changes; confirm the current figure with the vendor before deciding on it.

What are Semrush Site Audit's crawl limits?

A free Semrush account crawls 100 pages per month. The entry paid tier crawls 100,000 pages per month with a 20,000-page ceiling per individual audit, the middle tier raises the monthly allowance to 300,000, and the top tier allows 1,000,000 pages per month with 100,000 per audit.

This is worth stating plainly, because it is where the two products' free options diverge in an interesting way: Semrush's free 100 pages per month is roughly one Audra-sized report per month, in the cloud, at no cost. If that genuinely covers your site, use it — it is the cheaper option and there is no reason to pretend otherwise.

The paid comparison is not close in either direction. Semrush crawls orders of magnitude more; Audra costs orders of magnitude less. Volume and price are not the same axis, and choosing on either one alone is how people end up with the wrong tool.

Where does Semrush genuinely win?

On breadth, automation, and everything a team needs that a single-user desktop app cannot provide.

• Continuous monitoring. Scheduled recurring audits with historical trend graphs, so regressions surface without anyone remembering to check. Audra has no scheduling at all.
• Crawl scale. Six-figure monthly page allowances against Audra's 1,000-page ceiling per report.
• White-label client reporting. Branded PDF reports carrying your own logo. Audra exports self-contained HTML and A4 PDF with no branding options whatsoever.
• Multi-user and agency workflows. Shared projects, seats, and one source of truth. Audra is one user and files on one disk.
• Thematic reports. Crawlability, HTTPS, Core Web Vitals and internal linking as separate structured views, integrated with Search Console and Analytics data.
• Everything outside auditing. Keyword research, rank tracking, competitor and advertising analysis, content tools. If you use any of it, the subscription is already justified.

What does Audra do that Semrush does not?

Three things, all of them narrow: page-level AI-visibility checks, full accessibility testing, and auditing sites that are not publicly reachable.

The AEO layer is genuinely distinct from Semrush's AI prompt tracking. Prompt tracking asks "do AI assistants mention my brand?"; Audra's checks ask "can they retrieve and cite this specific page?" — whether robots.txt permits ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot (30% of the AEO score, because being blocked makes every other signal irrelevant), whether /llms.txt exists and is valid, whether JSON-LD entities carry required properties, whether question-shaped content is marked up as FAQPage, whether the opening paragraph answers the headline instead of warming up for 60 words, whether a freshness date is machine-readable and under 21 days old, and whether internal links reach at least 3 or 40% of your site median. Those are page-level, actionable and diagnostic; they complement prompt tracking rather than competing with it.

Accessibility is the second. Audra runs the full axe-core 4.12 ruleset on every crawled page, weighting violations by impact — critical 15, serious 10, moderate 4 — and folding the result into the Accessibility sub-score at 25% of the composite. Accessibility is not a focus of Semrush Site Audit.

Third, local execution means staging sites, password-protected pre-launch builds and internal tools audit exactly like production. A cloud crawler cannot reach them. If that is a regular part of your work it is not a small point — see why PageSpeed Insights cannot audit staging either.

Who is each one actually for?

Semrush suits marketing teams running ongoing programmes across several channels, where auditing is one recurring task among many and the subscription is shared. Audra suits freelancers, developers and small agencies who need to know what is technically wrong with a site today, produce something to hand over, and not add a monthly bill.

Choosing on price alone is a mistake in either direction. Decide on the jobs you actually do each week: if that list includes keyword research, rank tracking or client-facing branded reporting, buy the suite. If it is "crawl this site, tell me what is broken, give me a PDF", the $19 tool does that job and the suite is overkill.

Related reading: the Ahrefs Site Audit comparison covers the same suite-versus-tool trade-off, and the WordPress audit guide covers what to check on the platform most of these audits land on.