Audra as a Sitebulb alternative

Sitebulb is the deeper auditor and the better tool if auditing is a weekly part of your job — it offers far more hints, crawl visualisations and audit-over-audit comparison, on a subscription. Audra covers the core audit once, for $19, and adds one thing Sitebulb does not have: an 8-check layer measuring whether AI answer engines can retrieve and cite your pages. Both keep desktop crawls local; Sitebulb Cloud is a separate product that does not.

Last updated 2026-07-28

Are Audra and Sitebulb the same kind of tool?

Almost. Both are desktop auditors that crawl a whole site and explain findings in plain language rather than dumping raw data, which puts them closer to each other than either is to a general-purpose crawler. What separates them is depth on one side and scope on the other.

Sitebulb goes considerably further on interpretation. Its "Hints" library — over 100 on the entry desktop tier and over 300 on the higher one — is the actual product: prioritised, explained, severity-ranked findings. It also does crawl visualisations, scheduled audits and comparison between successive crawls, none of which Audra attempts.

Audra answers a smaller question: what is wrong with this site, how bad is it overall, and can AI answer engines see it? It produces one scored document you can send to a client, and then it is finished. There is no trend chart and no crawl map.

How do they compare on price, platform and data location?

Sitebulb is a subscription with a 14-day free trial and no credit card required; Audra is $19 once with a free 7-day trial. Sitebulb Desktop stores crawls on your own disk, but Sitebulb Cloud is a separately-priced product that crawls on Sitebulb's infrastructure — so "is Sitebulb local?" depends entirely on which one you buy.

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 does Sitebulb do that Audra does not?

Everything that turns auditing into a repeatable programme rather than a one-off: trend comparison, scheduling, crawl visualisation, and a far larger library of prioritised hints.

• Audit-over-audit comparison. Sitebulb shows what changed since the last crawl. Audra stores past reports as local files you can reopen, but draws no trend lines and computes no diffs.
• Scheduled audits. Sitebulb Pro re-crawls on a schedule. Audra runs only when you press the button.
• Crawl maps and visualisations. Seeing site architecture as a diagram genuinely changes how you argue about internal linking with a developer. Audra has nothing comparable.
• Crawl scale. Sitebulb Lite handles 10,000 URLs per audit and Pro handles 500,000. Audra tops out at 1,000.
• Hint depth. More checks, more explanation, and prioritisation refined over years. If the quality of the explanation is what you are buying, Sitebulb is the stronger product.

What does Audra do that Sitebulb does not?

One substantive thing: it audits whether AI answer engines can retrieve and cite your pages. That is a distinct layer, not a rebadged SEO check.

The 8 AEO checks are retrieval-bot access in robots.txt (whether ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot are permitted on that path — weighted at 30% of the AEO score, because being blocked makes every other signal moot); training-bot access, reported but never scored as a failure; whether /llms.txt exists and is structurally valid per llmstxt.org; whether JSON-LD entities carry their required properties, so an Article without author, datePublished and dateModified fails; whether question-shaped content is marked up as FAQPage; whether the opening paragraph answers the page's own headline instead of opening with 60 words of preamble; whether a machine-readable freshness date exists and is under 21 days old; and whether the page carries enough internal links relative to your own site median, with an absolute floor of 3.

The second difference is cost shape. Audra is $19 once with no renewal. Over three years that is $19 against roughly $540 for Sitebulb Lite at its listed annual rate — but you are not buying the same thing, and the cheaper tool is only better value if it does the job you need. If it does not, $19 is wasted, not saved.

The third is a smaller point that matters for some work: Audra makes no AI or LLM API calls and has no telemetry. Every check is deterministic and runs offline against your own Chrome, and once activated the app works with no network connection at all.

Which one should you choose?

Choose Sitebulb if auditing is recurring work — monthly client retainers, tracking fixes over time, arguing priorities with developers. The subscription buys depth you will use every week, and the 14-day trial costs nothing to test.

Choose Audra if you audit occasionally, work on a Mac, want a clean client-facing report without a monthly line item, or specifically want the AI-visibility layer. They are not mutually exclusive either: using Audra for quick checks and a heavier tool for deep dives is a common and reasonable setup.

If crawl scale rather than depth is the deciding factor, the Screaming Frog comparison is more relevant. If you want to understand the scores underneath both tools first, start with what a good Lighthouse score actually means.