Sitebulb vs SpeedCurve in 2026: Crawl audits vs continuous performance monitoring
Sitebulb finds broken links, duplicate content, and crawl issues. SpeedCurve watches Core Web Vitals and competitor speed over time. Neither one does the other's job.
Sitebulb
SpeedCurve- Sitebulb crawls a site to find structural and content issues across 300+ prioritized Hints. SpeedCurve has no crawler at all; it monitors speed metrics for URLs you configure.
- SpeedCurve tracks Core Web Vitals continuously through synthetic testing and real user monitoring. Sitebulb has no ongoing performance monitoring or RUM capability.
- SpeedCurve's competitive benchmarking tracks named competitor URLs on the same chart using the same methodology. Sitebulb has no competitor tracking feature.
- Sitebulb starts at $18/month and includes JavaScript crawling on every tier. SpeedCurve starts at $90/month with no free tier.
- SpeedCurve connects performance metrics to conversion rate and revenue through business impact correlation. Sitebulb has no equivalent business-metric layer.
- Neither tool tracks AI search visibility or AI Overviews citations. Both are built around traditional technical SEO and performance signals.
Sitebulb and SpeedCurve both show up in technical SEO stacks, but they were built to answer different questions. Sitebulb crawls a site and ranks what it finds, broken links, duplicate content, canonical problems, missing metadata, across 300-plus prioritized Hints, starting at $18 a month with JavaScript rendering included on every plan. SpeedCurve watches how fast a site actually is for real visitors, tracking Core Web Vitals through synthetic tests and real user monitoring, and layering in competitive benchmarking and revenue correlation that no crawler attempts, starting at $90 a month. If your problem is "what is technically broken on this site," Sitebulb is built for that. If your problem is "is this site fast enough, and is it getting faster than our competitors," that is SpeedCurve's entire reason for existing.
The tools at a glance
Sitebulb
Website crawler for technical SEO audits with prioritized hints and visual reporting
Sitebulb crawls a website and turns the results into more than 300 prioritized Hints, each ranked by severity with built-in educational context explaining why a given issue matters. That prioritization is the main reason agencies pick it over a raw crawler: instead of a flat list of URLs, you get a ranked starting point for where to focus first.
It ships as Desktop, which runs locally and suits freelancers who want full control, and Cloud, which adds team collaboration, scheduled recurring crawls, and capacity up to 10 million URLs per audit for larger accounts. JavaScript rendering is included on every plan, including the $18 Lite tier, at no extra cost, which is not universal among competing crawlers.
What it does not do is monitor performance over time. There is no real user monitoring, no synthetic testing schedule, no Core Web Vitals trend chart, and no competitive speed benchmarking. Sitebulb tells you what is structurally wrong with a site at the moment you crawl it; it does not watch how fast the site loads for real visitors afterward.
| Feature | Lite $18/month | Pro $42/month | Cloud From $125/month |
|---|---|---|---|
| URLs per audit | 10,000 | 500,000 | Up to 10 million |
| SEO Hints | 100+ | 300+ | 300+ |
| JavaScript crawling | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| GA / GSC / Sheets integration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduled audits | No | Yes | Yes |
| Audit comparisons | No | Yes | Yes |
| Customized PDF reports | No | Yes | Yes |
| Team collaboration | No | Add-on +$11/user | Included (2+ users) |
| Project limits | Limited | Limited | Unlimited |
| Data Studio integration | No | No | Yes |
| Free trial | 14 days | 14 days | 14 days |
SpeedCurve
Web performance monitoring platform that tracks site speed through synthetic testing and real user monitoring, with competitive benchmarking and business impact correlation.
SpeedCurve was founded by Steve Souders and Mark Zeman, two of the most recognized names in web performance engineering, and it shows in the product's focus: continuous visibility into how a site performs, not a one-time snapshot. It combines scheduled synthetic tests from global locations with real user monitoring captured from actual visitor sessions, presenting both on the same timeline.
Two features set it apart from simpler performance tools. Competitive benchmarking lets you add named competitor URLs and track their performance alongside your own using identical methodology, so you can see whether a given optimization actually moved you ahead of a rival. Business impact correlation connects metrics like LCP to conversion rate and revenue, giving performance data a language non-technical stakeholders can act on.
It has no crawler and does not look at page content, metadata, links, or indexing issues at all. Pricing starts at $90 a month for Starter and scales to $576 for Growth, with Enterprise requiring a custom quote, and there is no free tier or public trial. The interface assumes more performance expertise than a simpler tool would.
| Feature | Starter $90/month | Growth $576/month | Enterprise Contact for pricing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Synthetic monitoring | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Real user monitoring | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Competitive benchmarking | Limited | Yes | Yes |
| Business impact correlation | No | Yes | Yes |
| API access | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| CI/CD integration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Performance budgets | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Head-to-head feature comparison
| Feature | Sitebulb | SpeedCurve |
|---|---|---|
| Primary function | Technical SEO crawl audits | Continuous performance monitoring |
| Starting price | $18/month (Lite) | $90/month (Starter) |
| Free trial | 14 days | Not publicly advertised |
| Site crawler | Yes | No |
| JavaScript crawling | Yes, all plans | Not applicable |
| Prioritized issue hints | Yes, 300+ Hints | No |
| Real user monitoring (RUM) | No | Yes |
| Scheduled synthetic performance testing | No | Yes |
| Core Web Vitals trend tracking | No | Yes |
| Competitive speed benchmarking | No | Yes |
| Business impact / revenue correlation | No | Yes |
| CI/CD pipeline integration | No | Yes |
| API access | No (MCP server in development) | Yes, all plans |
| Max URLs / scale | Up to 10 million URLs/audit (Cloud) | Not URL-crawl based |
Which should you choose?
SitebulbSpeedCurveSitebulbSpeedCurveSitebulbSpeedCurveThere is barely any functional overlap here, so the choice usually is not Sitebulb versus SpeedCurve, it is Sitebulb and/or SpeedCurve depending on what problem is active. Sitebulb answers structural and content questions at the moment of a crawl: broken links, duplicate content, missing metadata, indexing issues. SpeedCurve answers a completely different question over time: is this page fast enough for real visitors, and is it getting faster or slower relative to named competitors. Larger teams with a dedicated performance function often run both, since Sitebulb's audits do not measure real-world speed and SpeedCurve does not look at crawl or content issues at all.
Bottom line
Start with Sitebulb if the immediate need is a thorough crawl audit and you want prioritized, ranked issues at a price a freelancer can justify. Add SpeedCurve once Core Web Vitals and page speed become an ongoing concern that needs continuous monitoring, competitive benchmarking, or a business case tied to revenue, since Sitebulb was never built to track any of that over time.
Frequently asked questions
Can Sitebulb monitor Core Web Vitals over time like SpeedCurve does?
Sitebulb cannot monitor Core Web Vitals over time the way SpeedCurve does; it captures a snapshot at crawl time and has no real user monitoring, no scheduled synthetic testing, and no historical Core Web Vitals trend chart. SpeedCurve is built specifically for that kind of continuous tracking, which is the core gap between the two tools.
Does SpeedCurve find broken links or duplicate content issues?
SpeedCurve does not find broken links or duplicate content issues since it has no crawler and does not evaluate page content, metadata, internal links, or indexing status at all. It exists to measure speed and Core Web Vitals for URLs you configure, not to audit a site's technical SEO structure.
Is SpeedCurve worth $90 a month for a small agency?
Only if performance monitoring is an ongoing client need rather than a one-time check. At $90 a month minimum with no free tier, SpeedCurve is priced for teams with a dedicated performance function; smaller agencies doing occasional speed checks may get more value from WebPageTest's free tier before committing to SpeedCurve's subscription.
Which tool is cheaper to get started with?
Sitebulb, by a wide margin. Its Lite plan starts at $18 a month with JavaScript crawling included, versus SpeedCurve's $90-a-month Starter tier with no free trial. The two tools are not really substitutes, but on cost alone, Sitebulb is the easier first purchase.
Does Sitebulb Cloud offer any kind of performance monitoring add-on?
Sitebulb Cloud does not offer a performance monitoring add-on; it adds team collaboration, scheduled recurring crawls, and larger URL capacity up to 10 million per audit, but none of that extends into real user monitoring or synthetic performance testing. For that layer, a dedicated tool like SpeedCurve is still required.
Can SpeedCurve's competitive benchmarking replace manual competitor speed checks?
Yes, that is its purpose. SpeedCurve tracks named competitor URLs using the same synthetic testing methodology applied to your own site, so comparisons are consistent rather than based on ad hoc one-off tests run at different times or with different tools. Sitebulb has no competitor tracking feature of any kind.