The other big thing, in comparison to cloud software, is convenience. You can setup a crawl and start it running -and see URLs being crawled - within a minute.

On cloud software that's simply not possible, due to the way that everything is scheduled.

There are a few other small things, such as being able to view Audits offline (what we call 'train mode').

The cost structure can be a big limiting factor though, especially for smaller companies. Sitebulb effectively remove all limitations around number of domains, number of projects, total number of URLs crawled etc...

> The other big thing, in comparison to cloud software, is convenience. You can setup a crawl and start it running -and see URLs being crawled - within a minute.

This depends on implementation. If the architecture is modern and well thought, using dynamic scaling or even AWS Lambda, the result should be available much faster on the cloud software due to ability to parallelization. You can only have so much network bandwith / CPU power locally and if you need to crawl hundreds of pages to get your result, it matters a lot.

Disclaimer: I'm building a SaaS tool for SEO which also involves page crawling.

> On cloud software that's simply not possible, due to the way that everything is scheduled.

As someone who works in cloud software this makes me cringe a little.

I have no doubt this is how existing cloud SEO crawlers work but with elastic scaling, web sockets, and serverless there is no reason why this has to be true.

It is not a limitation of cloud software. It is a sign of devs and/or product owners deciding making instant results is not a priority for the product.

Edit: I hear that a lot from industries that are not intimately familiar with web apps. "You can't do that on the cloud"... a typical web software engineer will not be able to do it but there are people out there who can. They are more expensive than your typical developer but if depending on your product they are worth it.

Sorry, maybe I misread, but I kind of read the comment as 'what separates this from other cloud products on the market?'

So I wasn't trying to argue what is and isn't possible with cloud architecture, simply what is and isn't possible with (our) cloud-based competitors.

The process is along the lines of: 'Click Start', get taken to a screen which says 'Initializing' or similar, then maybe 2-3 minutes later you'll see something start to happen. But there is little to no data on which URLs are actually being crawled.

Sitebulb, and desktop crawlers in general, has a much quicker feedback loop.

> Sitebulb, and desktop crawlers in general, has a much quicker feedback loop.

I wasn't denying that. I'm sure it does. I am confident this is way better than most (if not all) current cloud solutions.

I just think it is unfortunate because there is no technical limitation of the cloud that prevents it from being instant on the cloud as well.

The cloud can't handle spikes well (1,000 customers all unexpectedly try to scan at once) but if the load is predictable, linear, or easily done in parallel which I suspect it is for this use case than it is perfectly doable with no delay on the cloud.

Deepcrawl does that, but again it entirely depends on the website type and infastructure you have got.

The one advantage that I can think of is this can run on websites that are in development and not accessible to something running in the cloud. A lot of enterprise websites have their dev/stage behind a VPN and being able to run this against those without having to find out how to jump through hoops would be really nice (which is looks like this is capable of doing since you just need to feed it a URL). On top of that you also don't have to worry about what they're doing with the data output by the program on their server.

> On top of that you also don't have to worry about what they're doing with the data output by the program on their server.

Why would you care if the site is available in the Internet and you can't control who is browsing it?

This is a valid argument only for internal websites which are not a subject for SEO anyway.

But it can run on sites that will be public but are not yet deployed.

Yep exactly. All crawls are stored locally so there is no data issue to worry about.