ChatGPT answers, unedited

If your priority is scheduled crawls + detailed crawl-rate/crawl-budget reporting, I’d narrow it to Botify, JetOctopus, and Lumar, with Botify as my first choice for serious crawl-budget analysis.

1. botify.com — my top pick

If by "crawl budget reporting" you mean "show me what Googlebot actually did with my site, how often it crawled different URL classes, what it ignored, and where we're wasting crawl capacity", Botify is probably the strongest fit.

Its Search Engines reporting combines your crawler data with server-log data and can show things such as:

• Percentage of your URLs crawled by Google
• Crawl frequency
• Crawl depth
• URLs Google crawled vs. didn't crawl
• Orphan URLs and how much Google crawls them
• Crawl activity by indexability
• Cumulative Google crawl activity over time
• Comparison between Botify's crawl and Google's actual crawl behavior Botify Knowledge Base

It also supports daily, weekly, monthly, or continuously recurring crawls, so it works well as an ongoing monitoring system rather than simply an audit tool. Botify Knowledge Base

The big differentiator is that Botify lets you combine crawl data + server logs + GSC data. That's important because a conventional crawler tells you what your crawler discovered, whereas crawl-budget analysis needs to tell you what Googlebot actually spent its time crawling. Botify Knowledge Base Botify Knowledge Base

I'd choose Botify if: you're managing millions of URLs, a large ecommerce/content site, faceted navigation, large numbers of parameter URLs, or you need executive-level reporting on Googlebot behavior.

2. jetoctopus.com — probably the best value

JetOctopus is the one I'd investigate first if Botify feels unnecessarily enterprise-oriented.

It combines:

• Cloud crawling
• Log-file analysis
• Googlebot/Bingbot behavior
• Crawl-budget optimization
• Crawl scheduling
• Crawl comparisons
• Segmentation
• GSC data
• Analysis of 40+ bots

Its current offering specifically advertises crawl-budget optimization insights and live log analysis, while its crawler can run at up to 250 pages/sec. Tech SEO Platform

The particularly useful thing is the crawl + logs correlation. For example, you can answer questions like:

"Googlebot is spending 38% of its crawl activity on URLs that aren't indexable."

That's considerably more useful than simply knowing that your crawler encountered 38,000 non-indexable URLs.

JetOctopus also supports scheduled crawls and crawl comparisons. Tech SEO Platform

I'd choose JetOctopus if: you're in the ~100K–several-million-URL range and want detailed technical data without necessarily buying a full enterprise SEO platform.

3. lumar.io — best for enterprise monitoring

Lumar (formerly DeepCrawl) is excellent if your primary requirement is continuous technical SEO monitoring.

It's particularly strong for:

• Scheduled/continuous crawling
• Large sites
• JavaScript rendering
• Regression detection
• Automated alerts
• Technical SEO monitoring
• Enterprise workflows/API integration

I'd put it behind Botify for your specific requirement, though, because crawl-budget analysis based on actual search-engine behavior is where Botify's log-analysis capabilities give it a meaningful advantage.

4. sitebulb.com — excellent reporting, less crawl-budget-centric

Sitebulb is fantastic for technical SEO reporting and visualization. Its cloud version can crawl up to 10 million URLs per audit, supports scheduled crawls, and provides extensive visualization and reporting. Sitebulb

Its strength is answering:

"What's wrong with my site and how do I communicate it clearly?"

rather than:

"Exactly how is Googlebot allocating its crawl budget?"

So I'd favor Sitebulb for technical SEO auditing/reporting, but Botify or JetOctopus for crawl-budget intelligence.

What I'd actually buy

I'd make the decision this way:

• Enterprise / millions of URLs / serious crawl-budget program → Botify
• Mid-market / large site / want logs + crawl data without going full enterprise → JetOctopus
• Enterprise technical SEO monitoring and regression detection → Lumar
• Primarily technical audits and polished reporting → Sitebulb Cloud
• Need maximum crawler control and don't need integrated Googlebot log analysis → Screaming Frog

One important distinction: "crawl rate" and "crawl budget" aren't quite the same thing. A crawler can tell you how fast your crawler is crawling. To understand Google's crawl budget, you really want server-log data showing Googlebot requests over time, ideally segmented by URL type, status code, indexability, content type, directory, parameters, etc. Botify and JetOctopus are much better suited to that than conventional crawlers. Botify Knowledge Base Tech SEO Platform

If you tell me roughly how many URLs the site has (e.g. 100K, 1M, 10M+) and whether you have access to server logs, I can recommend the specific platform and the crawl-budget dashboard/metrics I'd set up.

"What's wrong with my site and how do I communicate it clearly?"

rather than:

"Exactly how is Googlebot allocating its crawl budget?"

So I'd favor Sitebulb for technical SEO auditing/reporting, but Botify or JetOctopus for crawl-budget intelligence.

What I'd actually buy

If your priority is scheduled crawls + detailed crawl-rate/crawl-budget reporting, I’d shortlist these:

My #1: JetOctopus

For the specific requirement you described, JetOctopus is probably the one I'd evaluate first.

The important distinction is that there are really two different kinds of “crawl rate”:

1. Your crawler's crawl rate — e.g. how quickly JetOctopus/Screaming Frog crawls your site.
2. Googlebot's crawl behavior — how many URLs Google actually requests, how frequently, which sections it favors, response codes, wasted crawling, etc.

If you're interested in crawl budget, #2 is what matters. JetOctopus combines its site crawler with real-time server-log analysis, allowing you to see what Googlebot and other bots actually do. It also combines crawl, log, GSC and GA4 data. jetoctopus.com

That makes it particularly good for questions like:

• How many Googlebot requests are we getting per day?
• Which URL types consume the most crawl budget?
• What percentage of Googlebot crawling returns 2xx/3xx/4xx/5xx?
• How much crawling is going to parameter URLs, faceted navigation, duplicate pages, etc.?
• Which pages are in our XML sitemap but rarely/never crawled?
• Is Googlebot spending its time on low-value URLs?
• Did crawl behavior change after a site release?
• How does Googlebot's behavior differ from GPTBot, ClaudeBot, etc.?

JetOctopus currently advertises real-time bot logs, full-site crawls, 16+ months of GSC data, and large-scale crawling, including very large sites. jetoctopus.com

Runner-up: OnCrawl

I'd put OnCrawl ahead of JetOctopus if your SEO team is particularly data/analytics-oriented.

Its strength is combining crawl data + log files + search data and allowing sophisticated segmentation and analysis. It's particularly interesting if you want to build your own models around things such as:

Googlebot visits → indexation → rankings → organic traffic

rather than just looking at a conventional technical SEO dashboard.

Enterprise option: Lumar

I'd look at Lumar if you're dealing with a large enterprise site and want scheduled crawling, monitoring, change detection, workflows and governance across a sizeable SEO/dev organization.

It's more of an enterprise technical-SEO monitoring platform than simply a crawl-budget analytics tool.

Don't overlook Google Search Console

I'd actually use Google Search Console Crawl Stats alongside whichever crawler you choose.

Google's Crawl Stats report gives you Google's own data on crawl requests, timing, response codes and availability issues. That's substantially more authoritative for Googlebot behavior than any third-party crawler can be. support.google.com

The ideal architecture is therefore:

Crawler → discovers/diagnoses everything on the site
Server logs → tells you what Googlebot actually crawled
GSC Crawl Stats → Google's first-party aggregate crawl data
GSC indexing data → tells you what Google indexed

Where Sitebulb fits

Sitebulb Cloud is excellent if what you really want is beautiful scheduled technical SEO audits and change reporting. Cloud supports crawls up to 10M URLs and scheduled recurring crawls. sitebulb.com

But there's an important limitation for your particular use case: Sitebulb doesn't currently provide log-file analysis. sitebulb.com

So I'd choose Sitebulb over JetOctopus if your primary question is:

“What technical SEO problems changed between this month's crawl and last month's?”

I'd choose JetOctopus/OnCrawl if it's:

“How is Googlebot actually spending our crawl budget?”

What I'd buy

Under ~100K URLs:
Sitebulb Cloud + GSC is probably sufficient.

100K–1M URLs:
JetOctopus would be my first trial.

1M+ URLs / sophisticated enterprise SEO:
I'd demo JetOctopus, OnCrawl and Lumar against the same dataset.

If crawl budget is a major strategic issue:
Don't buy a crawler that only gives you crawl reports. Make server-log analysis a hard requirement. A scheduled crawl tells you what your crawler found; logs tell you what Googlebot actually spent its time crawling. JetOctopus and OnCrawl are much better aligned with that distinction. jetoctopus.com

If you tell me roughly how many URLs the site has (100K / 1M / 10M+), whether you have access to server/CDN logs, and whether this is one site or a portfolio, I can narrow this down to the best 2–3 options and compare their crawl scheduling, crawl-budget dashboards, log ingestion, alerting, API/BI exports, and likely cost.

If your priority is specifically scheduled site crawls + detailed crawl-rate data + crawl-budget analysis, I’d narrow the field considerably.

My top picks

1. botify.com — best overall

• Strongest fit if you want to understand how search engines crawl your site, not just find technical SEO errors.
• Supports recurring daily/weekly/monthly crawls and continuous crawling. Botify Knowledge Base Botify Knowledge Base
• Gives real-time crawl speed (URLs/sec), bandwidth utilization, response time, URLs crawled vs. discovered, URL discovery rate, and HTTP-status trends. Botify Knowledge Base
• Particularly good when combined with server log data + Google Search Console, allowing you to compare what your crawler sees with what Googlebot actually does. Botify Knowledge Base
• You can control maximum URLs, crawl speed, and crawl depth. Botify Knowledge Base

I'd choose this for an enterprise site where crawl budget is a serious SEO KPI.

2. lumar.io — best for enterprise technical SEO monitoring

• Excellent for scheduled/continuous crawling and large sites.
• Particularly attractive if you want segmentation, automated monitoring, JavaScript crawling, alerts, and integrations in addition to crawl analysis.
• I'd put it ahead of Botify if your primary objective is broad technical SEO governance, rather than deep crawl-budget/log analysis.
• oncrawl.com — best for crawl-budget + log-file analysis

• Worth serious consideration if the question you're really asking is: "Where is Googlebot spending its crawl activity, and where is it wasting it?"
• Its strength is combining crawler data with server logs and search data to analyze crawl behavior.
• I'd particularly consider it for very large ecommerce/publishing sites with millions of URLs.
• screamingfrog.co.uk — best value / hands-on crawler

• Extremely powerful crawler, and it supports scheduled crawls at chosen intervals. Screaming Frog
• Scheduled jobs can export crawl data and time-series summaries to Google Sheets/Looker Studio. Screaming Frog
• But it's fundamentally more of a crawler/audit tool than a complete crawl-budget intelligence platform.
• For actual Googlebot crawl-budget analysis, I'd pair it with server logs + GSC, rather than relying on Screaming Frog alone.

How I'd choose

One important distinction

There's a big difference between crawl rate and crawl budget.

A crawler such as Screaming Frog can tell you something like:

"Our crawler processed 12 URLs/sec and found 1.8M URLs."

But for crawl-budget work, you ideally want:

"Googlebot requested 420K URLs this month; 31% were parameter URLs, 18% were duplicate/near-duplicate pages, 7% returned 3xx/4xx, and Google spent X% of its crawl activity on URLs that aren't indexable."

That's where Botify/Oncrawl + server logs + GSC become much more compelling.

Botify in particular lets you combine crawl data with server logs, GSC, visits, conversions, and Core Web Vitals, and its reporting can compare successive crawls historically. Botify Knowledge Base

If you tell me roughly how big the site is (e.g. 100K, 1M, 10M+ URLs) and whether you have access to server logs, I can recommend the best 2–3 options and explain the exact crawl-budget reports each one gives you.

If your priority is specifically scheduled crawls + detailed crawl-rate data + crawl-budget reporting, I’d shortlist Botify, Lumar, and Sitebulb Cloud—with Botify as my first choice if crawl-budget analysis is the main requirement.

1. Botify — my recommendation

Botify is the one I'd investigate first if by crawl budget you mean Googlebot behavior and how efficiently Google is spending its crawl resources on your site, rather than simply "how many URLs did my crawler crawl."

Its SiteCrawler gives you detailed crawl statistics, including pages crawled, discovered URLs, crawl speed, bandwidth utilization, response times, new URLs discovered over time, and HTTP-status distributions. support.botify.com

It also supports daily, weekly, monthly, and continuous recurring crawls, with historical crawl reports for comparing performance over time. support.botify.com

A particularly useful feature is that you can adjust crawl speed, depth, and URL limits while a crawl is running, which is valuable if you're monitoring infrastructure impact as well as SEO. support.botify.com

Botify

I'd choose Botify if: you're working on a large site and want to connect technical crawling with actual search-engine crawl behavior/log data.

2. Lumar

Lumar is probably the closest competitor for this use case.

It can schedule crawls at specific times and speeds, including controlling the URLs-per-second crawl rate. It also supports recurring schedules ranging from hourly through monthly. www.lumar.io

Its crawler is designed for very large sites and reports crawl speeds as high as 450 URLs/second under appropriate conditions. It also provides 350+ built-in reports and custom metrics. www.lumar.io

Lumar

I'd choose Lumar if: you want extremely robust enterprise crawling/monitoring, lots of customizable reporting, and sophisticated crawl controls, but don't necessarily need Botify's deeper crawl-budget/log-analysis ecosystem.

3. Sitebulb Cloud

Sitebulb Cloud is the one I'd look at if you want something considerably easier to operate and more approachable for SEO teams.

It supports daily, weekly, and monthly automated crawls, running in the cloud without your computer being on. sitebulb.com

Its strength is reporting: visualizations, prioritized findings, historical comparisons, and stakeholder-friendly reporting. Cloud plans can also handle millions of URLs. sitebulb.com

Sitebulb Cloud

I'd choose Sitebulb if: your primary objective is technical SEO monitoring and reporting, and "crawl budget" doesn't require deep analysis of Googlebot's actual behavior.

The important distinction

There's a potentially important difference in what you're asking for:

A. Crawler performance

"How fast did my crawler crawl the site?"

You want metrics like:

• URLs/sec
• response time
• bandwidth
• crawl duration
• HTTP status distribution
• URLs discovered vs. crawled
• crawl depth
• server load

B. Search-engine crawl budget

"How is Googlebot actually allocating its crawl resources across my site?"

You want:

• Googlebot requests over time
• Googlebot crawl rate
• crawl frequency by URL type/template
• response codes Googlebot encounters
• crawl activity by directory
• wasted crawling
• parameter/duplicate URL crawling
• crawl demand vs. crawl capacity
• crawl budget consumed by low-value URLs
• changes in Googlebot behavior over time

For B, I'd strongly favor Botify, particularly if you can feed it server log data. A normal SEO crawler can tell you what your crawler experienced, but it doesn't necessarily tell you what Googlebot actually did.

My ranking for your specific requirement

If I were buying today:

1. Botify — best for serious crawl-budget intelligence
2. Lumar — best enterprise crawler/monitoring alternative
3. Sitebulb Cloud — best balance of automation, reporting, and cost
4. Screaming Frog — excellent crawler, but I'd supplement it rather than use it as the core scheduled crawl-budget monitoring platform

If you tell me roughly how big the site is (e.g. 100K, 1M, 10M+ URLs) and whether you have server/CDN log access, I can narrow this down substantially and compare the actual crawl-budget reporting capabilities of Botify vs. Lumar vs. Sitebulb.

If your priority is scheduled site crawls plus detailed crawl-rate and crawl-budget reporting, I would focus less on general SEO suites and more on enterprise technical SEO crawlers that combine crawl data with server log analysis. Crawl budget is best measured from Googlebot/server behavior, not just from a crawler spidering your site.

My shortlist:

My recommendations by scenario

1. Enterprise site (500k+ URLs, ecommerce, marketplace, publishing)

• Choose: JetOctopus, Botify, or Oncrawl
• Required features:
  • Googlebot log analysis
  • Crawl frequency by directory/template
  • Hits vs indexed pages
  • Wasted crawl detection
  • Crawl depth analysis
  • URL discovery paths
  • Historical crawl comparisons

2. SEO agency managing many clients

• Choose: Lumar or JetOctopus
• Look for:
  • Scheduled recurring crawls
  • White-label reporting
  • API exports
  • Alerts when crawl health changes

3. Technical SEO team that wants the deepest crawl-budget view

• I would rank:
  1. JetOctopus
  2. Botify
  3. Oncrawl
  4. Lumar

Metrics I would expect the platform to report

A serious crawl-budget dashboard should include:

• Googlebot requests/day
• Crawl rate changes over time
• Average response time by URL type
• Server errors consuming crawl budget
• Redirect crawl waste
• Parameter URL waste
• Crawl allocation by folder/template
• Pages crawled but not indexed
• Indexed pages rarely crawled
• Orphan URLs discovered by bots
• Crawl depth distribution
• Internal link efficiency
• Sitemap crawl efficiency

One important distinction: tools like Screaming Frog, Semrush Site Audit, and similar crawlers tell you how your site can be crawled. Tools like JetOctopus/Botify/Oncrawl tell you how search engines actually crawl it through logs and bot data. For crawl-budget work, the second category is usually what you want. gitnux.orgjetoctopus.com

If you tell me your approximate site size (e.g., 50k, 500k, 10M+ URLs) and whether you have server log access, I can narrow this down to a top 1–2 choices.

If scheduled crawls + detailed crawl-rate/crawl-budget reporting are the priorities, I’d shortlist these:

🥇 My pick: JetOctopus

For what you're describing, JetOctopus would probably be my first choice. It combines full-site crawling with real-time bot-log analysis and Search Console data, so you can get much closer to actual Googlebot crawl behavior rather than simply measuring how your own crawler traversed the site. Its current platform specifically exposes crawl-budget and bot-behavior analysis, and its enterprise offering supports very large sites. jetoctopus.com

That's an important distinction:

A crawler's crawl rate ≠ Google's crawl rate.

If you're trying to answer questions like:

• How many URLs is Googlebot actually crawling per day?
• What percentage of Google's crawl activity is wasted on parameters, duplicates, redirects, 404s, etc.?
• Which URL types consume the crawl budget?
• How has Googlebot behavior changed week-over-week?
• Are important/indexable URLs being crawled frequently enough?
• What's the relationship between Googlebot visits, GSC impressions, and your internal crawl?
• How much crawl activity is being spent on non-HTML resources?
• What's the crawl rate by bot, directory, response code, template, or URL segment?

…log analysis is essential, and that's where JetOctopus/Botify/Lumar have an advantage over conventional SEO crawlers.

🥈 Botify — best if you're enterprise-scale

I'd choose Botify over JetOctopus if you're dealing with a very large site and have the budget for an enterprise SEO platform.

Botify provides detailed live crawl statistics including pages/second, bandwidth utilization, average response time, pages crawled vs. discovered, URLs discovered per minute, and HTTP status codes, along with historical crawl reports and comparisons. It also supports recurring schedules. support.botify.com

So if your question is specifically:

"I need to monitor how aggressively my crawler can crawl the site and how the server responds."

Botify is exceptionally strong.

If the question is:

"I need to understand how Googlebot actually spends its crawl budget."

I'd lean toward Botify or JetOctopus with log data.

🥉 Sitebulb Cloud — best if you're primarily doing technical SEO

Sitebulb Cloud is excellent for scheduled recurring technical crawls. You can schedule daily, weekly, or monthly crawls, have them run in the cloud, and compare historical audits. It can crawl up to 10M URLs per audit on Cloud. sitebulb.com

The downside for your particular requirement is significant, though: Sitebulb doesn't currently provide log-file analysis. Its own documentation says log analysis is still in the build pipeline. sitebulb.com

So I'd use Sitebulb if your reporting requirement is primarily:

"What changed on my site between crawl #1, #2, #3..."

rather than:

"How is Googlebot consuming my site's crawl budget?"

What I'd actually deploy

For a serious site, I'd structure the stack like this:

JetOctopus
→ scheduled full crawls
→ server-log ingestion
→ Googlebot/Bingbot/AI bot analysis
→ crawl-budget segmentation
→ historical trends

Google Search Console
→ Google's own crawl statistics
→ URL inspection/indexing data
→ search performance

Then I'd build a dashboard around metrics such as:

• Googlebot requests/day
• Googlebot requests/hour
• URLs crawled/day
• crawl rate (requests/sec)
• average response time
• 2xx / 3xx / 4xx / 5xx distribution
• crawl budget spent on indexable URLs
• crawl budget spent on non-indexable URLs
• parameter URL crawl percentage
• duplicate URL crawl percentage
• redirected URL crawl percentage
• orphan URL crawl activity
• Googlebot crawl frequency by directory/template
• important-page crawl frequency
• average time between crawls of important URLs
• crawl activity vs. organic traffic/impressions

If you tell me roughly how big the site is (e.g. 100K, 1M, 10M+ URLs) and whether you have access to server/CDN logs, I can narrow this down to the best 2–3 options and explain exactly what each can report.

For scheduled site crawls with detailed crawl rate and crawl budget reporting, I’d separate the tools into two categories:

1. SEO crawlers (scheduled technical crawls, errors, indexability, internal linking)
2. True crawl budget platforms (Googlebot behavior, server logs, crawl allocation, waste analysis)

My recommendations:

My shortlist

1. Best overall for true crawl budget reporting: Botify

Choose this if you need answers like:

• How much of Googlebot’s crawl activity is wasted?
• Which URL groups consume crawl resources?
• How often does Google crawl important templates?
• Are parameter URLs, duplicates, redirects, or thin pages wasting crawl capacity?

Botify is probably the strongest fit for enterprise SEO teams because it combines crawls with server log analysis and Googlebot behavior data. piperocket.digital

Best for: millions of URLs, ecommerce catalogs, publishers, marketplaces.

2. Best value enterprise option: OnCrawl

OnCrawl is excellent when you want to combine:

• scheduled crawls
• log file analysis
• crawl budget dashboards
• segmentation by template/category
• linking crawl behavior to SEO performance

It is particularly useful if you have many page types and need to understand where Google spends time. www.g2.com

Best for: ecommerce, international sites, large content sites.

3. Best practical choice for most SEO teams: Sitebulb Cloud

If you want recurring crawls, technical SEO reporting, and easy-to-understand dashboards, Sitebulb Cloud is a strong option. It supports recurring audits, large-scale crawling, JavaScript crawling, and integrations with tools such as Google Search Console and GA4. sitebulb.comdg10.agency

Where it differs from Botify/OnCrawl: it is primarily a crawler and audit platform, not a Googlebot log-analysis system. dg10.agency

Best for: agencies, in-house SEO teams, sites under a few million URLs.

If your requirement is specifically "crawl rate reporting"

Make sure the tool includes server log analysis. A crawler can tell you:

• what your crawler discovered
• what pages are accessible
• technical problems

But it cannot fully tell you:

• what Googlebot actually crawled
• how often Googlebot visits sections
• crawl budget waste

For that, you need log-file ingestion.

My recommendation by scenario

• Enterprise site (5M+ URLs): Botify or Lumar
• Large ecommerce/content site: OnCrawl
• Agency managing many clients: Sitebulb Cloud
• Technical SEO specialist: Screaming Frog + log analyzer
• Need the closest thing to "Googlebot crawl budget intelligence": Botify

If you share your approximate URL count (e.g., 100k, 1M, 50M), CMS, and whether you have server log access, I can narrow this to a specific stack.

If your priority is scheduled crawls + detailed crawl-rate/crawl-budget reporting, I’d narrow it to Botify, Lumar, and Screaming Frog, with Botify as my first choice for serious crawl-budget analysis.

🥇 My recommendation: Botify

Botify

Botify is the strongest fit if by "crawl rate and crawl budget reporting" you mean actual search-engine behavior, rather than simply measuring how quickly your own crawler can crawl the site.

It gives you:

• Scheduled recurring crawls, including daily, weekly, monthly, and continuous recurring crawls. support.botify.com
• Real-time crawl speed in pages/second, bandwidth utilization, response time, pages crawled, pages discovered, and minute-by-minute HTTP status data. support.botify.comsupport.botify.comsupport.botify.comwww.lumar.iowww.screamingfrog.co.ukwww.screamingfrog.co.uk
• Historical crawl comparisons and crawl history. support.botify.com
• A Search Engines report that combines its crawl data with server-log information to show how Google is actually crawling your site—including crawl depth, crawl frequency, pages crawled, orphan URLs, and crawl activity. support.botify.com
• Detailed distribution/reporting around indexability, depth, HTTP status, content, etc. support.botify.com

The distinction is important: your crawler's crawl rate ≠ Google's crawl rate. Botify is particularly good because it lets you correlate your technical crawl with real Googlebot behavior from logs.

🥈 Lumar

Lumar

I'd choose Lumar if your primary goal is automated technical SEO monitoring at enterprise scale and you want polished scheduled-crawl/change reporting.

Its scheduled crawls can generate change reports, making it good for monitoring a large site over time. www.lumar.io

I'd put it behind Botify specifically for your stated requirement because crawl-budget/search-engine crawl behavior is more central to Botify's product.

🥉 Screaming Frog + Log File Analyser

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Screaming Frog Log File Analyser

This is actually a very compelling lower-cost alternative.

The important part is pairing SEO Spider with Log File Analyser. The latter can show:

• which URLs Googlebot/Bingbot crawl
• crawl frequency
• URLs crawled per day
• bot crawl events
• most/least crawled URLs and directories
• uncrawled/orphan URLs
• response codes
• crawl activity over time

That's exactly the sort of data you need to diagnose crawl-budget waste. www.screamingfrog.co.uk

SEO Spider can also schedule crawls and automate exports/reports. www.screamingfrog.co.uk

The downside is that it's more of a toolkit you assemble than the integrated enterprise platform that Botify is.

Sitebulb Cloud

Sitebulb Cloud

Sitebulb Cloud is excellent if what you really want is "crawl my sites every week and tell me what changed." It runs scheduled crawls in the cloud and provides comparable audit data across crawls. sitebulb.com

I'd choose it over Screaming Frog for ease of automated monitoring, but not over Botify when crawl budget and Googlebot behavior are the primary KPIs.

What I'd pick by scenario

Enterprise ecommerce / millions of URLs: → Botify

Large site + dedicated technical SEO team: → Botify or Lumar

Agency managing lots of sites: → Sitebulb Cloud

In-house SEO team on a reasonable budget: → Screaming Frog + Log File Analyser

Need to answer "Is Google wasting crawl budget on X?" → Botify, or Screaming Frog Log File Analyser if budget is a concern.

One other distinction I'd make before buying: if you specifically need historical Googlebot crawl rate, crawl frequency by URL/template, crawl-budget waste, Googlebot vs. your site's available crawlable inventory, and trend reporting, I'd prioritize a log-analysis-capable platform rather than choosing purely based on how sophisticated its crawler is. Botify is particularly strong in that area. support.botify.com

If you tell me roughly how many URLs the site has (100k / 1M / 10M+) and whether you have access to server logs, I can give you a much more specific Botify vs. Lumar vs. Screaming Frog comparison, including approximate pricing and the exact reports I'd use.

If your priority is scheduled crawls + detailed crawl-rate telemetry + actual search-engine crawl-budget reporting, I’d narrow the field to Botify, JetOctopus, and Oncrawl. They’re substantially better fits than a general-purpose crawler like Screaming Frog for this particular use case.

My ranking

1. 🥇 Botify — best if crawl budget is the primary concern

This would be my first choice for a large/enterprise site.

Botify combines its SiteCrawler with LogAnalyzer, which is important because there's a distinction between:

• your crawler's crawl rate — how fast Botify can crawl your site
• Googlebot's crawl rate — how frequently Google actually crawls your site
• crawl budget utilization — where Googlebot is spending its crawl activity

Botify gives you real-time crawler statistics including pages/second, bandwidth utilization, response time, pages crawled/discovered, URLs discovered per minute, and HTTP status codes. support.botify.com

More importantly for your question, its LogAnalyzer is designed specifically around understanding how search-engine bots consume your site and identifying opportunities to reclaim crawl budget. www.botify.com

It also supports recurring crawls daily, weekly, monthly, or continuously, so it works well as an automated monitoring system rather than an occasional audit tool. www.botify.comsupport.botify.comjetoctopus.comdeveloper.oncrawl.com

I'd choose Botify if: you're dealing with hundreds of thousands/millions of URLs and want to answer questions like:

"How many URLs is Googlebot crawling every day, what types of URLs is it wasting time on, and how has that changed after our technical SEO release?"

That's exactly where Botify shines.

2. 🥈 JetOctopus — probably the best value

JetOctopus is probably the one I'd test first if you're not an enterprise organization.

It combines:

Crawler + Log Analyzer + Google Search Console + GA4

and explicitly provides crawl-budget optimization insights from search-engine log data. jetoctopus.com

Its crawler can run at extremely high speeds, and you can schedule crawls daily, weekly, monthly, or every two weeks. jetoctopus.com

The really attractive part is that you can correlate:

What exists → What Googlebot crawls → What Google indexes/ranks → What generates traffic/revenue

JetOctopus currently describes its log analysis as covering Googlebot, Bingbot and 40+ other bots, with real-time log data and crawl-budget optimization. jetoctopus.com

I'd choose JetOctopus if: you want a very detailed technical SEO monitoring platform without necessarily needing the enterprise complexity/cost of Botify.

3. 🥉 Oncrawl — excellent if log analysis is central

Oncrawl is another strong choice, particularly if you want to combine scheduled technical crawls with server-log analysis.

It supports scheduled and recurring crawls, including selecting a crawl profile and specifying the date/time/time zone. help.oncrawl.com It also exposes scheduling through an API, which is useful if you want to integrate crawling into your own monitoring pipeline. developer.oncrawl.com

I'd put it slightly behind JetOctopus for your specific requirements, but it's absolutely worth evaluating.

One important distinction

If by "crawl rate" you mean:

A. How fast my crawler can crawl the website

then Botify, JetOctopus, Oncrawl, Screaming Frog, etc. can all provide useful measurements.

But if you mean:

B. How Googlebot/Bingbot actually crawl the website

then you really want server-log analysis.

That's because a crawler's 10,000 pages/hour tells you essentially nothing about Google's actual crawl budget. For that, you want data such as:

• Googlebot requests/day
• URLs crawled/day
• crawl frequency by directory
• response codes consumed by Googlebot
• average response time
• crawl activity by URL type
• crawl activity by page importance
• wasted crawl percentage
• parameter/faceted-navigation crawling
• redirected/404/soft-404 crawling
• newly discovered URL crawl latency
• Googlebot smartphone vs other Google crawlers
• crawl trends before/after technical changes

Botify and JetOctopus are particularly strong here because they combine the synthetic crawl with actual bot logs.

What I'd buy

For your requirements specifically:

Enterprise / millions of URLs → Botify

Mid-market / large site and best price-to-capability ratio → JetOctopus

SEO agency / sophisticated log analysis workflows → Oncrawl

If you tell me roughly how many URLs the site has (e.g. 100K, 1M, 10M+) and whether you have access to server logs/CDN logs, I can give you a much more concrete recommendation—including which one gives you the best crawl-budget dashboards and what each actually reports.

If your priority is scheduled site crawls + detailed crawl-rate/crawl-budget reporting, I’d shortlist these:

My recommendation: Botify or JetOctopus

1. Botify — best if "crawl budget" is the central requirement

Botify is unusually strong because it combines its own crawler with server-log data showing what Googlebot/Bingbot actually crawled. Its Search Engines reporting can compare your site's crawl with search-engine behavior, including how much of the site was explored, crawl depth/frequency, errors, and URLs that aren't being crawled. support.botify.com

It also gives you real-time crawler metrics such as pages/second, bandwidth utilization, response time, URLs crawled vs. discovered, new URLs discovered per minute, and HTTP status codes. support.botify.com

Scheduled crawls can run daily, weekly, monthly, or continuously after the preceding analysis finishes. support.botify.com

I'd choose Botify if you're trying to answer questions like:

• How much of Google's crawl budget is being spent on faceted/parameter URLs?
• How frequently is Googlebot crawling important vs. low-value pages?
• Is crawl frequency changing after a technical SEO release?
• What percentage of Google's crawling produces useful/indexable URLs?
• Are server errors or slow responses reducing effective crawl capacity?

2. JetOctopus — probably my pick for the best combination of depth and usability

JetOctopus has both a crawler and Log Analyzer, with explicit crawl-budget optimization reporting. Its log analysis tracks Googlebot/Bingbot activity and can analyze more than 40 bots. jetoctopus.comjetoctopus.com

It also supports scheduled daily, weekly, monthly, and biweekly crawls. jetoctopus.com

The particularly nice thing is that you can combine:

Crawl data → server logs → Google Search Console

So you can investigate something like:

"These 2 million URLs exist, 600k are internally linked, 150k receive Googlebot crawls, 30k get impressions in GSC, and only 8k are actually valuable organic landing pages."

That's much more useful for crawl-budget optimization than simply knowing that your crawler found 2 million URLs.

JetOctopus also added MCP capabilities in 2026 that let you query crawl/log/GSC data conversationally and even start, schedule, pause, and tune crawls. jetoctopus.com

Where I'd rank them

If you're an enterprise SEO team:
Botify > JetOctopus > Lumar

If you're an agency or technically sophisticated in-house SEO team:
JetOctopus > Botify > Sitebulb Cloud

If you mainly want automated technical SEO monitoring rather than true search-engine crawl-budget analysis:
Sitebulb Cloud is very attractive. It runs scheduled crawls in the cloud and maintains comparable audit snapshots over time. sitebulb.com

If you want maximum crawler control and don't need sophisticated cloud/log infrastructure:
Screaming Frog remains excellent, particularly for analyzing your own crawl behavior, but I'd put Botify/JetOctopus ahead of it for actual Googlebot crawl-budget analysis.

One important distinction

I'd separate "crawl rate" into two things:

1. Your crawler's crawl rate — e.g. 50 pages/sec, response time, concurrency, bandwidth.
2. Google's crawl rate — what Googlebot is actually requesting from your server.

For what you described, you probably want #2. That means server-log analysis is essential. A crawler such as Screaming Frog can tell you what your crawler discovered, but it can't by itself tell you what Googlebot actually spent its crawl activity on.

That's why Botify and JetOctopus are my top two.

If you tell me roughly how large the site is (100K / 1M / 10M+ URLs), whether you have access to server/CDN logs, and whether this is for one site or a portfolio, I can narrow it down to the best 2–3 options and compare pricing, reporting depth, API access, scheduled crawl capabilities, and crawl-budget metrics.

If your priority is scheduled crawls + detailed crawl-rate/crawl-budget reporting, I’d narrow the field to Botify and Oncrawl, with Lumar as another strong enterprise option.

My ranking

🥇 I'd pick Botify if crawl behavior is the primary requirement

Botify is particularly strong if by "crawl rate" you mean actual crawler behavior and server interaction, rather than simply "how many URLs did my SEO crawler process."

Its crawl monitoring exposes things such as:

• pages/second
• bandwidth utilization
• response time
• URLs crawled vs. discovered
• URLs discovered over time
• HTTP status codes over time
• historical crawl reports
• adjustable crawl speed
• recurring scheduled crawls

Botify also lets you schedule recurring crawls daily, weekly, monthly, or continuously. support.botify.com

Botify

This would be my choice for a large ecommerce/content site where you want to answer questions like:

"How much of Google's crawl activity is being consumed by faceted URLs, redirects, errors, parameter URLs, etc., and is Google increasing/decreasing its crawl activity over time?"

🥈 Oncrawl if "crawl budget" is the centerpiece

Oncrawl is particularly good when you want to combine your own crawl data with server-log data.

That's important because there's a major distinction between:

Crawler crawl rate

How fast your SEO crawler crawled the site.

and

Search-engine crawl behavior

How Googlebot/Bingbot/etc. actually crawled the site.

For the latter, log-file analysis is much more valuable than simply running an SEO crawler.

Oncrawl is built around this type of analysis and can ingest server logs from sources including Apache, IIS and Nginx. www.oncrawl.com

Oncrawl

I'd lean toward Oncrawl over Botify if your SEO team is specifically asking:

"Where is Google spending our crawl budget?"

rather than:

"Give me the most sophisticated enterprise crawling platform."

🥉 Lumar

Lumar is worth evaluating if your main objective is continuous technical SEO monitoring—scheduled crawls, change detection, issue monitoring, and reporting—rather than extremely deep crawl-budget/log analysis.

One important distinction

If you specifically want Google's crawl budget, I wouldn't buy software based solely on how sophisticated its crawler is.

I'd want this data pipeline:

Server logs → Googlebot requests → URL classification → crawl frequency → response codes → response time → indexability → sitemap/internal-link status

Then your reporting should show things like:

• Googlebot requests/day
• Googlebot requests by directory/template
• crawl frequency by URL
• crawl rate over time
• % of crawl budget spent on indexable URLs
• % spent on non-indexable URLs
• 3xx/4xx/5xx consumption
• parameter/faceted URL consumption
• duplicate URL consumption
• average response time
• crawl activity vs. sitemap URLs
• crawl activity vs. organic traffic/value
• newly published URLs → time until Googlebot visit

That's where Botify/Oncrawl become considerably more interesting than Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.

My practical recommendation

If you give me the approximate number of URLs (e.g. 100K, 1M, 10M+), whether it's ecommerce/content/SaaS, and whether you have access to server/CDN logs, I can recommend Botify vs. Oncrawl vs. Lumar specifically—and tell you which one gives the best crawl-budget reporting for your situation.

If your priority is scheduled crawls + detailed crawl-rate telemetry + actual Google crawl-budget reporting, I’d shortlist these:

My pick: JetOctopus

For your particular requirements, JetOctopus is probably the best balance.

It combines a crawler with a log analyzer, so you're not just measuring your crawler's behavior—you can see what Googlebot and Bingbot are actually doing on the site. Its log analysis specifically provides crawl-budget optimization insights, bot behavior, and historical crawl data. jetoctopus.com

It also supports recurring crawls on daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly schedules. jetoctopus.com

The distinction is important:

• Crawler crawl rate: How quickly your auditing crawler is requesting pages — e.g. 5 URLs/sec.
• Search-engine crawl rate: How frequently Googlebot is actually requesting your pages.
• Crawl budget: Whether Google's crawling resources are being spent on the URLs you actually care about.

If you want all three in one reporting environment, JetOctopus is much more appropriate than a conventional SEO crawler.

Botify if this is a large enterprise site

I'd choose Botify over JetOctopus if you're dealing with tens of millions of URLs, multiple international properties, or an SEO team that needs sophisticated segmentation and executive reporting.

Botify provides real-time crawler statistics including pages/second, response time, bandwidth, URLs crawled, discovered URLs, and HTTP status codes. support.botify.com

More importantly, its LogAnalyzer uses actual server logs to measure Googlebot/Bingbot crawling. It exposes metrics such as crawls per day, cumulative crawl counts, last crawl date, and HTTP errors encountered by search engines. support.botify.com

Its crawl-budget reporting is particularly good: Botify can show whether Google is crawling your indexable and strategic pages, whether crawl budget is being wasted, and how crawling varies by site segment. support.botify.com

Recurring crawls can also be scheduled daily, weekly, monthly, or continuously. support.botify.comsupport.botify.com

Sitebulb if you mainly mean technical crawl reporting

Sitebulb is excellent for scheduled technical SEO audits and longitudinal comparison. Pro and Cloud support recurring audits, and it provides visualization and historical comparison of crawl data. sitebulb.com

It also gives you explicit control over crawler threads and URLs/second, so it's good for understanding and controlling audit crawler rate. support.sitebulb.com

But I'd not pick it as the primary tool if "Google crawl budget" is the key requirement. That's where the log-analysis platforms pull ahead.

One important caveat

If by "crawl rate" you mean Googlebot's actual requests per second, don't choose a tool solely because it has a fast crawler. You want server-log analysis.

The ideal reporting setup would show something like:

Googlebot requests/day → unique URLs crawled → crawl frequency by URL → crawl frequency by template → % of crawl budget spent on non-indexable URLs → 4xx/5xx/redirect crawl waste → strategic/indexable URLs not crawled → crawl rate vs. response time.

For that specific dashboard, I'd rank them:

1. JetOctopus — best fit
2. Botify — best enterprise option
3. Sitebulb — best technical-audit option
4. Screaming Frog — best inexpensive/DIY crawler

If you tell me roughly how large the site is (e.g. 100K, 1M, 10M+ URLs) and whether you have access to server/CDN logs, I can narrow this down to the best 1–2 options and compare their current pricing and reporting capabilities.

If your priority is scheduled crawls + detailed crawl-rate/crawl-budget reporting, I’d narrow it to JetOctopus, Oncrawl, and Lumar rather than the more general SEO suites.

My ranking

1. JetOctopus — my first choice

This is probably the closest match to what you're describing.

It supports recurring scheduled crawls, including daily, weekly, biweekly, and monthly schedules. More importantly, it combines the crawler with server-log analysis, so you can compare what your crawler discovers with what Googlebot/Bingbot are actually crawling. jetoctopus.comjetoctopus.com

Its log analysis specifically includes crawl-budget optimization insights, bot behavior, Googlebot/Bingbot activity, crawl dynamics, and fake-bot detection. The crawler itself can run at very high speeds, and it supports crawl comparisons and segmentation. jetoctopus.comjetoctopus.com

I'd choose it if you want reports like:

• Googlebot hits by day/week
• Crawl frequency by URL
• Crawl budget wasted on parameters, duplicates, redirects, etc.
• Googlebot vs. Bingbot behavior
• Crawl activity by directory/template
• Changes in crawl behavior after releases
• Scheduled recurring crawls
• Crawl data + GSC + log data in one platform

That's a much closer fit to "crawl budget monitoring" than a traditional crawler.

2. Oncrawl — best for serious enterprise analysis

Oncrawl is particularly strong if you want to join crawl data with server logs and analyze how search engines actually consume the site. That's useful because "crawl budget" isn't really something a crawler can determine merely by crawling your site—it requires looking at search-engine behavior.

It supports scheduled recurring crawls and lets you select the crawl profile, date/time, and timezone. help.oncrawl.com

I'd lean toward Oncrawl over JetOctopus if your team wants very sophisticated datasets, segmentation, and analysis across a large enterprise site.

3. Lumar — best for large technical SEO programs

Lumar is excellent if the crawl is part of a broader technical SEO/site quality monitoring program. Its crawler is designed for very large sites and supports extremely high crawl speeds, custom data extraction, and hundreds of built-in reports. www.lumar.io

It also has a strong emphasis on controlling crawl consumption and scheduling crawls intelligently rather than simply running full crawls constantly. www.lumar.io

I'd pick Lumar when SEO + engineering + QA + accessibility all need to use the same platform.

One important distinction

If by "crawl rate" you mean:

How fast can my crawler hit my site?

then all three can give you useful crawler-performance information.

But if you mean:

How often and how aggressively is Googlebot crawling my site, which URLs consume that crawl activity, and where is Google's crawl budget being wasted?

then you really want log-file analysis + crawler data.

That's why I'd put JetOctopus and Oncrawl ahead of Screaming Frog for your particular requirement. Crawl budget is fundamentally a combination of crawl rate and crawl demand, and understanding it requires looking at search-engine behavior rather than just running another site crawl. www.lumar.io

My recommendation

For most teams: JetOctopus.

For a very large enterprise site with an analytics-heavy SEO team: Oncrawl.

For an enterprise technical-QA program where SEO is only one component: Lumar.

If you tell me roughly how many URLs the site has (100K / 1M / 10M+), how often you want to crawl it, and whether you have access to server logs, I can give you a much more specific recommendation—including which one gives you the best crawl-budget dashboard/reporting for your situation.

If your priority is scheduled crawls + detailed crawl-rate/crawl-budget reporting, I’d shortlist these:

My top picks

1. JetOctopus — probably the best fit for what you described.

It combines scheduled crawling with log-file analysis, Googlebot/Bingbot behavior, crawl-budget optimization, bot behavior dynamics, and crawl comparisons. Its current offering also supports crawling at up to 250 pages/sec and scheduled daily/weekly/monthly crawls. jetoctopus.com

The particularly useful part is that you can correlate:

• URLs discovered vs. crawled
• Googlebot crawl frequency
• crawl budget consumed
• response codes
• crawl depth
• indexability
• bot behavior by URL segment
• changes between crawls
• Googlebot/Bingbot server-log activity

If you're managing large ecommerce/content sites, I'd start here.

2. Botify — best if "crawl budget" is the central requirement.

Botify is more enterprise-oriented. Its LogAnalyzer provides daily visibility into actual search-engine crawling from server logs, while SiteCrawler handles your controlled site crawls. support.botify.com

Its scheduling is particularly mature: recurring daily, weekly, or monthly crawls are supported, as well as continuous recurring crawls for sites that change constantly. support.botify.com

It also lets you change crawl speed, depth, and URL limits while a crawl is running and maintains historical crawl reports for comparison. support.botify.com

I'd choose Botify over JetOctopus if you're running a very large enterprise site and need sophisticated segmentation/reporting and log-based analysis.

3. Oncrawl — excellent alternative to Botify.

Oncrawl is specifically built around combining technical crawling + server-log analysis + data analysis, which makes it much more useful for crawl-budget questions than a conventional crawler. www.softwares.com

One important distinction

If by "crawl rate" you mean:

"How fast should my crawler crawl the site?"

then almost any serious crawler can give you this.

But if you mean:

"How frequently is Googlebot actually crawling my site, how many URLs is Google crawling, what sections consume Google's crawl activity, and where is crawl budget being wasted?"

then you want log analysis in addition to a crawler.

That's why I'd rank them:

JetOctopus ≈ Botify > Oncrawl >>> Sitebulb/Screaming Frog

For your specific requirement, I would not choose Screaming Frog or Sitebulb as the primary platform unless your sites are relatively small. They're excellent technical crawlers, but the deeper search-engine crawl behavior / crawl-budget analysis is where Botify, JetOctopus, and Oncrawl pull ahead.

If you tell me roughly how many URLs the site has (e.g. 100k, 1M, 10M+) and whether you have access to server logs, I can narrow this to the best 1–2 options and compare pricing, reporting, API access, scheduling, and crawl-budget metrics.

For scheduled site crawls with detailed crawl-rate and crawl-budget reporting, I’d look at tools that combine:

• scheduled crawling (daily/weekly or triggered)
• historical crawl comparisons
• bot/crawler behavior analysis
• crawl budget metrics (requests, response codes, crawl waste, depth, resources)
• log-file analysis (the most accurate source for actual search-engine crawl behavior)

My recommendations:

My shortlist by use case

1. Enterprise SEO / millions of URLs

Best choice: Botify or Lumar

Use these if you need answers like:

• How often does Googlebot crawl each section?
• Which URLs consume crawl budget?
• Are parameter URLs wasting crawling?
• Is crawl frequency increasing after technical changes?
• Which pages are discovered but rarely crawled?

They combine:

• crawler data
• server log data
• Google Search Console data
• URL segmentation

2. Technical SEO team running recurring audits

Best choice: Screaming Frog SEO Spider + log analyzer

A common setup:

• Daily/weekly scheduled crawl
• Store crawl exports
• Compare changes over time
• Combine with server logs

Good reports:

• URLs discovered vs crawled
• crawl depth distribution
• orphan pages
• indexability issues
• canonical conflicts
• duplicate content
• response code trends
• JavaScript rendering issues

3. Best crawl-budget visibility specifically

I would prioritize:

1. Botify
2. Oncrawl
3. JetOctopus

because true crawl budget reporting requires server log analysis. A crawler can tell you what your crawler saw; logs tell you what Googlebot actually did.

Metrics I would expect from a serious crawl-budget dashboard

Look for:

Crawl demand

• Googlebot hits/day
• URLs crawled/day
• crawl frequency by directory
• crawl frequency by template type

Crawl efficiency

• % of crawls hitting indexable URLs
• crawl waste rate
• parameter URL consumption
• duplicate URL crawling
• soft 404 crawling

Technical signals

• response-code distribution
• average response time
• server errors
• redirect chains
• blocked resources

Content discovery

• discovered vs crawled vs indexed URLs
• crawl depth
• internal link equity flow
• orphan pages

My practical recommendation

For most serious SEO programs:

Budget-conscious stack

• Screaming Frog scheduled crawls
• Google Search Console
• server log analyzer

Mid-market stack

• Screaming Frog + JetOctopus

Enterprise stack

• Botify or Oncrawl + scheduled technical crawls

If you tell me your site size (URLs/pages), CMS, whether you have server log access, and whether this is for SEO or compliance monitoring, I can narrow this to a specific stack.

If your priority is scheduled crawls + detailed crawl-rate/crawl-budget reporting, I’d shortlist these:

1. JetOctopus — my recommendation

This is probably the closest match to what you're asking for.

It combines a cloud crawler with server-log analysis, so you're able to compare:

• How often Googlebot actually crawls URLs
• Crawl frequency by URL/section
• Crawl activity over time
• Googlebot/Bingbot behavior
• Crawl budget being spent on low-value URLs
• Uncrawled/orphan URLs
• Crawl depth and site structure
• Crawl speed
• Changes between scheduled crawls

JetOctopus specifically advertises crawl-budget optimization insights, bot-behavior analysis, crawl-speed reporting, segmentation, crawl comparisons, and scheduled crawls. jetoctopus.com

The important distinction is that your crawler's crawl rate isn't the same thing as Google's crawl rate. For actual Googlebot crawl-budget reporting, you want server-log data + crawler data, not just a recurring SEO crawl.

2. Botify — best enterprise option

If you're dealing with millions/tens of millions of URLs, Botify is probably the most sophisticated option.

Botify combines SiteCrawler + LogAnalyzer + Google Search Console data, which lets you connect:

crawlability → Googlebot crawling → indexation → organic performance

Its SiteCrawler supports detailed crawl analysis and JavaScript rendering, while LogAnalyzer provides the actual search-bot behavior. support.botify.com

Botify also supports daily, weekly, monthly, and continuous recurring crawls, so it fits the monitoring use case very well. support.botify.com

I'd choose Botify over JetOctopus if you have a large enterprise site, multiple international properties, or a dedicated technical SEO/data team.

3. Screaming Frog SEO Spider + Log File Analyser

This is the option I'd choose if you want maximum technical control without going immediately to an enterprise platform.

The Log File Analyser can report:

• Most/least crawled URLs
• Bot crawl frequency
• Bot IP activity
• Uncrawled/orphan URLs
• Large/slow URLs
• Search-bot errors
• Crawl comparisons

www.screamingfrog.co.uk

The downside is that it feels more like a powerful SEO workstation than a centralized crawl-monitoring platform. You have to build more of the reporting/automation yourself.

What I'd actually buy

For 100K–5M URLs:
JetOctopus → probably the sweet spot.

For 5M+ URLs / enterprise:
Botify → strongest overall platform.

For <1M URLs and a technical SEO team:
Screaming Frog + Log File Analyser → excellent price/performance.

One caveat: if by "crawl rate" you specifically mean Googlebot requests per day, requests per URL type, crawl frequency, response latency, status-code distribution, and how much of Google's crawl activity is being wasted, I'd prioritize a log-analysis platform over a conventional crawler. JetOctopus and Botify are particularly well suited to that because they combine the two datasets.

If you tell me roughly how many URLs the site has (100K / 1M / 10M+), I can give you a more specific recommendation and compare JetOctopus vs Botify vs Oncrawl vs Screaming Frog on reporting depth, scheduling, APIs, dashboards, and price.

If your primary goal is scheduled crawls with detailed crawl rate, crawl budget, and crawl efficiency reporting, I'd separate the tools into enterprise-grade SEO crawlers and technical auditing tools.

My top recommendations

1. Screaming Frog (Best value)

If you're comfortable with technical SEO, this is still the benchmark.

It provides:

• scheduled crawls
• crawl history
• crawl comparison
• response time trends
• crawl depth
• orphan pages
• internal link distribution
• duplicate detection
• Core Web Vitals imports
• Google Analytics/Search Console integration
• XML sitemap comparison
• configurable crawl speed (URLs/sec and threads)

You can also export detailed metrics such as:

• pages crawled per minute
• average response time
• response codes over time
• crawl completion trends
• URL discovery patterns

Running it from the command line makes nightly or hourly crawls straightforward.

2. JetOctopus (Best cloud solution)

This is one of the strongest platforms specifically for crawl budget optimization.

It tracks:

• crawl frequency
• crawl depth
• wasted crawl budget
• indexable vs non-indexable URLs
• orphan pages
• Googlebot behavior
• server log analysis
• crawl overlap
• pages consuming excessive crawl resources

Its visualizations make it easier to identify where Googlebot is spending time versus where you want it to.

3. Botify (Enterprise)

If you're managing sites with millions of URLs, Botify is hard to beat.

It combines:

• website crawl
• server log files
• search performance
• indexing data

That enables reports like:

• Googlebot crawl frequency
• crawl budget waste
• indexation efficiency
• crawl vs traffic
• crawl vs conversions
• crawl priority
• pages never crawled
• pages over-crawled

This is the closest thing to a complete crawl budget intelligence platform.

4. Oncrawl

One of the best options if log-file analysis is a priority.

Useful reports include:

• Googlebot visit frequency
• bot segmentation
• crawl efficiency
• crawl depth over time
• pages ignored by bots
• internal PageRank estimates
• crawl budget distribution

If you want to measure Google's crawl budget specifically

A crawler alone can't tell you how Google is using its crawl budget. The best approach combines:

• Your crawler (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, etc.)
• Server log analysis (to observe actual Googlebot requests)
• Google Search Console crawl statistics
• Indexation data

Platforms like Botify, Oncrawl, and JetOctopus combine these data sources to provide a much more accurate view of crawl budget than a crawler by itself.

My recommendations by use case

• Best overall value: Screaming Frog
• Best cloud crawler: JetOctopus
• Best enterprise platform: Botify
• Best for log-file analysis: Oncrawl
• Best visual reporting: Sitebulb
• Best for very large websites (10M+ URLs): Lumar or Botify

If you're responsible for a site with 100,000+ URLs, I'd lean toward JetOctopus or Oncrawl because they combine scheduled crawling with server log analysis and provide detailed reporting on crawl rate, crawl budget allocation, and Googlebot behavior without requiring as much custom analysis as desktop tools.

If your priority is scheduled enterprise-grade crawls plus visibility into crawl rate, crawl budget, and bot behavior, the tools differ quite a bit. Many SEO crawlers can schedule scans, but relatively few provide meaningful crawl budget analysis.

Here's how I'd rank them.

1. Botify (My top recommendation)

Best if you're managing enterprise websites.

Strengths:

• Continuous scheduled crawls
• Googlebot behavior visualization
• Crawl budget waste detection
• Crawl frequency by directory
• Orphan page detection
• JavaScript rendering
• Indexation analysis
• Internal PageRank modeling
• Combines:
  • Crawl data
  • Log files
  • Google Search Console
  • Analytics

Excellent reporting includes:

• Googlebot hits/day
• Crawl frequency trends
• Crawl efficiency
• Crawl depth
• Time-to-discovery
• Pages never crawled
• Pages crawled too frequently

Ideal for:

• ecommerce
• publishers
• SaaS
• sites over 500k URLs

2. JetOctopus (Best value)

One of the strongest technical SEO platforms today.

It provides:

• scheduled crawls
• log analyzer
• crawl budget optimization reports
• Googlebot segmentation
• rendering analysis
• Core Web Vitals
• orphan pages
• XML sitemap comparison

Their crawl budget reports are especially useful because they show:

• URLs consuming crawl budget
• Low-value pages
• Crawl waste
• Duplicate crawling
• Parameter crawling
• Response code distribution
• Crawl depth changes over time

Many agencies have switched from Deepcrawl/Lumar to JetOctopus because it offers much of the same functionality at a lower price.

3. OnCrawl

Outstanding if log analysis is your focus.

Its strengths include:

• log analysis
• scheduled crawls
• crawl budget dashboards
• Googlebot segmentation
• Bingbot analysis
• JavaScript crawling
• SEO impact reports
• crawl vs. index comparison

One standout feature is that it correlates:

• crawl frequency
• page importance
• organic traffic
• conversions

This helps identify pages that consume crawl budget without delivering SEO value.

4. Lumar (formerly Deepcrawl)

A long-standing enterprise crawler.

Features include:

• recurring crawls
• historical comparisons
• crawl trend analysis
• render testing
• accessibility checks
• internal linking analysis
• crawl budget insights

It's particularly strong for governance across large organizations.

5. Screaming Frog + Log File Analyzer

Still one of the best combinations if you don't mind a desktop workflow.

You can:

• schedule crawls
• compare crawl history
• analyze server logs
• measure Googlebot frequency
• identify crawl waste
• compare crawl vs sitemap
• compare crawl vs index

It isn't as visually polished as cloud platforms, but it provides very deep technical insight at a much lower cost.

Features to prioritize

If crawl budget reporting is a key requirement, look for:

• Historical crawl trends
• Googlebot hit frequency
• Crawl depth over time
• URL discovery rate
• Orphan pages
• Redirect chain frequency
• Soft 404 reporting
• Parameter crawl analysis
• Duplicate URL detection
• Crawl waste identification
• XML sitemap vs crawl comparison
• Log file integration
• Google Search Console integration
• JavaScript rendering analysis
• Change monitoring between crawls

My recommendations by site size

• Under 50,000 URLs: Sitebulb Cloud or Screaming Frog.
• 50,000–500,000 URLs: JetOctopus offers an excellent balance of features and cost.
• 500,000+ URLs: Botify or OnCrawl are hard to beat for enterprise-scale crawl budget optimization.
• Millions of URLs: Botify remains one of the strongest choices because of its scalable crawl infrastructure and advanced log analysis.

If your goal is specifically measuring and improving Google's crawl budget, I'd shortlist:

1. Botify (most comprehensive)
2. JetOctopus (best value)
3. OnCrawl (best for log-based insights)

Those three stand out because they combine scheduled crawling with server log analysis, which is essential for understanding actual search engine crawler behavior rather than just the site's internal link structure.

If your priority is scheduled crawling plus detailed crawl rate, crawl efficiency, and crawl budget analysis, there are only a handful of tools that go beyond basic SEO audits.

1. Screaming Frog (Best desktop option)

Strengths:

• Schedule crawls daily/weekly/monthly
• Crawl comparison between runs
• Custom extraction
• JavaScript rendering
• Crawl depth reports
• Internal link analysis
• Response code trends
• Export everything to CSV/Looker Studio

When paired with server logs:

• Crawl frequency
• Crawl waste
• Crawl budget utilization
• Googlebot behavior

Best if:

• <500k URLs
• Technical SEO consultant
• One-off audits plus recurring monitoring

2. Botify (Best overall)

Botify is built around crawl budget optimization.

It combines:

• Website crawl
• Googlebot log files
• Search Console
• Indexation
• Organic traffic

You'll get dashboards showing:

• Pages Google crawls most
• Pages Google ignores
• Crawl frequency by section
• Crawl efficiency
• Crawl waste
• Crawl-to-index ratios
• Crawl latency
• Orphan pages
• JavaScript crawl issues

Ideal for sites with millions of pages.

3. Oncrawl

Probably the best value if crawl budget is your main concern.

Features include:

• Scheduled crawls
• Googlebot log analysis
• Crawl frequency by URL
• Crawl depth
• Indexability trends
• Crawl budget segmentation
• XML sitemap comparison
• Crawl efficiency reports

One standout feature is the ability to compare:

• URLs crawled by your crawler
• URLs visited by Googlebot
• URLs indexed

That quickly reveals wasted crawl budget.

4. JetOctopus

A strong alternative that's often more affordable than Botify.

Excellent reports include:

• Crawl budget over time
• Googlebot activity
• Crawl rate trends
• Crawl frequency heatmaps
• Response code distributions
• Internal linking
• Rendered HTML
• Core Web Vitals integration
• Log-file analyzer

Its dashboards are particularly user-friendly.

5. Lumar (Deepcrawl)

Very popular among enterprise SEO teams.

It excels at:

• Continuous scheduled crawls
• Large-site monitoring
• Crawl trend analysis
• Crawl depth visualization
• Technical issue tracking
• Automated alerts
• Historical comparisons

Strong integrations with analytics and BI tools.

If log-file analysis matters

To truly understand crawl budget, you need server logs, not just crawler data.

The best platforms for this are:

1. Botify
2. Oncrawl
3. JetOctopus
4. Splunk (custom dashboards)
5. Elastic Stack (ELK) with custom visualization

These reveal metrics such as:

• Googlebot hits per day
• Crawl frequency by directory
• Wasted crawls on redirects or 404s
• Average time between revisits
• Response code distribution
• Crawl spikes
• Crawl delays
• Crawl-to-index ratios

Recommendation by website size

• Small (<10k URLs): Screaming Frog
• Medium (10k–100k URLs): Sitebulb or JetOctopus
• Large (100k–1M URLs): Oncrawl or JetOctopus
• Enterprise (1M+ URLs): Botify or Lumar

For the most detailed reporting on crawl rate and crawl budget, Oncrawl and JetOctopus tend to offer the strongest balance of depth, usability, and cost. If budget isn't a constraint and you're managing a very large site, Botify is widely regarded as the most comprehensive platform because it unifies crawl data, log-file analysis, indexing signals, and search performance into a single view.

If your priority is scheduled enterprise-grade crawls with deep crawl rate, crawl budget, and technical SEO reporting, I'd separate the tools into two categories:

• Technical SEO crawlers (best for crawl analysis)
• Log analyzers (best for actual crawl budget reporting from search engines)

The strongest setup is usually one crawler + one log analyzer.

1. JetOctopus ⭐ Best value

If I had to recommend one platform specifically for crawl budget analysis, it would probably be JetOctopus.

Strengths:

• Scheduled cloud crawls
• Crawl frequency over time
• Crawl depth
• Orphan pages
• Internal PageRank
• HTTP response trends
• XML sitemap comparison
• Googlebot behavior
• Crawl budget waste
• JS rendering
• Server log integration

Their crawl reports make it very easy to answer questions like:

• Which pages Googlebot visits most?
• Which sections are ignored?
• Which URLs consume crawl budget?
• Are parameter URLs being crawled?
• Are faceted pages wasting resources?

Ideal for sites from about 100k to several million URLs.

2. Botify ⭐ Enterprise leader

Botify is probably the most comprehensive crawl-budget platform available.

It combines:

• crawler
• server logs
• Google Search Console
• indexing data

into one interface.

It answers questions such as:

• Crawl frequency
• Crawl efficiency
• Crawl waste
• Indexation rate
• Freshness
• Internal linking impact
• Log-based Googlebot analysis
• Rendering analysis

Large publishers and ecommerce companies commonly use it.

3. Oncrawl

Oncrawl excels at combining three data sources:

• crawler
• server logs
• Search Console

Its visualizations are particularly strong for:

• crawl budget
• crawl frequency
• page groups
• crawl depth
• crawl equity
• orphan URLs

It's a strong choice if you enjoy working with data.

4. Lumar (formerly Deepcrawl)

Lumar is built around scheduled cloud crawling.

Notable features include:

• recurring crawls
• historical comparisons
• crawl changes over time
• JavaScript rendering
• segmentation
• crawl diagnostics

It's popular with agencies because it handles many client sites.

5. Screaming Frog

Still the gold standard desktop crawler.

Excellent for:

• scheduled crawls (Windows Task Scheduler or cron)
• custom extraction
• JavaScript crawling
• API integrations
• crawl visualization

However, for crawl budget reporting, it's limited because it doesn't analyze Googlebot logs in depth unless you supplement it with log files and external analysis.

6. Sitebulb

Sitebulb produces some of the clearest visual reports.

Strengths:

• scheduled crawling
• historical crawl comparisons
• crawl depth
• internal linking
• indexability
• duplicate content

It's excellent for technical audits but less focused on Googlebot crawl budget than cloud platforms.

If crawl budget is your main KPI

The biggest misconception is that crawl budget is determined by site crawls alone. Your crawler can tell you what could be crawled, but only server logs reveal what search engine bots actually crawled.

The best reporting typically combines:

• Site crawler
• Server log analysis
• Google Search Console crawl statistics
• XML sitemaps
• Indexation data

That combination lets you identify:

• wasted crawl budget (e.g., parameter URLs, redirects, 404s)
• under-crawled important pages
• crawl frequency by directory
• Googlebot response codes
• changes in crawl activity after site updates

My recommendations by use case

• Best overall for crawl budget: Botify
• Best value: JetOctopus
• Best for enterprise SEO teams: Oncrawl
• Best cloud crawler: Lumar
• Best desktop crawler: Screaming Frog
• Best visualization: Sitebulb

If you're managing websites with more than 500,000 URLs, I'd narrow the shortlist to Botify, JetOctopus, and Oncrawl. Those platforms are specifically designed to correlate crawl data with server logs and Search Console data, providing the most actionable insights into crawl rate, crawl efficiency, and crawl budget over time.

If detailed crawl rate, crawl budget analysis, and scheduled recurring crawls are your priorities, the best choice depends on whether you want an enterprise platform or a crawler you run yourself.

Here's how I'd rank them.

1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider (Best overall for most teams)

Strengths:

• Schedule unlimited recurring crawls
• Compare crawl history
• Crawl speed graphs
• Response time reporting
• Crawl depth reports
• Internal link distribution
• Orphan page detection
• XML sitemap comparison
• API integrations (GA4, Search Console, PageSpeed, Ahrefs, etc.)

Excellent crawl budget metrics include:

• Pages crawled
• Response time trends
• Redirect chains
• Duplicate URLs
• Indexability changes
• Crawl depth over time

The only limitation is that it doesn't analyze actual Googlebot behavior unless you combine it with server logs.

2. JetOctopus (My favorite for crawl budget)

This is built specifically around crawl efficiency.

It combines:

• Website crawl
• Googlebot log analysis
• Search Console data

You get dashboards like:

• Googlebot wasted crawl
• Crawl budget allocation
• Crawl frequency
• Crawl depth
• Pages never crawled
• Important pages ignored by Google
• Crawl anomalies

If crawl budget is your primary KPI, this is one of the strongest options without enterprise pricing.

3. Oncrawl

Outstanding for technical SEO.

It combines:

• Scheduled crawls
• Raw server logs
• Search Console
• Internal PageRank
• Crawl efficiency metrics

Some standout reports:

• Googlebot frequency
• Crawl waste
• Crawl budget optimization
• Freshness vs crawl frequency
• JavaScript crawl analysis
• SEO segmentation

Great if you're managing websites with millions of URLs.

4. Botify

Probably the gold standard for enterprise SEO.

Features include:

• Daily crawls
• Real Googlebot analysis
• Indexation monitoring
• Log file analysis
• Crawl budget optimization
• Rendering analysis
• Search Console integration
• ML-powered recommendations

Used by many very large ecommerce and publisher sites.

5. Lumar (formerly Deepcrawl)

Very strong at:

• Scheduled cloud crawls
• Crawl comparisons
• Trend reports
• Site architecture
• Indexability monitoring
• Crawl budget visualization

Excellent executive reporting.

6. Sitebulb

Less focused on crawl budget than the others but fantastic for visualization.

Its strengths include:

• Scheduled audits
• Crawl maps
• Visual site architecture
• Crawl comparisons
• SEO issue prioritization
• Easy-to-read reports

Very popular with agencies.

If you specifically want crawl budget reporting

Look for software that supports server log analysis. A crawler alone only tells you what can be crawled, not what search engines actually crawl.

The strongest tools in this area are:

1. Botify
2. Oncrawl
3. JetOctopus
4. Splunk or ELK + Screaming Frog (DIY approach)

These can answer questions like:

• Which URLs does Googlebot crawl most?
• Which URLs never get crawled?
• How much crawl budget is wasted on redirects, parameters, or 404s?
• Which sections of the site are over- or under-crawled?

Recommended setups by site size

• Small sites (<50k URLs): Screaming Frog is usually all you need.
• Medium sites (50k–500k URLs): Screaming Frog + server log analysis, or Sitebulb.
• Large sites (500k–5M URLs): JetOctopus or Oncrawl.
• Enterprise (5M+ URLs): Botify or Lumar.

If your goal is continuous monitoring of crawl budget with recurring scheduled crawls and historical reporting, JetOctopus offers one of the best balances of capability and cost. If you need the deepest enterprise-grade analysis and have the budget, Botify and Oncrawl are among the most comprehensive solutions available.