Docket vs Ahrefs Site Audit

By Matt Kerr·Published 6 August 2026·Updated 8 October 2026

The short answer: Ahrefs Site Audit is one module inside a keyword and backlink platform. Its page says it “scans for 170+ issues” and sorts them into errors, warnings and notices. Docket is a one-time Mac app whose whole job is the audit: 99 checks, ranked by impact against effort. If you also need keyword volumes and a backlink index, you need Ahrefs. If you need the audit and a plan, Docket costs $349 once.

• Ahrefs suits someone who does keyword research and link building and wants the audit inside the same account.
• Docket suits someone on a Mac who wants to audit any site, a client's included, with a ranked list of fixes and no crawl credits.

At a glance

Read from Ahrefs' own pages on 8 October 2026.

Where you can point Site Audit depends on the plan. Ahrefs Free (which Ahrefs says is the same account as the original Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) runs it only on sites you verify you own. The paid plans that include it run from Starter at $29 a month to Advanced at $449. Docket audits any site, including a client's, a prospect's or a competitor's. If you need keyword volumes and a backlink index, Docket cannot replace Ahrefs and does not try. That data has to be bought, not built.

What Ahrefs has that Docket can never have

A crawled index of the web. That is what powers keyword difficulty, search volume, backlink profiles, and competitor content gaps. Building it costs tens of millions of dollars a year in infrastructure. Docket audits what is on your site and how it is configured; it has no opinion about what people search for, and any tool claiming otherwise without an index behind it is guessing.

Ahrefs also crawls in the cloud, which matters if you want scheduled audits running while your laptop is closed, or a team looking at the same data.

Where the audit itself differs

Ahrefs' Site Audit page says it "scans for 170+ issues" and sorts them into errors, warnings and notices "so you know which ones to fix first". Docket goes one step further in the same direction: every finding is ranked by impact against the effort of fixing it, with an estimate of how long the fix takes, so the output is a sequence rather than three buckets.

The cloud model also brings metering. Ahrefs' pricing page lists a monthly crawl-credit allowance per plan (100,000 on Lite, 500,000 on Standard, 1,500,000 on Advanced), so the audit you run is shaped partly by what you can afford to spend on it. Docket runs on your machine with no per-crawl cost, so auditing a client site twice in a day costs nothing.

And three areas are not listed among the checks on Ahrefs' Site Audit page: per-crawler AI search access, landing-page conversion, and marketing tracking coverage. That is what their page does and does not advertise, which is not the same as proof the product cannot do it. If you need one of these, ask them rather than taking this page's word for it.

Side by side

The metering problem, concretely

Cloud auditing is priced per crawled URL, and that changes how you work in a way that is easy to miss until you hit it. Ahrefs' Lite plan lists 100,000 crawl credits a month. Their pricing page does not spell out what spends a credit, so the exact arithmetic is theirs to state, not ours, but a monthly allowance means re-auditing a client site after a fix, then again after the next fix, draws down a budget that a larger client might need.

The practical effect is that people run fewer audits than they should. You verify a change once rather than iterating, and you hesitate before crawling a prospect's site to win the work. Docket has no equivalent constraint: the crawl happens on your laptop, so running it twenty times in an afternoon costs nothing but time. For agencies doing pre-sales audits that difference compounds quickly.

Two limits, not one, and the second is a bill

Re-read on 2026-10-08: the credit allowances are unchanged, but they are not the only ceiling. Each plan also caps pages per project: 25,000 on Lite, 50,000 on Standard, 250,000 on Advanced. A monthly credit budget and a per-project page cap constrain different things: the first limits how often you can re-crawl, the second limits how large a single site can be before it will not fit in one project at all.

And the credit figure is a billing threshold as well as a cap. Ahrefs' own FAQ: "Once you enable additional pay-as-you-go credits and data, you'll be automatically charged when consumption exceeds your plan's limits." That is opt-in, and it is worth knowing which way yours is set before a large re-crawl rather than after. Running out and running up a bill are different outcomes, and only one of them stops.

Docket has neither limit, because neither is a thing a local crawler needs: there is no allowance to draw down and no project size to exceed. The bound is the page and depth caps you choose, and the fifteen-minute crawl deadline the tool applies to respect the site it is reading.

The reverse is also true and worth stating. Because Docket runs locally, closing the laptop stops a scheduled audit, and there is no shared workspace for a team to look at the same results. If either of those matters, cloud is the right architecture and the metering is what you pay for it.

Docket on a real site: ours

Ahrefs sorts what it finds into errors, warnings and notices. Docket ranks every finding by impact against effort. This is what that looks like on a real audit of our own site.

Docket's findings for that site, 9 in all (2 medium, 3 low and 4 notice), come out as a ranked list. This is the order it gave, with the ones that name nobody else:

1. Medium: 4 pages across 2 groups target the same search as each other. Medium effort, 4 pages.
2. Low: 2 groups of near-identical colours in your CSS. Medium effort, 2 pages.
3. Low: Only 1 recognised profile in sameAs. Trivial effort, 1 page.
4. Low: 1 page promises one thing in search and another on the page. Small effort, 1 page.
5. Notice: Missing 1 baseline security header. Trivial effort, 1 page.
6. Notice: 2 marketing and analytics tools detected. Trivial effort, 2 pages.
7. Notice: One AI visibility control cannot be checked from outside, including by Docket. Trivial effort, 1 page.

2 more name other companies or sites, a cookie-consent finding among them, and are left out here as they are in the public sample report.

When to pick Ahrefs instead of Docket

• You do keyword research or link building. You need an index, and Ahrefs or Semrush is how you get one. Docket has no keyword or backlink index and does not try to build one.
• You want audits running while your laptop is closed, or a team looking at the same results. Ahrefs crawls in the cloud. Docket's schedule runs only while the app is open, and it has no shared workspace.
• You are not on a Mac. Docket runs on macOS only.
• You want the audit and a plan, once, on your own machine. That is Docket, for $349 once.

Plenty of people run both: an index tool for research, and a local auditor for the work.

Checked 8 October 2026. The factual claims about this product were read from its own pages on that date: Site Audit "scans for 170+ issues", and "segments issues into errors, warnings, and notices, so you know which ones to fix first" (source); Ahrefs Free includes Site Audit "For verified websites", and Ahrefs says Ahrefs Free and Ahrefs Webmaster Tools "are the same account" (source); Site Audit lists finding duplicate content, "Be it title tags, meta descriptions, headings, or low-quality content pages" (source); Site Audit is among the tools on the $29 Starter plan (source); monthly prices Starter $29, Lite $129, Standard $249, Advanced $449; projects on sites of unverified ownership 5 on Lite, 20 on Standard, 50 on Advanced (source); crawl credits are listed per plan: Lite 100,000, Standard 500,000, Advanced 1.5M per month, and max pages per project of 25,000, 50,000 and 250,000 (source). Products change and pricing changes; if something here has gone out of date, tell us and it will be corrected. Everything else on this page is a comparison of approach, not a claim about their roadmap.

Common questions

What does the Ahrefs Site Audit tool check?

Ahrefs' Site Audit page says it scans for 170+ issues and segments them into errors, warnings and notices. Docket runs 99 checks across thirteen areas and ranks every finding by impact against effort.

Is the Ahrefs site audit free?

Partly. Ahrefs Free includes Site Audit for verified websites, meaning sites you prove you own. Auditing a client's or a competitor's site needs a paid plan, where the number of projects on unverified sites is capped by plan. Docket's free version shows your score and how many problems each area has, on any site, with no key.

Does the Ahrefs site audit include a content audit?

Its Site Audit page lists finding duplicate content, in title tags, meta descriptions, headings or low-quality pages, among its checks. This page tested nothing beyond what Ahrefs publishes. Docket's content checks cover thin pages, competing pages that target the same search, language mismatches and missing authorship, and rank them with everything else.

Is there a one-time alternative to Ahrefs Site Audit?

Docket is a one-time purchase for macOS: $349 once. It audits any site with no crawl credits. It does not replace Ahrefs' keyword and backlink data.

Can Docket replace Ahrefs?

Only for the site audit. Ahrefs' keyword volumes, difficulty scores and backlink data come from a crawled index of the web, which Docket has no equivalent of and does not claim to.

Does Docket have crawl limits like Ahrefs?

No. Docket runs on your machine, so there are no crawl credits and no per-audit cost. The only limits are the page and depth caps you set.