Docket vs crawler.sh
crawler.sh and Docket agree about almost everything except what a crawler is for. It runs on your own machine, needs no account, has no cloud bill and no per-page fee — which is Docket's entire argument, made by somebody else. Where they part company is purpose.
What crawler.sh is for
Its own headline calls it a local Markdown extractor for AI training and RAG: point it at a site and it returns clean, readable Markdown ready for a retrieval pipeline, a fine-tuning corpus or an agent's context, with word count, byline, language and excerpt on every page. Docket does nothing of the kind. If you are building a dataset out of web content, Docket is the wrong tool and crawler.sh is built for precisely that.
It also does SEO analysis, and describes that coverage in two different ways on the same page — "16-category SEO analysis" beside its paid tier, and "24 automated checks" in its workflow section. The examples it gives are missing titles, duplicate meta descriptions, noindex directives, thin content, broken links, long URLs and content-freshness signals.
What Docket is for
97 checks across thirteen areas, four of which are not technical SEO at all — conversion, brand consistency, AI search visibility and campaign tracking — arriving as a ranked plan rather than a list of issues, with the ordering formula published. The overlap with their SEO feature is real but partial: the technical checks on their list are ones Docket also runs, and most of what Docket runs is not on their list.
The page cap
This is the one measurable difference between two tools that both run locally. crawler.sh's
free tier is capped at 50 pages a session and its paid tiers at 10,000. Docket has no cap:
-n 0 crawls until the site ends, because nothing is counting. On a site of a few
hundred pages neither limit matters; past ten thousand, one of them does.
On price they are not close. crawler.sh is $99/yr per product tier, with a free tier capped at 50 pages a session, renewed yearly. Docket is $349 once. A subscription is better value until roughly the fourth year and worse after it, and a free tier that needs no account is a genuinely easier thing to try than a $349 purchase.
One thing that is not a difference: both render JavaScript. They use their own engine rather than headless Chrome; Docket renders a sample of every audit in the WebKit that macOS already ships.
Which to buy
- Use crawler.sh if you want site content as Markdown for an AI pipeline, or a free local crawler for a small site with SEO checks attached.
- Buy Docket if you want the audit itself — what is wrong, across technical, conversion, brand and AI visibility, ranked into the order to fix it, with no page limit.
Nothing here compares the quality of either tool's checks, which has not been measured. Both vendors' own published descriptions are what this page is built from.
Checked 16 September 2026. The factual claims about this product were read from its own pages on that date: it describes itself as a local crawler that turns websites into RAG-ready Markdown for AI training, fine-tuning and agent context, built in Rust and running on your own machine (source); its free tier is capped at 50 pages a session and its paid tiers at 10,000, priced at 99 US dollars a year with one subscription covering both the CLI and the desktop app (source); it states its SEO coverage twice and differently — "16-category SEO analysis" beside the paid tier, and "24 automated checks" in its workflow section (source); it renders JavaScript with its own engine rather than headless Chrome, and respects robots.txt Disallow, Allow and Crawl-delay with adaptive pacing on 429 and 403 (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.
Docket is a one-time download for macOS. No account, no crawl credits, and the crawl runs
on your machine. Five optional checks fetch data it cannot produce alone; --offline
turns all five off. Download Docket →
Common questions
Is Docket a crawler.sh alternative?
Only for the SEO half. crawler.sh is a local Markdown extractor for AI training and RAG with SEO analysis attached; Docket has nothing that turns a site into a training corpus. For auditing and prioritising what is wrong with a site, Docket does considerably more.
Does crawler.sh limit how many pages you can crawl?
Yes. Its free tier is capped at 50 pages a session and its paid tiers at 10,000. Docket has no cap at all — -n 0 crawls until the site ends, because there is no server counting.
Which is cheaper?
crawler.sh, at $99/yr per product tier, with a free tier capped at 50 pages a session against Docket's $349 one-time. It renews yearly, so a subscription is better value until roughly the fourth year and worse after it. Its free tier also needs no account, which makes it much easier to try.
Do both render JavaScript?
Yes, and it is not a difference between them. crawler.sh uses its own render engine rather than headless Chrome; Docket renders a sample of every audit in the WebKit engine macOS already ships.