Docket vs Semrush Site Audit

Semrush sells an index of the web with an audit tool attached. Docket sells the audit tool and nothing else. If Site Audit is the part of Semrush you actually open, you are renting the index to get at it, and the question on this page is whether that trade is worth $139–$549/mo to you. For a lot of people it is.

What the subscription buys that a download cannot

The concessions come first because they settle the question for most readers. Six things Semrush gives you that Docket has no version of:

• Backlinks. Referring domains, anchor text, who links to a competitor and not to you. That comes from crawling the web continuously and keeping the result. Docket holds none of it and is not building any.
• Keyword research. Volume, difficulty, the gap between your coverage and someone else's. Same index, same reason. A tool without one that prints a monthly search volume is showing you a guess with a number on it.
• Rank tracking. Their pricing page puts "500 keywords to track daily" on the entry plan. Docket never looks at a search result page, so it has no idea where you sit on one.
• Trend lines for the whole site. Their technical SEO page describes tracking "how each issue category trends over time". That is the chart that shows a client the retainer bought something. Docket has no equivalent view.
• Crawling somewhere other than your desk. Audits scheduled daily, weekly or monthly run on their machines whether your laptop is open or shut, at 20,000 pages an audit on Pro and Guru and 100,000 on Business.
• More than one person. Seats, shared projects, white-label reports carrying someone else's logo, dashboards, alerts.

Their knowledge base also says Site Audit can "check over 140+ website issues", against Docket's 96. A count is a weak measure of an audit and more checks with no ordering is just a longer list. It is still a larger number, and writing around that would be its own kind of tell.

One further concession, which retires something this site has leaned on elsewhere. Semrush's Site Audit page now checks AI crawler access per bot, naming ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot, Google-Extended, Perplexity-User, PerplexityBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot. Docket checks the same crawlers. What it adds is the sorting: search crawlers on one side, training crawlers on the other, which is the distinction that decides whether a block in your robots.txt costs you citations or only costs a model some training data.

Severity is not a plan

Semrush groups findings into three tiers and its knowledge base gives the order as "Errors (most harmful to a website) - Warnings (harmful) - Notices (least harmful)". That says how bad each thing is. It does not say what to do on Tuesday morning.

The gap opens as soon as two findings land in the same tier. A noindex left on a pricing page and 300 thin product descriptions are both errors. One is a two-minute change worth more than everything else on the list; the other is a quarter of somebody's writing time. Docket scores each finding on impact against effort and drops it into one of four phases: stop the bleeding, quick wins, build, polish. Reach is compressed as well, so a trivial issue that happens to appear on 4,000 pages does not outrank a serious one on the homepage. The report opens as a sequence instead of a filter you have to operate.

Nothing leaves your Mac

Docket has no account, no sign-in and no telemetry. The crawl runs on your machine and each run is written to ~/.docket/ as plain JSON you can diff, script against, or delete. Four checks reach outside by default and --offline turns all four off.

Two consequences that matter in practice. Auditing a prospect's site before a pitch is a quieter act on your own laptop than inside a vendor's project workspace. And re-running costs nothing, so a fix gets verified the moment it ships rather than saved up until a crawl is worth spending. Semrush's allowance is 100,000 pages a month on Pro, 300,000 on Guru and 1,000,000 on Business, and their knowledge base notes those reset on the 1st rather than rolling over.

Feature by feature

The arithmetic, and why it flatters Docket

Semrush's pricing page lists the entry plan at $139 a month, or $117.33 a month billed annually. Paid monthly that is $1,668 in the first year and the same again in the second. Docket is $199 once — activation is a licence key you paste in once — which works out at roughly five weeks of the cheapest Semrush plan.

Then take the flattery back out. That $139 is not the price of a site audit. It is the price of keyword research, rank tracking and a backlink index, with an audit included. If you use those three, cancelling to save on the audit saves nothing, because the rest of the platform still costs $139. The comparison only runs one way: when Site Audit is the tool you open and the remainder is shelfware.

One caveat we could not resolve and are not going to paper over. Their pricing page currently sells SEO, Starter, Pro+ and Advanced. Their knowledge base still documents crawl limits under Pro, Guru and Business. We have not worked out which new name inherits which old allowance, so read the limits on the plan in front of you rather than trusting the row above.

Reasons to buy Semrush instead

Docket is the wrong purchase, and a cheap wrong purchase is still wrong, if any of this is your week:

• You need to know who links to a competitor.
• You need search volume, keyword difficulty or a content gap analysis.
• You track positions for a keyword list and report on the movement.
• Two or more people have to open the same results, or the report has to carry a client's branding.
• Audits have to run on a schedule whether or not your machine is awake.
• Somebody wants a twelve-month trend line for a board deck.
• You are on Windows, Linux, or an Intel Mac, where Docket will not start.
• Your crawls run to hundreds of thousands of URLs.

Two of those and it is not a close call. There is no version of this page where Docket wins that argument on price.

Who each one is for

Semrush suits people for whom search is the job rather than a Thursday afternoon: agencies pitching on keyword opportunity, in-house SEO teams reporting upward, anyone whose work needs the index behind it.

Docket suits people who need the audit itself, in order, on hardware they control, at a price that stops. Freelancers, marketers who own the website alongside four other responsibilities, and agencies auditing prospects who have not signed anything yet.

Running both is a normal answer rather than a fence-sit. The platform answers where you stand; the local tool answers what to change next.

Checked 10 August 2026. The factual claims about this product were read from its own pages on that date: the entry plan is listed at $139/mo, or $117.33/mo billed annually, and the top standard plan at $549/mo; the entry plan lists "500 keywords to track daily" (source); Site Audit can "check over 140+ website issues", ordered "Errors (most harmful to a website) - Warnings (harmful) - Notices (least harmful)" (source); the crawl allowance is 20,000 pages per audit on Pro and Guru and 100,000 on Business, against 100,000 / 300,000 / 1,000,000 pages a month, resetting on the 1st rather than rolling over (source); AI crawler access is checked per bot, naming ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Googlebot, Google-Extended, Perplexity-User, PerplexityBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot (source); audits can be scheduled daily, weekly or monthly, with white-label reporting and tracking of "how each issue category trends over time" (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

Is Docket a Semrush alternative?

For the site audit, yes. For the rest of Semrush, no. Keyword volumes, backlink data and rank tracking come from an index of the web that Docket has no equivalent of and will not be building. Keep Semrush if you use those; Docket covers the audit for a one-time price.

How much cheaper is Docket than Semrush?

Semrush's pricing page lists its entry plan at $139 a month, or $117.33 a month billed annually, which is $1,668 in a year paid monthly. Docket is $199 paid once, about five weeks of that plan. The saving is only real if the site audit is the part of Semrush you use.

Does Docket have crawl limits like Semrush?

Not monthly ones. Semrush's knowledge base lists 20,000 pages per audit on Pro and Guru and 100,000 on Business, drawn against 100,000 to 1,000,000 pages a month depending on plan, resetting on the 1st. Docket crawls on your Mac, so the bounds are the page and depth caps you set, and re-running an audit costs nothing.

Does Docket check AI crawler access like Semrush?

Both do, so this is not a reason to switch either way. Semrush's Site Audit page names ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot, Google-Extended, Perplexity-User, PerplexityBot, Claude-User and Claude-SearchBot among the bots it checks. Docket checks the same crawlers and separates search crawlers from training crawlers such as GPTBot, because blocking one of those costs you citations and blocking the other does not.