To drive traffic and sales, your website needs to be discoverable in search. However, when it comes to JavaScript-powered websites, optimizing your content for crawling and indexing can be complex. This is where SEO auditing and optimization tools like Botify and Lumar come in.
This technical SEO tool comparison explores the key differences between Botify and Lumar, including their features, advantages, disadvantages, and pricing structures. We’ll also introduce Prerender.io as a compelling alternative to Botify and Lumar, particularly for those seeking more cost-effective dynamic rendering software.
What is Botify?
Botify is a comprehensive SEO auditing and optimization tool for enterprise-level websites. It helps you conduct in-depth SEO audits to analyze technical SEO elements and some on-site and content performance aspects. This includes content duplication, meta tags, and internal linking.
That said, Botify’s particular strength lies in its ability to identify technical SEO issues, especially crawling and indexing problems such as partial or no-crawl/no-index pages that often cause ‘missing content.’
Botify Top Features
Botify organizes its solution into three primary categories: analytics, intelligence, and activation. The following features provide an overview of its offerings:
- Daily log analysis: provides detailed reports on your pages’ crawling and indexing performance.
- Tailored reporting: offers over 1,000 SEO metrics to choose from, allowing you to monitor the most relevant metrics for your website.
- Customizable caching management: controls how search engines interact with your website to display the most updated content on SERPs.
- Proactive alerts: provides 24/7 error notifications when your website requires attention.
- AI-driven recommendations: predicts which URLs are likely to be crawled or visited to ensure they get maximum online visibility from the moment they go live.
Botify Pros and Cons
Botify offers robust SEO auditing and reporting capabilities, providing users with a deep understanding of how their website performs and is perceived by search engines.
As one G2 reviewer noted, “Botify offers helpful alerts and insights into how search engines access (or not) a website at scale. The additional log-file analyzer tool is also extremely useful, with the ability to automate log-file feeds into the platform for analysis, saving hours!” (source).
However, other reviewers have mentioned challenges with the tool’s interface and performance. The sheer number of analysis options can be overwhelming and slow down the platform: “It can take a lot of practice to become comfortable navigating Botify—both the language they use (and sometimes change) and the actual layers of the tool. More easily accessed definitions across the tool would be a huge help,” (source) and “It can sometimes take a lot of time to load. There is a lot of information, and it can be daunting to use” (source).
What is Lumar?
Lumar (formerly known as DeepCrawl) is renowned for its lightning-fast crawlers, capable of analyzing up to 450 URLs per second. This speed makes Lumar ideal for conducting detailed SEO audits of large-scale websites without complications. In addition to technical SEO elements, Lumar can also analyze your website’s on-site SEO and site speed. This includes meta tags, thin content, and metrics used to measure Core Web Vital scores.
Top tip: This guide will show you how to measure Core Web Vital using PageSpeed Insights and improve its health.
Once the crawlers identify issues, Lumar provides actionable recommendations for fixes. The findings are shared on the platform, facilitating team coordination and simplifying SEO task management. Lumar also offers ‘SEO templates’ that enable you to check your content performance and identify potential issues before they are published on your site.
Lumar Top Features
Lumar focuses on enhancing technical SEO, site speed, and web accessibility by emphasizing these core selling points:
- Traffic funnel: provides an overview of the availability, indexability, uniqueness, and rankability of your pages.
- Advanced SEO reporting: identifies over 250 key technical SEO elements, site speed (through integration with Google Lighthouse), and web accessibility issues.
- Rich test suites: creates pre-production environments to test content performance, identify potential issues, and mitigate risks.
- AI-powered workflow: offers automated AI-based suggestions and ticket creation, enabling efficient and timely issue resolution.
- Customizable crawling: targets crawlers to specific webpages or segments and allows for ad-hoc crawls to obtain the insights you need when you need them.
Lumar Pros and Cons
Lumar excels at its detailed crawling capabilities. The tool crawls deep into your pages to identify SEO issues and promptly alert your team for quick resolution.
As one user noted, “I like that it can crawl very large websites quicker than other crawlers and diagnose issues on them. It’s especially good for technical SEO audits, the fact that you can add log files to this tool makes it superior to others” (source).
However, the sheer volume of data returned from the audit can be overwhelming. Some users wanted easier filtering options, suggestions on the most pressing issues, or a more user-friendly interface that allows for focused problem-solving.
As one user stated, “The only potential downside is losing focus through the sheer amount of data and discoveries made by the crawler. You always need to keep prioritization front of mind when deciding on which items to fix“ (source).
Botify vs. Lumar: Features
Now that you know what Botify and Lumar can do to improve your business’s online visibility and rankings, let’s compare their features side by side. The list below highlights the major differences between the two SEO auditing and optimization solutions.
| Botify | Lumar | |
| Focused SEO areas | Technical SEO, especially crawling and indexing behavior | Technical SEO, site speed, and web accessibility |
| Unique selling points | Log file analysis and real-time indexing | Lightning-speed crawlers and automated QA testing |
| Best for | Enterprise-size websites, primarily serving customers in the ecommerce industry | Enterprise websites serving diverse industries, including automotive and agencies. |
| AI-powered system | Yes, predicting the crawling and indexing performance of URLs | Yes, recommend fixes to find SEO issues |
| Crawl analysis | Yes | Yes |
| JavaScript SEO rendering | Indirectly, as part of the crawling and auditing process | Not clear. Based on this blog, it only crawls the rendered version of your JS-based content |
| Real-time error notifications | Yes | Yes |
| Team collaboration | Yes | Yes |
| Keyword optimization | Yes | Yes |
| Integration options | Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Semrush, and more | Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, Adobe Analytics, Power BI, and more |
Our feature verdict: given the similarities between Botify and Lumar, choosing the best SEO tool depends on your website’s specific needs. If your website relies heavily on JavaScript, Botify’s in-depth crawling and indexing behavior can be invaluable. However, if you need a comprehensive overview of technical SEO, site speed, and web accessibility performance, Lumar might be a better fit.
Botify vs. Lumar: Pricing
While Botify and Lumar are both highly regarded for their SEO auditing and optimization offerings, their pricing transparency can be a drawback. Neither company publicly discloses their pricing plans.
Botify Pricing Plans
To inquire about Botify’s pricing, you’ll need to contact their team for a demo and a personalized quote, likely based on your website’s size, complexity, and SEO challenges. However, some reviewers have shared the potential cost of Botify.
According to Capterra, Botify’s pricing starts at $500 per month, but the specific features and integrations included are unclear. This high price point has been confirmed by one reviewer, “It is an expensive tool, especially for startups and small agencies that want a tool that adds value to their daily work. The monthly fee is high, even in the lowest plan” (source).
Additionally, Botify’s pricing seems to vary based on the number of features you purchase. If JavaScript crawling and indexing issues are your primary concern, be prepared for higher costs, as explained by one reviewer: “The tool can be quite pricey, especially if you are looking to start using some of the more in-depth features (log analyzer, keywords) or look into crawling Javascript” (source).
Lumar Pricing Plans
Like Botify, to determine the cost of adopting Lumar, you’ll need to request a pricing quote from their team. They will provide a personalized pricing proposal based on your specific web performance requirements.
According to a third-party source, the estimated median annual cost for Lumar’s Analyze plan is $32,000, which equates to approximately $2,667 per month for crawling 5 million URLs. Lumar’s pricing is not based on ‘active’ projects but rather on the number of URLs that can be crawled. A reviewer corroborated the high price point, stating: “The only drawback to the product is the price. It’s quite expensive, limiting its use to large enterprise companies” (source).
Our pricing verdict: given the lack of transparent pricing information from both Botify and Lumar, it’s challenging to determine which SEO auditing and optimization tool offers better value for money. While we know that Botify is priced at $5,000 per month compared to Lumar’s $2,667, these are reported costs, and the specific features and benefits included in these plans are undisclosed, hindering a fair comparison.
Botify vs. Lumar: Which Technical SEO Tool is Better?
Botify and Lumar are both robust tools for enterprise-level SEO auditing and optimization. They offer a wide range of features designed to enhance your website’s search engine visibility on SERPs, drive more traffic, and ultimately boost sales.
While pricing information remains elusive for both platforms, we can compare their feature sets. If your primary focus is general technical SEO health, including site speed and web accessibility, Lumar is the ideal choice. Botify, on the other hand, excels in crawling and indexing performance optimization. This makes it a great option if you’re looking for a solution to see how search engine bots interact with your JavaScript website.
Prerender.io: The Most Affordable Technical SEO Solution for JavaScript-Heavy Websites
Now, perhaps your primary concern isn’t the comprehensive SEO audit with its in-depth analysis, but rather significantly improving the indexing potential of your JavaScript-heavy website. If so, Prerender.io emerges as an affordable option, especially as a Botify alternative.
Prerender.io Benefits
Prerender.io optimizes SPAs and JavaScript-based websites for search engines by pre-rendering pages into static HTML versions, which are then cached for faster crawling and indexing. The dynamic rendering software then determines if a request is from a search engine crawler or a human user. It serves the pre-rendered HTML to search engines for better SEO scoring, and the regular website experience for human visitors.
As a result, Prerender.io can boost your JavaScript pages’s crawling performance by up to 300x and indexing speed by 260%. This can result in an 80% increase in website traffic.
Visit this page to learn more about how Prender.io works and its benefits.
Prerender.io Features
Here are some reasons why Prerender.io is the best JavaScript SEO solution for large-scale websites:
- A specialized JavaScript pre-rendering solution
Unlike Botify, Prerender.io doesn’t render as a by-product of SEO auditing and crawling processes. Prerender.io is a dedicated JS rendering software that prioritizes rendering for SEO benefits.
- Actionable technical SEO insights
Get real-time reports to quickly identify and resolve SEO issues like crawling errors, failed indexing, and 404 errors, enabling you to take immediate action.
- Advanced rendering options
Prioritize specific URLs for pre-rendering or re-rendering, with detailed render history for performance tracking and content optimization.
- Recaching capability and customizable cache freshness
Configure automatic page recaching for dynamic websites. Set intervals between 6 hours and 30 days. This ensures Google always displays the latest content on SERPs.
- Built-in SEO scoring and keyword rank tracker
Stay informed about your content’s on-site SEO health (e.g., missing alt text, meta tag, and H1 elements) with our built-in SEO scoring feature. Additionally, monitor the progress of your keyword rankings after implementing specific SEO strategies without needing to switch between different tools.
Learn more about how Prerender.io works in this video:
Prerender.io Pricing
Prerender.io offers transparent and flexible pricing plans to suit different website needs. Plans start at $90 per month and adjust based on how much content you render and how often you need it updated (cache freshness). You can give this technical SEO solution a test drive with a free 14-day trial.
Additionally, add-on services like onboarding assistance and ongoing support from account managers are available to maximize Prerender.io’s impact on your website performance.
For a detailed breakdown of pricing and features, visit Prerender.io’s pricing page.
Prerender.io: An Excellent Alternative to Botify and Lumar
While Botify and Lumar simplify SEO optimization at scale, they both come with a high price tag and are not designed to address JavaScript SEO issues at their core.
Prerender.io, on the other hand, is a dedicated JS rendering tool that enhances the SEO performance of dynamic content. With affordable, transparent pricing, it delivers measurable value in just a few weeks. It’s no wonder that companies like Salesforce, Wix, and Netlify trust Prerender.io to improve web performance and boost SERP visibility, leading to increased sales.
Ready to elevate your organic performance? Get started for free with Prerender.io today!
Botify vs. Lumar: What You Need to Know
Find answers to common questions about Botify and Lumar comparison, and how Prerender.io stands out as the better technical SEO alternative solution for JavaScript-based websites.
1. Prerender.io vs. Botify: Which SEO Optimization Tool Should You Choose?
If you’re looking for reliable JavaScript dynamic rendering software, Prerender.io is the ideal choice. Unlike Botify, which renders web pages as part of its auditing process, Prerender.io specifically focuses on rendering and preparing your JS pages for search engine crawlers. This ensures that when search engines request them, they receive a pre-rendered version, significantly reducing crawling and indexing time while improving content accuracy. As a result, your JavaScript pages will appear on SERPs faster, with no content missing.
Learn more about how Prerender.io and Botify compare in detail.
2. Prerender.io vs. Lumar: How Do They Compare?
While both Prerender.io and Lumar contribute to technical SEO optimization, they function in distinct ways.
Prerender.io specializes in JavaScript rendering. It pre-renders your dynamic JS pages, making them readily understandable by search engines. This proactive approach ensures Google can efficiently crawl and index your content, improving SEO results and organic traffic.
Lumar focuses on SEO auditing and optimization. It identifies crawl, indexing, and other technical SEO issues, and gives guidance for resolution.
3. What is Prerender.io?
Prerender.io is a dynamic rendering software that helps your JavaScript content easily crawled, indexed, and found by Google and customers. It works by:
- Converting your JavaScript pages into static HTML: making your JS content readily understandable by search engine crawlers.
- Caching pre-rendered pages: ensuring search engines always have access to a fast-loading version of your site.
Consequently, Prerender.io accelerates indexing and page load times, improving SEO performance and user experience. Discover the detailed workings and benefits of Prerender.io.
