Botify vs. Lumar for Technical SEO and Optimization: Feature and Pricing Comparison

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.

Source

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.

Source

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. Learn more about Prerender.io’s reaching feature here.

• 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: