Comparison
Find out how we back up against our competitors and alternative technology solutions. This comparison page will help you understand why our clients choose us to power over 600k domains.
Quick Definitions:
* The number of times the tool can send the cache version of your page to a search bot
** The ability to render and cache your page again to pick up changes
*** How often you can recache your page to keep the content fresh
In terms of rendering capabilities, most tools use their own version of dynamic rendering.
However, it’s important to note that only Prerender and competitor #2 are specialized tools for dynamic rendering. Competitor #1 takes advantage of the fact that it is already crawling your site to report on technical issues to do a rendering process. However, because it also has to process data to feed into other systems, the rendering process is slower than Prerender.
On the other hand, Competitor #3 provides a server-side rendering (SSR) service that can be configured for dynamic rendering. As a default, it will render your pages for both search engines and humans on demand. However, it has very basic recaching capabilities, sending outdated pages until it finally spots changes on your pages – documentation isn’t available so we’re not sure what the process would look like.
Out of all tools, only Prerender counts with detailed documentation to let you understand how the tool works, what you’re being charged for (and how), and every configuration you can add to the tool to make it work more efficiently.
Competitor #1 doesn’t provide any pricing details on its website, but it does list several tiers you can choose from – although there’s not much information about the differences between the tiers either. It also forces you to buy the entire suite, which, according to G2 reviews, is very expensive even in entry-level tiers. It also makes it easy for their team to try to upsell you additional services constantly. In that sense, the competitor demands a “trust in my process” model.
In Competitor #3’s case, it’s more a lack of definitions, making it hard to know exactly what you’re committing to. For example, its most expensive plan states that it offers 5M renderings per month and 1M API calls. According to the only documentation available on their site, it says they work by performing API calls when a page is requested, so it’s unclear how many pages you can render per month.
Prerender pricing and Competitor #2 offer very similar plans, with the main difference being that this competitor assigns a fixed number of browsers to render your pages and has a storage limit for cached pages. These limitations don’t apply to Prerender as we only charge for the rendering process (cache and recaching), and storage is on us.
A particularity of Competitor #3 is that it limits the number of caching returns (100M in the most expensive plan) which is not a problem for small SPAs, but makes it unviable for enterprise-level websites because crawlers and social bots can quickly eat your cache returns budget.
From the tools compared (except Competitor #1 because it doesn’t provide any details), Prerender provides the shortest recaching intervals, making it the best choice for websites in the ecommerce, tourism (hotels, flights, etc.), and real estate industries because these pages are constantly changing and benefit from Google always indexing the freshest version.
Competitor #1 offers the most diverse solution, as their rendering feature is a secondary capability of their “activation” system. They excel at reporting, making it a solid choice for your site’s monitoring.
When you see the results in days, you’ll wish you tried Prerender sooner.
