crawlgraph vs moz — domain authority, without the subscription

moz invented the shorthand. when someone says “what's their DA?” they mean Moz's Domain Authority — a 0-100 score that became the industry's common language for “how strong is this site.” crawlgraph doesn't try to replace that language. it gives you the underlying referring-domain data the score is built from, sourced from the public Common Crawl graph, for a one-time price. here is where each one actually fits.

what you're really comparing

Moz Pro is a full SEO suite — Link Explorer, Keyword Explorer, rank tracking, site crawl, and the MozBar browser extension — anchored by the DA/PA metrics. crawlgraph is a single-purpose backlink tool: paste a domain, get every referring domain in the latest Common Crawl release, export it, done. So this is not feature-for-feature. It's “do you need the suite and the DA metric, or do you need the link data underneath it without a monthly bill?”

what each tool actually does

Moz wins on breadth and on the DA metric that clients and prospects already recognize. crawlgraph wins on methodology, export caps, and a billing model that is the same number Moz charges per month — once.

the domain authority question

Here is the honest part most comparison posts skip: DA is a Moz-proprietary score. It's genuinely useful as a quick, universally-understood proxy — if you report to clients or pitch guest posts, “DA 60+” is a shared vocabulary you can't get anywhere else. crawlgraph's cg_authorityis the same idea (a 0-100 percentile from the Common Crawl harmonic-centrality ranking), but it is not the number your client will recognize. If your workflow depends on quoting DA specifically, Moz is doing a job crawlgraph isn't trying to do.

What crawlgraph gives you instead is the thing the score is computed from: the full list of who links to a domain, each with its own authority percentile, exportable in bulk. For prospecting — “show me every site linking to my competitor so I can pitch them” — that raw list is what you actually act on, and DA-the-number is just a sort key.

the case for the focused tool

Most people who churn off Moz don't do it because the data is bad — it's good. They do it because they were paying $99/month for a suite when they only opened Link Explorer. If your recurring use of Moz is “check a competitor's backlinks once or twice a week,” you are renting a ten-room house to sleep in one bedroom. crawlgraph is that one room, bought outright.

a 20-minute moz-to-crawlgraph migration

If your only recurring Moz task is competitor link research, the swap is short:

curl -X POST https://crawlgraph.com/api/v1/backlinks \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer cg_live_…" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"domain": "competitor.com", "limit": 1000, "sort": "authority"}'

That returns the referring-domain list with authority scores:

{
  "domain": "competitor.com",
  "release_id": "CC-MAIN-2026-jan-feb-mar",
  "total_linking_domains": 9120,
  "returned": 1000,
  "cg_authority": 71,
  "results": [
    { "linking_domain": "industry-news.com", "num_hosts": 47, "tld": "com", "cg_authority": 84 },
    { "linking_domain": "review-blog.io",    "num_hosts": 9,  "tld": "io",  "cg_authority": 66 }
  ]
}

Pull your three closest competitors, dedupe, and you have a prospecting list that cost you nothing per month. Keep a single month of Moz if you need to snapshot DA values for a client report, then cancel.

when to stay on moz

Stay on Moz Pro if: you quote DA to clients or for outreach qualification and need the recognized number; you use the MozBar daily; you rely on its keyword research or rank tracking; or you want the hand-holding of a mature, beginner-friendly suite with strong docs and community. crawlgraph does none of those — it is deliberately one tool.

the verdict

Moz is the suite that gave the industry its shared metric, and that's a real, ongoing reason to pay for it. crawlgraph is the backlink-data layer underneath, from open data, for $99 once instead of $99 a month. If you need DA-the-number and the surrounding suite, keep Moz. If you mostly need the referring-domain list and can't justify a recurring suite bill, crawlgraph does that specific job at a fraction of the lifetime cost. Run your own domain through the free check and compare the referring-domain list to what you see in Link Explorer.