crawlgraph vs serpstat - how many modules do you actually open?

If you open Serpstat for rank tracking, audits, and keywords as well as backlinks, stay where you are: $69/mo for four working modules is a fair price and crawlgraph replaces none of it. If you log in only to pull a competitor's referring domains, you are paying for a suite to use one drawer of it, and that one job costs $99 once here. This post is the arithmetic and the honest split, including where Serpstat wins.

the question is usage, not price

Serpstat sells breadth for the money. Rank tracking, site audit, keyword research, competitor analysis, and backlinks in one login at $69/mo, with API access available low down the range rather than as an enterprise upsell. Next to Ahrefs at $129/mo or Semrush at $140/mo that is a real bargain, and nothing in this post argues otherwise. crawlgraph is not a suite at all. It answers one question, who links to this domain, and it charges $99 once. If you want the free-tool route before either, the free backlink research guide walks that whole stack.

So the comparison that matters is not “which tool is better” but “how many of those modules did you open last month?” Six tabs on the sidebar and one in your browser history is the pattern that makes people search for an alternative, and it is not a complaint about the product. It is a mismatch between what was sold and what got used. If your honest answer is one module, the rest of this post is the arithmetic on that mismatch. If it is four, skip to the last section and stay put.

what each tool actually does

Read that table as a shopping list, not a scoreboard. Serpstat is ahead on five rows because it sells five things. crawlgraph is ahead on the rows that describe the one thing it sells. Neither of those is a surprise, and the row that decides the purchase is the first one you would actually miss.

is crawlgraph better than serpstat?

As a suite, no, and it is not close. Serpstat does four jobs crawlgraph does not attempt: it tracks rankings, crawls your site for technical issues, researches keywords, and profiles competitor visibility. Buy crawlgraph expecting any of that and you will be disappointed in about ninety seconds.

On the single job of pulling a full referring-domain list, we think the answer flips. crawlgraph reads the Common Crawl domain graph directly: 121.1M domains and 3.90B domain-level links in the apr-jun 2026 release, exportable up to 100k rows per query, with the methodology public enough that you can go check our arithmetic against the source dataset. A backlink module inside a suite is built to be good enough alongside four other modules. That is a different design goal, and it shows in export caps and in how much of the list you can actually work.

the money, worked out

Serpstat is $69/mo. crawlgraph is $99 once, the same $99 for everyone. Month one, Serpstat is cheaper: $69 against $99. Month two, Serpstat has taken $138 and crawlgraph has stopped charging. From month two onward we cost less, and the gap only widens: $828 against $99 over a year, $2,484 against $99 over three.

That arithmetic is only an argument if the backlink module is the part you use. If Serpstat's rank tracking is saving you a separate $30/mo subscription and its audit is saving you another, the suite is doing four jobs for $69 and the per-job cost is excellent. Do the honest version of this sum with your own login history, not with a landing page's version of your workflow.

The sum cuts the other way too. If you are already paying for Serpstat and wanted deeper link data, adding crawlgraph is $99 once on top of a bill you are keeping anyway, which is less than one Ahrefs month at $129/mo and buys the full referring-domain export permanently. Plenty of people run both: the suite for rankings and audits, the specialist for the link list and the API.

where serpstat beats us

Four places, and they are not small.

Breadth. Everything above. One login, four working modules, team plans that stay affordable as seats are added.

Freshness. crawlgraph republishes on a roughly quarterly rhythm, tied to Common Crawl releases. A link you earned last week is not in our data yet and will not be until the next ingest. A commercial crawler runs on its own schedule and is built to catch new links sooner than a quarterly public dataset does. If your work is monitoring a live campaign week by week, that is a real gap and you should weigh it heavily.

A standing free tier. Serpstat runs a permanent metered free tier rather than a countdown trial, which is more generous in shape than most of the market. Our free surfaces are narrower and we should say so plainly: the anonymous domain check shows the top 5 referring domains, the gap analysis is free but needs an email for an unpaid run, returns the first 5 gaps, and is rate limited per IP, and a free API key is 15 backlink lookups a month.

Keyword and SERP context. Knowing who links to a competitor is half a strategy. Knowing which pages of theirs rank, and for what, is the other half, and we do not provide it. Pairing crawlgraph with Google Search Console and Keyword Planner closes some of that gap for nothing, but it is a stack you assemble rather than a screen you open.

the other serpstat competitors

If you are shopping the category rather than shopping us, the field prices out like this: SpyFu $39/mo, Majestic $50/mo, Serpstat $69/mo, Moz $99/mo, SE Ranking $103/mo, Ahrefs $129/mo, Semrush $140/mo. Serpstat sits low in that list, which is the point of it.

We will not rank those tools by index size or refresh speed, because we have not measured them and neither has anyone quoting numbers at you in a comparison table. What separates them is shape. Majestic and crawlgraph are link specialists. SpyFu's center of gravity is PPC history. Moz sells a metric the whole industry quotes. Ahrefs and Semrush sell depth across everything and charge for it. Serpstat sells the widest set of modules for the least money. Pick on shape first, then on price. The full field, priced against a one-time $99, is on the free serpstat alternative page.

the ten-minute test before you cancel anything

Do not switch on an argument. Pull the same competitor in both tools and compare what comes back:

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"}'

{
  "domain": "competitor.com",
  "release_id": "CC-MAIN-2026-apr-may-jun",
  "total_linking_domains": 6417,
  "returned": 1000,
  "cg_authority": 58,
  "results": [
    { "linking_domain": "saas-roundup.com",  "num_hosts": 18, "tld": "com", "cg_authority": 71 },
    { "linking_domain": "marketing-wiki.io", "num_hosts": 5,  "tld": "io",  "cg_authority": 49 }
  ]
}

Compare total_linking_domains against the count Serpstat reports for the same domain, then export both and diff the lists. Expect genuine differences in both directions: we will be missing links earned since the last Common Crawl release, and we will usually carry long-tail referring domains a smaller proprietary index never crawled. If that trade works for your projects, keep one more Serpstat month to finish anything in flight, then decide.

the verdict

Serpstat at $69/mo is a good buy for the person it was built for: someone who needs rank tracking and audits and keywords and links, and would rather pay one bill than four. If that is you, stay, and spend the $99 elsewhere. crawlgraph is for the other reader, the one who opens a $69/mo suite twice a week to do a single thing. That reader is renting five tools to use one, and buying the one outright pays for itself in month two. Run a competitor through the free check and see whether the referring-domain list is the whole reason you log in.