crawlgraph vs spyfu - different questions, different bills

SpyFu and crawlgraph do not compete: SpyFu answers “what is my competitor bidding on,” crawlgraph answers “who links to my competitor.” SpyFu is the cheapest subscription in this comparison set at $39/mo, and it is a real PPC and ad-intelligence tool. crawlgraph is $99 once for referring-domain data pulled from the open Common Crawl graph. If you landed here to pick one, the question is which of those two you actually open a tool to answer.

two tools, two questions

Most comparison posts start by claiming the other tool is worse. This one starts by conceding the obvious: SpyFu is not a backlink tool that we beat on links, and we are not a paid-search tool that beats SpyFu on ads. Its center of gravity is competitor ad and SERP history. Ours is the hyperlink graph. People end up comparing the two anyway, because SpyFu is the cheapest sticker price on the shelf and link research is the job they were trying to get done. If link research is the job, start from the free backlink guide instead of from a price list.

So the useful frame is not feature-for-feature. It is: which question do you open a tool to answer, and what does answering it cost over two years?

The two data sets are not near-substitutes either, which is why the comparison keeps disappointing people. Ad intelligence is built by watching search results over time and reconstructing who paid to appear in them. A link graph is built by crawling pages and recording which page points at which other page. One tells you about spend and intent. The other tells you about the sites that already vouch for a competitor and might vouch for you. A tool that is excellent at the first has no particular reason to be good at the second, and buying it hoping otherwise is how the $39/mo line item ends up cancelled three months later.

what each tool is for

Read that table as a split, not a scoreboard. The top three rows are SpyFu's and we do not try to take them. The middle rows are ours. The last row is the only one where the two tools are genuinely being weighed against each other, and it is the row people get wrong.

the price picture, month by month

We are not the cheaper monthly option and we will not pretend to be. $39/mo is less than $99, so for the first two months SpyFu costs you less: $39 after one month, $78 after two, against our $99 paid up front. The lines cross in month three, where SpyFu has taken $117 and crawlgraph has taken $99 and stopped.

Extend it and the gap widens on a fixed schedule, because one side has a schedule and the other does not. Twelve months of SpyFu is $468. Twenty-four months is $936. crawlgraph is $99 at month one, $99 at month twelve, and $99 at month twenty-four. That is the entire pricing argument, and it only holds if the thing you are paying for is link data. If you are paying for ad intelligence, $468 a year buys you something we do not sell at any price.

when spyfu is the right purchase

Plainly: if you open the tool to reverse-engineer somebody's paid search - what they bid on, which ad copy they have run, how their SERP presence moved over the years - buy SpyFu. crawlgraph is not a replacement, not a partial replacement, and no amount of link data substitutes for ad history. Nothing on this page changes that recommendation.

The mismatch we do see is the other direction. Someone needs referring domains for outreach, shops on price, picks the cheapest suite on the shelf, and finds that links are the thinnest part of a product built around ads. That is a $468-a-year answer to a question the product was not designed around.

A quick way to tell which side you are on: write down the last three things you actually did in a competitor research tool. If two of them were about paid search, keep SpyFu and stop reading price comparisons. If two of them were “who links to this site and can I get a link too,” you are shopping in the wrong category, and the fix is not a cheaper suite - it is a tool whose whole output is the referring-domain list.

what our link data actually is

crawlgraph reads the Common Crawl hyperlink graph. The current release, Apr-Jun 2026, holds 3.90B domain-level links across 121.1M domains. You can check the source yourself, which is the part a proprietary index cannot offer.

Two honest limits. First, freshness: we ingest and republish on a roughly quarterly rhythm, so a link you earned last week is not in our data yet and will not be until the next release lands. If you need to see a link within days of it going live, Google Search Console is the free tool for that job and we say so in the guide. Second, scope: no keywords, no rank tracking, no site audit, no ads. One graph, one job.

if you genuinely need both

Buying both is a defensible answer and worth doing the arithmetic on. SpyFu for ad intelligence plus crawlgraph for links is $468 plus $99 in the first year, so $567, and $468 in every year after that, because only one of the two renews. Compare that to putting the same money into a single mid-priced suite: one year of Ahrefs at $129/mo is $1,548, and one year of Semrush at $140/mo is $1,680. Two specialists that each do their own job well can cost less than one generalist that does both adequately.

The reverse also holds. If ad data is not part of your work at all, the $468 a year is not a discount on anything - it is a subscription to a question you never ask.

the five-minute check

Do not take either claim on trust. Pick a competitor, pull its referring domains, and see whether the list is the thing you were shopping for:

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"}'

The response is the prospecting list, sorted by authority:

{
  "domain": "competitor.com",
  "release_id": "cc-main-2026-apr-may-jun",
  "total_linking_domains": 6318,
  "returned": 1000,
  "cg_authority": 62,
  "results": [
    { "linking_domain": "ppc-roundup.com",   "num_hosts": 14, "tld": "com", "cg_authority": 68 },
    { "linking_domain": "agency-blog.io",    "num_hosts": 5,  "tld": "io",  "cg_authority": 51 }
  ]
}

Look at total_linking_domains, then ask what you would have done with that number inside an ad-intelligence tool. If the answer is “nothing, I came for the ad history,” you have your answer and it is SpyFu.

If the answer is “I would pitch every one of those sites,” run the same pull against your own domain and diff the two lists. The domains that link to the competitor and not to you are the prospecting list, sorted by authority, and that diff is what the gap analysis does for you in one step. Free runs return the first 5 gaps, which is enough to see whether the list is any good before you pay for the rest of it.

the verdict

SpyFu at $39/mo is the cheapest subscription among the seven tools we compare, and for PPC and competitor ad intelligence it is the right purchase. We are not a replacement for it. crawlgraph is $99 once for the referring-domain layer, from open data, with an API and no renewal - cheaper than SpyFu from month three onward, and $369 cheaper across a first year, if link data is what you were buying. Run a competitor through the free check before you decide. The rest of the field, priced the same way, is on the spyfu alternative page.