crawlgraph vs ubersuggest — the budget backlink question

Ubersuggest owns the “cheap SEO tool” slot in most people's heads — Neil Patel's all-rounder with keyword research, a basic site audit, and a backlink view, for ~$12-29/month or a $290 lifetime deal. crawlgraph isn't an all-rounder. It does backlinks, deeply, from the open Common Crawl graph, for $99 once. If you're weighing two budget tools, the split is clean.

breadth vs depth, at the budget end

Ubersuggest's pitch is “most of what the expensive suites do, for cheap.” That breadth is real and useful if you're a beginner who wants keyword ideas, a rough site audit, and a backlink peek in one login. crawlgraph's pitch is the opposite: one job, done with more data than a generalist carries. The question is whether your bottleneck is “I need a bit of everything” or “I need serious backlink data without a subscription.”

what each tool actually does

Ubersuggest wins on breadth — keyword research alone is a reason many people keep it. crawlgraph wins on backlink depth, export caps, an actual API, open methodology, and a lifetime price that undercuts even Ubersuggest's lifetime deal by ~$190.

where the depth actually shows

The honest difference between the two on backlinks specifically: generalist tools like Ubersuggest run a smaller proprietary link index, so for a given domain you tend to see a truncated sample of referring domains. crawlgraph reads the Common Crawl hyperlink graph — 4.4 billion edges across 120 million domains — so the referring-domain list is the complete public picture, exportable in full. For prospecting, that completeness is the whole point: you can't pitch a site you never saw because your tool capped the list at the first few hundred.

where ubersuggest is genuinely ahead

Equally honest the other way: crawlgraph does no keyword research, no rank tracking, no site audit. If those are part of your weekly routine, Ubersuggest gives you all of them in one cheap login and crawlgraph simply doesn't compete. A lot of solo SEOs genuinely want the all-rounder, and for them Ubersuggest is the better single purchase. crawlgraph is the right call when backlinks are the part you actually care about and you'd rather pair it with free tools (Google Search Console, Keyword Planner) for the rest.

the 15-minute test

Don't take the depth claim on faith — check it. Pull the same competitor in both tools and compare the referring-domain counts:

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-jan-feb-mar",
  "total_linking_domains": 8044,
  "returned": 1000,
  "cg_authority": 64,
  "results": [
    { "linking_domain": "roundup-blog.com", "num_hosts": 21, "tld": "com", "cg_authority": 73 },
    { "linking_domain": "tools-directory.io", "num_hosts": 6, "tld": "io", "cg_authority": 52 }
  ]
}

Look at total_linking_domains versus what Ubersuggest reports for the same site. If crawlgraph surfaces materially more referring domains — it usually does — that gap is the prospecting upside you'd be leaving on the table.

when ubersuggest is the better buy

Buy Ubersuggest if you want one cheap tool that does keyword research, rough audits, and a backlink peek, and you don't want to assemble a stack from separate pieces. Buy crawlgraph if backlinks are the job, you want the complete referring-domain picture and an API, and you're happy using free tools for keywords. They're cheap enough that “both” is also a defensible answer — crawlgraph for link depth, Ubersuggest for keywords — for under what one Ahrefs month costs.

the verdict

At the budget end this isn't a fight, it's a fork: Ubersuggest is the all-rounder, crawlgraph is the backlink specialist. If you only had $99 and your bottleneck is competitor backlink research and outreach, crawlgraph spends it deeper. If your bottleneck is “I need a bit of everything,” Ubersuggest spends it wider. Run a competitor through the free check and compare the referring-domain count to your Ubersuggest report.