Hushbug vs Checkbot
Checkbot crawls your site for SEO and security issues. Hushbug watches in real time while you develop. Both are Chrome extensions, but they work very differently.
Short answer: Checkbot crawls your site and reports SEO, speed, and security issues across multiple pages at once. Hushbug monitors your browser in real time and catches runtime errors, network failures, and accessibility problems as they happen. Same form factor (Chrome extension), very different approach.
What Checkbot does
Checkbot is a Chrome extension that crawls your website and checks for SEO, speed, and security best practices. You give it a URL, it follows links and crawls up to 100 pages (free) or 10,000 pages (paid), and produces a report organized by category.
The SEO checks cover title tags, meta descriptions, heading structure, canonical URLs, broken links, redirect chains, and duplicate content. Speed checks look at page size, image optimization, caching headers, and render-blocking resources. Security checks cover HTTPS, mixed content, missing security headers, and cookie flags.
Checkbot is strong at catching site-wide problems. A missing canonical tag on 50 pages, a redirect chain that adds 300ms, an image directory where nothing is compressed. These are the kinds of issues that affect many pages at once and are hard to spot by browsing manually.
The free tier crawls 100 URLs per site. Checkbot Plus ($250/year for one site, $375/year for unlimited) crawls up to 10,000 URLs and adds priority support.
What Hushbug does differently
Hushbug does not crawl. It monitors your browser in real time as you work. When you navigate to a page and a JavaScript error fires, Hushbug catches it. When a fetch request returns a 500, Hushbug logs it. When a layout shift happens during a state change, Hushbug records it. These are runtime issues that a crawler cannot detect because they require interaction or specific conditions to trigger.
Checkbot looks at what your HTML looks like. Hushbug looks at what your app does. A page might have perfect HTML structure (Checkbot gives it a green check) but throw a TypeError when the user clicks a button (Hushbug catches it). These are different classes of problems.
Hushbug also does not require you to start a scan. It runs passively in the background. You install the extension once, and it monitors every page you visit across all tabs. There is no "crawl this site" step. If you visit a broken page during normal development, Hushbug records what went wrong.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Checkbot | Hushbug |
|---|---|---|
| How it works | Crawls site on demand | Monitors browser in real time |
| Multi-page scanning | Yes (up to 10,000 pages) | No (monitors visited pages) |
| SEO checks | Yes (titles, meta, canonicals, links) | No |
| Broken link detection | Yes (across all crawled pages) | Failed requests on visited pages |
| Image optimization | Yes (compression, sizing) | Broken images only |
| Security headers | Yes (HSTS, CSP, X-Frame-Options) | Yes (mixed content, headers) |
| HTTPS/mixed content | Yes | Yes |
| JavaScript error detection | No | Yes |
| Network failure detection | No (checks link status codes) | Yes (runtime fetch/XHR failures) |
| Layout shift detection | No | Yes |
| Accessibility checks | No | Yes |
| Requires manual trigger | Yes | No (passive) |
| Data storage | Local report | chrome.storage.local |
| Free tier | 100 URLs per crawl | 2 detectors, unlimited pages |
| Paid tier | From $250/year | $7/month ($84/year) |
Verdict
Use Checkbot when you want to audit an entire site at once. Before a launch, after a migration, or as a periodic health check. It catches structural SEO problems and site-wide issues that would take hours to find by hand.
Use Hushbug during daily development. It catches the runtime problems Checkbot cannot see: JavaScript errors, failed API calls, layout shifts, accessibility violations. It runs passively and does not require you to start a crawl.
They overlap slightly on security checks (both catch mixed content and missing headers). Everywhere else, they cover different ground.