Comparisons
A broken-link checker answers "is it 200?"
A broken-link checker — Screaming Frog, an Ahrefs site audit, the WordPress plugin, W3C link checker, a curl one-liner — asks one question: does this URL return a success status? That is a real job. Do it. RotSweep does it too.
What a broken-link checker is for
Status codes, on a crawl you run. Internal 404s, redirect chains, orphan pages, the quarterly hygiene export an SEO team already knows how to read. If that is the job, keep the crawler.
What it cannot see
A 301 to the wrong place still succeeds. A page that kept its URL and dropped the product still succeeds. Those are the cases a publisher, a docs team or an SEO agency actually loses sleep over, and a status-code checker is structurally blind to them. See the link that still returns 200.
When to use which
Use a crawler when you want a map of your own site. Use RotSweep when the question is “are the outbound URLs I depend on still the pages I meant?” Those can both be true for the same company. We are not a Screaming Frog replacement and we do not pretend to be. For the agency workflow in the gap between crawls, read what happens between exports.
The pricing shape is different on purpose
Billing is per workspace, metered on URLs, never on seats, from €5/month. There is no free tier; Daily Sweep and Deep Sweep can start with a 14-day trial, card required. We do not overage-bill. At the URL cap, existing links keep being swept. The ladder is on the pricing page.
Questions
Is RotSweep a broken-link checker?
It detects broken links, on every plan. It is not only a broken-link checker: it also follows redirects to the end and, with content drift, fingerprints the page so a 200 that is no longer the page you meant gets flagged.
Should I stop using Screaming Frog or Ahrefs?
No. Use a crawler for the periodic site audit. Use RotSweep for the outbound list you depend on, between crawls.