Linkguard and Ahrefs Site Audit solve the same problem from opposite directions: one is source-available software you can own outright for $24, the other is a subscription at $99+/mo run entirely on someone else's servers.
Head to head
| Linkguard | Ahrefs Site Audit | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $24 once | $99+/mo |
| 1 year | $24 | $1,188+ |
| Broken link detection | Yes | Yes |
| Redirect chains + hop flagging | Yes | Yes |
| Scheduled re-checks + diff | Yes | Yes |
| Email alerts | Yes | Yes |
| CSV export | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted, data stays yours | Yes | No |
What Linkguard does well
- Real crawler — Give it a start URL plus depth and page limits and it walks your internal pages with undici, no headless browser, checking every internal and external link it finds.
- Redirect-chain analysis — Follows redirects hop by hop, stores the full chain, and flags anything over two hops so you catch link-equity leaks.
- Filterable results table — URL, status code, hops, link text and the pages each link was found on, filterable to broken, redirects, over two hops, or OK.
- Scheduled re-crawls with diffs — Daily or weekly re-scans diffed against the last run, so you get new-broken-links-since-last-scan instead of a raw dump.
What Ahrefs Site Audit still does better
There's a real reason Ahrefs Site Audit costs what it does: a bigger team, broader integrations and dedicated support behind it. If that ecosystem is genuinely what you need, it's worth paying for.
Which one should you pick
If your workflow depends on Ahrefs Site Audit's specific integrations or you'd rather not run anything yourself, stay put — that's a legitimate call. If you're comfortable owning the tool and want to stop paying $99+/mo for a job your own hardware can do, Linkguard pays for itself and then some: less than one month of Ahrefs covers Linkguard outright, and it never bills you again no matter how many pages you crawl.
Try Linkguard — $24, once
Crawl your whole site for broken links and redirect chains, with scheduled re-checks and diffs.