Alternatives to Dr. Link Check
Online crawler that checks a website for broken links, bad SSL certificates and malicious links. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Dr. Link Check
Online crawler that checks a website for broken links, bad SSL certificates and malicious links.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Dr. Link Check.
W3C Link Checker
An online W3C tool that finds broken links and anchors on a web page or whole site.
W3C Link Checker is free with published source code and also checks anchors, but it has a plain, text-heavy report and does not flag harmful links.
Broken Link Check
Free online dead link checker for whole websites or single pages, with no sign-up.
Broken Link Check needs no sign-up and shows where each broken link sits in the HTML, but it does not flag malware links and its free version stops at 3,000 pages.
Dead Link Checker
Online broken link checker that crawls a website or single page and reports dead links.
Dead Link Checker offers free manual checks of whole sites and can check several sites in one run, while scheduled emailed reports are paid and need an account.
LinkChecker
Open-source command-line tool that checks links in web pages or crawls whole websites for broken ones.
LinkChecker is open-source GPL software you run yourself from the command line on Windows, macOS or Linux, with many output formats but no graphical interface.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
A desktop website crawler for Windows, macOS and Linux that audits sites for technical SEO issues.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler for Windows, macOS and Linux that checks broken links among over 300 issues, with the free version limited to 500 URLs.
Sitechecker Broken Link Checker
Online tool from the Sitechecker SEO platform that finds 404 and dead links across a website.
Sitechecker Broken Link Checker reports broken links inside a wider technical SEO audit with a Chrome extension, and it leans heavily toward selling the paid SEO platform.
Ahrefs Broken Link Checker
Free online tool that finds broken inbound and outbound links for any website or page.
Ahrefs Broken Link Checker needs no signup and shows inbound as well as outbound broken links, but results come from Ahrefs' index rather than a fresh crawl of your site.
SortSite
Website quality scanner testing accessibility, broken links, browser compatibility and SEO against over 1200 checkpoints.
SortSite combines broken link checks with accessibility, compatibility and SEO testing across more than 1200 checkpoints, but its free demo covers only the first 10 pages.
Also worth comparing
These listings name Dr. Link Check as their own alternative, so the relationship runs both ways.
Integrity
A free native Mac app that crawls a website and reports broken links.
Dr. Link Check is a web crawler that also flags malware links and invalid SSL certificates, with larger sites needing a paid plan.
muffet
A fast command-line link checker, written in Go, that crawls a website to find broken links.
Dr. Link Check is a hosted crawler that also flags links to malware and phishing sites and invalid SSL certificates, with larger sites on a paid plan.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Oh Dear
A hosted website health monitor covering uptime, SSL, DNS, cron jobs, broken links and performance.
Redirect Checker
A free web tool that traces a URL's redirects and reports each status code in the chain.
httpstatus.io
A web tool for checking HTTP status codes, response headers and redirect chains of URLs.
Sucuri SiteCheck
Free remote scanner that checks a website for visible malware, blocklisting and outdated software.
URLVoid
Website reputation checker that looks up a domain against more than 30 blocklist services.
Rocket Validator
A hosted crawler that runs HTML, CSS and accessibility checks across thousands of site pages.
