Both turn a URL into a PNG. Here's an honest comparison on the dimensions that actually matter: price, free tier, speed, and the things neither company puts on the marketing page.
Last updated January 2026. We try to keep this accurate, but always check the current pricing on each site.
| sitetrace | Urlbox | |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 100 calls/day, no signup | None (paid only) |
| Email-signup free tier | 1,000 calls/day | — |
| Cheapest paid plan | $9/mo (1,000 calls/day) | $49/mo (5,000 calls/mo) |
| Cost per 1,000 screenshots | $0.03 (Pro) — $0.01 (Volume) | $9.80 (Low) — $1.60 (Pro) |
| Render engine | Headless Chrome (Cloudflare) | Headless Chrome (custom) |
| Average render time | 2-3s | 2-4s |
| Custom viewports | ✓ any WxH, clamped 100-3840 | ✓ presets + custom |
| Full-page capture | ✓ | ✓ |
| Dark mode emulation | ✓ | ✓ |
| PDF rendering | — | ✓ |
| Video recording | — | ✓ (paid) |
| Bulk / batch API | — (use direct calls, async them yourself) | ✓ |
| Hosted in | Cloudflare edge (300+ POPs) | AWS (us-east-1, eu-west-1) |
| Open source | No | No |
| Tracks users of the screenshots | No | No (per their policy) |
Urlbox's $49/mo plan is 5,000 screenshots per month. Our $49/mo plan is 30,000 per day. For a project hitting the API hard, the gap is huge. For a project rendering a couple of screenshots an hour for a blog, both are overkill.
Urlbox has no free tier. We give you 100 calls/day with no signup, and 1,000 calls/day with just an email. "Try before you buy" should not require a card.
Our Worker runs in 300+ Cloudflare POPs. Urlbox is in two AWS regions. The first request from a new region is slow either way; subsequent requests are usually faster on our end.
If you need to render an HTML or URL to a PDF, Urlbox does it. We don't (yet). Same for video recording of a session.
Urlbox has a batch endpoint where you POST 100 URLs and get a webhook when they're done. We don't — you'd call us 100 times yourself and async them with your language's HTTP client. Most people can write this in 20 lines, but it's nicer to have it built in.
Urlbox has been around longer. We launched in 2026. If "will this still exist in 5 years" matters for your use case, that's a real point in their column.
First-time requests for a domain include DNS resolution, TLS handshake, page load, and the screenshot itself. 2-3s is typical. If you're calling us inside a request handler on your own server, that's 2-3s of user-perceived latency. Render async, save to your own storage, serve from there.
Change the width, the viewport, the dark mode toggle — that's a new cache key. If you want to capture many variants of a page, we charge for each one.
Cloudflare-protected sites, sites with sophisticated bot detection, sites that require user-agent whitelisting — all may serve a different (or empty) page to us. The screenshot will be of what the bot sees, not what a real user sees.
You want a free tier, you're cost-sensitive, your use case is "URL → image" (no PDFs, no video), and you want to be on Cloudflare's edge.
You need PDF rendering, video, or the bulk API out of the box. Or you want a vendor that's been around longer.
Urlbox has a 7-day refund policy. We have a no-signup free tier. Test the same URL on both and pick the one that renders your site correctly.