How to capture every page of a website, as screenshots and a mapOctopus.do vs. The Visual Sitemapper vs. Rarchy vs. Page Scanner

To see a whole website at once, you need two things: the list of its pages, and a picture of each one. A tool that crawls the site finds the list by following its links from the home page. A visual sitemap then lays the pages out as a tree or a flow, and some put a screenshot of each page on its card. Rarchy and The Visual Sitemapper do that from an address you type, and reach hundreds or thousands of pages. Octopus.do crawls a site into an editable sitemap for planning, with SEO tags rather than pictures. Page Scanner does it in the browser you are signed in to, for up to 30 pages, one of each kind, and draws every link between them.

Four tools at a glance

✓ yes, ✗ no. An empty cell is one the product's own pages do not answer.

Octopus.do

Octopus.do calls itself a "Lightning⚡fast visual sitemap builder" and is made for planning a website: pages as blocks in a tree diagram, with wireframes, content, SEO tags and notes. Its crawler is one way to start a project. You enter a URL, and it "makes a list of all links that are available in the HTML code", follows them until all are collected, and gathers each page's title, description and headings into blocks. It can also start from an existing sitemap XML file, which its help page calls "very quick" but only as complete as that file. It reads "any public website that doesn't have specific security settings that could limit crawler access, or limitations drawn in robots.txt file."

The crawler takes 300 pages on the free plan and 3,000 on Pro ($16 a month, $14 billed yearly) and Team ($24 per seat a month, $20 yearly). Every plan can generate a sitemap.xml, embed a view-only sitemap and export to Figma and WordPress; PNG, PDF, TXT, CSV and XML exports start at Pro. There is no trial, but the free plan has no time limit and paid plans can be refunded within 14 days.

What it does not say: none of the crawler, features or pricing pages mentions a screenshot of a crawled page. Its Image mode is for uploading design files or syncing Figma artboards. The result is a structure with metadata, not a picture of how each page looks.

Verdict: the one for planning a new or rebuilt site from the old one's structure, with a team editing the tree together.

The Visual Sitemapper

The Visual Sitemapper, at app.thevisualsitemap.com, does one thing: "Enter any domain to crawl its pages, capture screenshots, and generate an interactive visual sitemap with hierarchy and page details." Its crawl is breadth first ("BFS crawl discovers every page linked from your starting URL"), and it takes "full-page screenshots for every crawled page". Advanced options set the maximum pages and the maximum depth, which start at 100 and 5. A crawl can be narrowed to a subfolder such as /blog/, and a page that answers 4xx or 5xx is "flagged with a red border".

Free is "Up to 100 pages per crawl" and "5 sitemaps per month". Pro is "$29 one-time" for "Up to 1,000 pages per crawl" and unlimited sitemaps. Exporting and sharing are listed on Pro as "coming soon".

Verdict: the quickest way to type in a domain and look at its pages as screenshots, with a cheap one-time upgrade for larger sites; not yet the one for handing a file to someone.

Rarchy

Rarchy plans "website structures and customer journeys" and is "Designed for agencies & teams". Its generator starts a sitemap "by crawling your website, importing an existing XML sitemap, or uploading a CSV file", and can "Capture full-page screenshots of every page on your website to get a truly visual view, whether it's to wow your clients or simply archive your page content." Its crawler identifies itself as "Rarchy/bot" and is, in its words, "a polite crawler, meaning we auto-throttle based on average page latency". The sitemap opens in a real-time editor with comments, @mentions, version history and folder permissions, beside a user-flow tool.

The free plan is "50 pages per sitemap" and "50 screenshots per month", with the crawler and "Unlimited exports"; the plan table lists export to SVG, PDF, XML and CSV. Team starts at "$49 USD / mo", "Billed monthly for the first 5 people", and Agency at "$249 USD / mo", "Billed monthly for unlimited users". A year paid at once is 15% less. The pricing page gives two sets of limits for the paid plans. Its plan cards say "5,000 pages per sitemap" and "5,000 screenshots per month" for Team, and "25,000 pages per sitemap" and "25,000 screenshots per month" for Agency. The table below them says unlimited pages per sitemap for both, 500 and 25,000 pages per import, and 500 and 25,000 screenshots per month. Ask Rarchy which holds for Team before you buy.

Verdict: the most complete of the four for an agency that maps client sites with screenshots and works on the map as a team, at a team's price.

Page Scanner's site map

Page Scanner is a browser extension that captures a whole page and extracts it as a PDF or an image. Map this site is its way of capturing a site's pages, and it is a preview: Page Scanner can switch it off from its server without a release, and the popup marks it with a green dot until you first use it.

1. Open the page to start from, usually the home page, and click the Page Scanner icon.
2. Press Map this site, under Pick an element. The map opens in a tab of its own.
3. Choose 2 links deep or 3 links deep, and press Find pages. The browser asks you to let Page Scanner read that one site; allow it.
4. Read the list, which shows what it will capture and what it leaves out, and why. Press Capture N pages.

The list is made before anything is captured. It reads the site's pages with your browser's own cookies, so a site you are signed in to lists the pages you see. It keeps to the site you started from (example.com, www.example.com and docs.example.com are one site), follows each host's robots.txt except for the page you started on, and never follows a link whose address says it acts, such as sign out, delete or unsubscribe, or one that is a file. Pages of one kind, a blog's posts for instance, are one row that says how many others are like it, and only that one is captured.

Then each page opens in a background tab, is captured whole the way a scan is, and closes. The map grows as they arrive: the start page first, a column for each link of depth, a line for every link a page drew, and each address colored by whether it is the same host, another subdomain or another site, whose addresses are shown but never opened. A page that answered an error says so in red. When a site shows a check that a person is visiting, the map stops and brings that tab to the front for you to pass it; it never answers one itself.

Extract saves the whole map as one PNG, as an SVG whose cards, addresses and links stay sharp, or copies it to paste into Figma as layers. Any page opens in the editor, where it crops, takes marks and exports like any capture, as a PDF whose text you can select, or as an image.

What it costs. It captures 30 pages at most, three links deep at most, and one of each kind, so a large site lists the rest as past the limit rather than capturing them: the crawlers above reach hundreds or thousands. It reads the HTML each page is served, so a link a page adds with JavaScript afterwards is not followed. The map's PNG and SVG are drawn from small pictures of each page, the SVG embeds them, and a page's full capture exports from the editor. Figma is reached through the clipboard only. A page behind a check that a person is visiting waits up to 5 minutes for you to pass it in its tab, and is left uncaptured otherwise. Chrome's debugging bar is up from the first page to the last, pages are captured at least a second apart, a page has 120 seconds and a map 20 minutes. Chrome keeps the access you gave the site until you remove it. One map runs at a time, there is no shared workspace and no editing of the tree, and a map is kept with your captures for 12 hours. The pages are read and captured by your browser and stay on your computer; the extension's anonymous usage counts record that a map was made, with its depth and number of pages, and never an address.

Verdict: the one to use when the pages are behind your sign-in, or when you want each page as a full capture you can export, for a site of a few dozen pages.

Which should you use?

Use Octopus.do if you are planning a site's structure from an existing one and want the tree, its SEO tags and a sitemap.xml more than pictures of the pages.

Use The Visual Sitemapper if you want to type a domain and see up to 100 of its pages as screenshots for free, or 1,000 for a one-time price.

Use Rarchy if you map client sites with screenshots, need thousands of pages, and want your team commenting on the same map.

Use Page Scanner if the site is one you are signed in to, or a small one, and you want every page captured whole in your own browser, the links between them drawn, and each page ready to export.

Frequently asked questions

Can Page Scanner capture more than 30 pages of a site? Not in one map. It captures one page of each kind, up to 30, and lists the rest under Listed, not captured. To capture particular pages, open them in tabs, select the tabs and scan them into one document; that takes two to ten tabs, as saving several tabs as one PDF shows.

Why does the map ask to read the site? To list the pages before capturing any, Page Scanner reads them, and the browser lets an extension do that only for a site you allow. It asks for the one site you are mapping, when you press Find pages, and for no other.

Will it sign me out of the site? It never follows a link whose address says sign out, log out, delete, unsubscribe or cancel, because the pages open in your own browser, signed in as you are.

What if a page comes out short or blank? Each page of a map is captured the way a single scan is, so the same causes apply; see why a full-page screenshot comes out cut off, blank or repeated. For one page at a phone's width rather than a whole site, see how to screenshot a website at phone, tablet and desktop widths.

Can it read a whole site's design instead of its pages? Yes, from the command line: the design extract follows the site's links the same way and reads one page of each kind (how to extract a website's design system). To keep a single page as a record, see archiving a web page as PDF/A.

Where this comes from

• Octopus.do: the home page, the sitemap generator, features and pricing.
• The Visual Sitemapper: the app's home page and pricing.
• Rarchy: the home page, the visual sitemap generator and pricing.
• Page Scanner: Map a site and the FAQ.