Mortise compared with a traditional link checker
Traditional checkers are useful when you want a full list right now. Mortise is useful when you want the next change, on a site you are allowed to crawl.
No card required. 1 site and 200 pages on the free plan.
A normal report
A one-shot checker fetches what it can and lists failures. Run it again next month and the same known 404s are back, mixed with anything new. You prioritise by hand. Desktop SEO suites go further than links, and they are priced and shaped for that wider audit.
What Mortise changes
You verify ownership first. The first crawl is a baseline and does not alert. Later crawls highlight a URL that was working and then returned 404 or 410 twice. Known broken links remain visible on the site page so you can fix them on your own timetable. Timeouts are not promoted into alerts.
The tradeoff is deliberate. Mortise will not give you a loud alert for a link that was already dead on day one. If you need that full inventory, read Currently broken after the second crawl, or export CSV on Pro.
What this page will not claim
There is no ranking of other products here, and no borrowed feature lists or prices. Mortise does not fix links, crawl behind logins, or replace an SEO audit. Caps are 200 pages on Free and 2000 on Pro. Schedules and outbound alerts are Pro.
Questions
Is a traditional checker wrong?
No. A full list is the right output for a one-off audit. Mortise is the wrong tool if you want that list emailed on every run.
Does Mortise hide broken links?
It separates them. Known and confirmed failures stay on the site page. Alerts and the New breaks list are for regressions.
Why is ownership required?
So Mortise is not an open proxy for crawling sites you do not control. No token, no crawl.