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Stallscore vs Marmalead: Full Listing Audit vs Keyword Grades.

Updated April 2026. Pricing and features verified against each tool's public site.

Marmalead has been around since 2015. It built its reputation on "storm" sessions that help you brainstorm keywords, and on its SEO grading system that tells you how well a listing's tags and title match buyer search behavior. It costs $19/month with no free tier.

Stallscore takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of grading your keywords, it audits the structural health of every listing in your shop across 10 ranking signals. Keywords are only one dimension. Photos, shipping, description structure, section assignment, materials, video, and the new Feb 2026 algorithm rules all affect whether Etsy shows your listing or buries it.

If you are evaluating both tools, here is what you need to know.

The keyword grade blind spot

Marmalead gives you a letter grade for a listing's SEO. That grade is based almost entirely on keyword factors: how well your tags match search volume, whether your title keywords align with demand, and how competitive your chosen phrases are.

What Marmalead does not check:

• Whether your title is over 70 characters (the Feb 2026 mobile penalty)
• Whether your shipping cost triggers the $6 suppression band
• Whether your title's primary keyword survives the 30-character mobile thumbnail cut
• Whether you have enough photos and a video
• Whether your listing is assigned to a section (category hub boost)
• Whether your materials field is filled with multi-word terms
• Whether you are repeating the same phrase across title, tags, and description (keyword stuffing penalty)

A listing can get an "A" in Marmalead and still be deranked in 2026 because its title is 94 characters long or its shipping is set at $7.00. The keyword grade just does not see those signals.

10 structural signals Marmalead cannot see

Stallscore audits every active listing against 10 current Etsy ranking factors:

• Feb 2026 title penalty -- flags titles over 70 characters that get deranked on mobile
• $6 shipping suppression -- reads your shipping profiles and flags listings stuck in the suppression band
• Mobile thumbnail cut -- simulates the 30-character title truncation buyers actually see on phones
• Tag quality -- counts your 13 tag slots, flags single-word tags and duplicates
• Photo count and order -- flags listings with fewer than 5 images
• Video presence -- checks for the 2026 ranking boost from listing videos
• Description meta snippet -- audits the first 160 characters Google uses as the search snippet
• Section assignment -- finds unsectioned listings missing the category hub boost
• Materials field -- checks whether the secondary tag index is being used properly
• Keyword stuffing -- detects repeated phrases across title, tags, and description that trip the soft penalty

Marmalead touches on tag quality but stops there. The other 9 signals are outside its scope.

Pricing comparison

Marmalead costs $19/month. There is no free tier and no lifetime option. You get keyword research, SEO grades, and storm brainstorming sessions.

Stallscore Free gives you three full shop audits per month with all 10 signals and plain-English fix suggestions. Pro is $9/month for unlimited audits plus one-click fixes pushed directly back to Etsy. Lifetime is $149.99 once (pays for itself in under 17 months vs. Pro, and under 8 months vs. Marmalead).

At $19/month, Marmalead costs more than double Stallscore Pro, and it audits fewer listing dimensions.

Side-by-side comparison

Who should pick which

Pick Marmalead if you are in the product research phase and want a dedicated keyword brainstorming environment. Storm sessions are genuinely useful for exploring niches you have not sold in before. If keywords are your bottleneck, Marmalead is a focused tool for that.

Pick Stallscore if you already have listings live and want to know what is structurally wrong with them. If you built those listings following pre-2026 advice (long titles, basic tags, maybe shipping at $7), Stallscore will find the specific listings affected and tell you exactly what to change. At half the monthly price.

Use both if you want the full picture. Use Marmalead (or eRank) for keyword selection. Use Stallscore to make sure the listing you build with those keywords actually meets the 2026 structural requirements. The keyword is only one piece of the ranking puzzle.

Why the Feb 2026 update changes the equation

Before February 2026, you could get away with a keyword-only approach to Etsy SEO. Write a long, keyword-rich title. Fill in your 13 tags. Maybe write a decent description. That was enough to rank.

The February update added a hard penalty for titles over 70 characters on mobile search. That one change invalidated years of accumulated advice. Sellers who followed the "use all 140 characters" rule woke up to cratered mobile traffic.

Around the same time, the $6 shipping threshold became clearly reproducible. Listings with US shipping at $6.00 or above get quietly held back. No notification, no error message. Just less visibility.

Tools built around keyword grading do not catch these structural problems. You need a tool that reads the listing data directly from Etsy's API and checks each field against current rules. That is what Stallscore was built to do.

Bottom line

Marmalead is a keyword grading tool at $19/month. Stallscore is a full listing audit tool at $9/month (or free for three audits). They check different things. But if you are choosing one, the tool that checks 10 structural ranking signals including the Feb 2026 title penalty will catch more real problems than the tool that only looks at keywords.