Screaming Frog is one of the most widely used and effective SEO tools that any SEO professional or just website owner might be tempted to rely on at one point or the other. It’s extremely effective when it comes to technical SEO as it allows you to crawl websites in a timely fashion and discover a myriad of issues.
But because the license can be a little pricey, especially for someone who’s just starting out, we thought we’d put together a list of Screaming Frog alternatives that can help you achieve pretty much of the same tasks and that might actually be a little cheaper.
Top Screaming Frog Alternatives
What is Screaming Frog?
These days, Screaming Frog offers other services besides its world known SEO spider, including agency services ranging from search engine marketing to social media marketing, reactive PR services, or conversion rate optimization.
Despite this, though, the brand remains largely popular because of its SEO spider and Log File Analyzer, so these are the products that we will mostly focus on in this article and try to find the best alternatives in this sense.
Screaming Frog Features
Before we move on to describing the two previously mentioned software, we would like to suggest that you take some time and have a look at the Screaming Frog website.
There are loads and loads of tutorials and user guides available for both the SEO Spider and the Log File Analyzer, so if you still want to choose Screaming Frog over the other options we will showcase in the second part of the article, it might be a good idea to first understand how it works.
How does Screaming Frog work? Well, when it comes to both the Log File Analyzer and the SEO Spider, these are pieces of software that you need to download and install on your computer in order to get all of the features and benefits that they can offer you. There are no extensions, web versions, or anything in this sense, something that actually makes the difference between these products and some of the alternatives to Screaming Frog we’ll talk about below.
With the Log File Analyzer, you can find broken links, errors, and redirects, view bot crawl frequency, identify too large and slow URLs, combine and compare crawl data, and much more, for the price of 99 British Pounds per year per license. Every license is available for two users.
The SEO Spider shares some features with the Log File Analyzer, with the difference that it is a little more complex and generous when it comes to its features.
You get the ability to analyze page titles and meta data, discover duplicate pages, generate sitemaps, save and compare crawls, check on grammar and spelling mistakes, search and replace code, integrate with Search Console, and a lot more. It’s also worth noting that you get free technical support with a license costing 199 British Pounds per year (also for two users).
Best Screaming Frog Alternatives
Whether you’re looking for Screaming Frog SEO Spider alternatives or even a replacement for the Log File Analyzer, we’ve compiled a list of some of the most suitable choices you have at your disposal these days.
We have taken into account the features that we have previously mentioned and also looked at the pricing of all of the following tools, keeping in mind that since some of them are very complex in terms of features, they will cost more compared to Screaming Frog.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth
We decided to start with this one as it is a Screaming Frog free alternative, so it definitely addresses the needs of users that are currently on a budget. You do have to go through other websites and forums in order to be able to download it (we found a version that had last been updated in January 2023 on Softonic).
With Xenu’s Link Sleuth, you can check pretty much anything from broken links to internal linking, backgrounds, frames, images, and sitemaps. What we do have to add about it is that it is primarily developed for Windows computers, which means that if you do find a version that works for Mac laptops and computers, it’s probably not going to work as great.
Most of the reviews of Xenu’s Link Sleuth we came across praise the easy-to-use interface, the ability to easily find 404 errors, the broken link discovery feature, along with the discovery of heavy images that website owners or SEOs can then replace.
Analyzing a site’s architecture is also possible with this tool and there are no limits when it comes to the number of URLs you can check.
Unfortunately, it is not the most visually appealing option and it does call for a somewhat steep learning curve, so if you’re interested in trying out an alternative to Screaming Frog competitors, you might want to check out HTML Link Validator, SEO Powersuite (the free version), Web Link Validator, or Website Auditor.
Google Search Console
While it might seem a little laughable, Google Search Console does have its merits and there are quite a bit of things that you can do with it for free. Unfortunately, similarly to Xenu’s Link Sleuth, it does require a few headaches, especially for less tech-savvy users or those that haven’t improved a website before.
On the upside, you can set up Google Search Console to send you an email every time an error of any kind appears on any of the pages on your media property so that you can fix them as swiftly as possible and let them be crawled again.
It is somewhat limited when put side by side with Screaming Frog and we will admit that, and you do have to be the owner of the website in order to gain access to all of its features.
Even so, you can check out the other data that Search Console puts at your disposal, such as your click-through rate, coverage, sitemaps, removals, page experience, and mobile usability.
Visual SEO Studio
You’re going to be a little taken aback by this one if you’ve never heard of it before as its design largely resembles that of Screaming Frog. One of the products is even named SEO Spider, so that should give you a clue as to how much Visual SEO Studio resembles the features of Screaming Frog.
The nice thing about this one is that it is available both for Windows computers and Mac operating systems, so it’s not as limited as Xenu’s Link Sleuth is.
In terms of pricing, you’ll be happy to know that there is a free version available, but it does come with certain limitations. For example, while you can do pretty much of the same things as in the paid version, the maximum number of crawlable pages is 500 with a maximum concurrent HTTP connection of 2.
So, unless you have a very small website or one that’s relatively new so that you haven’t had a chance to create hundreds and hundreds of pages on it, the free version might not be a good choice for you.
The paid version, on the other hand, costs 149 euros (plus VAT) per year, so it is a lot more decently priced compared to Screaming Frog off the bat. You get a 15-day free trial with this one, so you can at least test out the product before to see if it suits your needs.
The Professional plan comes with a limit of 150,000 crawlable pages and 32 concurrent HTTP connections. With this one, you can do pretty much anything from inspecting titles and meta data to finding broken links, inspecting robots directives, generating XML sitemaps and validating them, plus heaps of useful features such as hreflang analysis, analytics health-check, crawl URL list, data extraction, and more.
For the price, we would argue that this is a pretty good alternative to Screaming Frog.
Spotibo
If you’ve never heard of Spotibo before, you should definitely check it out. It allows you to crawl any website for free, so long as it’s not bigger than 500 web pages. This is the free version that we are discussing, but there is a paid version, too.
Also, Spotibo offers SEO services such as SEO for redesign, SEO monitoring, and technical SEO auditing.
As for the SEO Monitoring Tool, it is more or less basic when compared to Screaming Frog, but it’s very user-friendly design makes it easy to use by almost anyone, including beginning SEOs and website owners.
To make things even better, you can even check everything using your smartphone with this one as everything is a web version of the software (at least when it comes to the free one). And there are plenty of instructional guides available on the Spotibo website in case you don’t know how to use the tool.
What about paid plans? Well, you’ll be glad to know that they are more than budget-friendly. The Lite is billed at just $14 per month (at the time we are writing this post) and comes with 5,000 URLs per month, 1,000 URLs per project, up to 5 projects, unlimited users, and a daily recrawl frequency. In terms of URL checks, this one is best for up to 10 pages and up to 2,000 alerts.
As for the other plans, the Standard costs $29 per month and the Big plan is billed at $59 per month. Naturally, the limits of these two are a lot more generous.
In a nutshell, if you need a web version of Screaming Frog and you really aren’t keen on installing anything on your computer, perhaps Spotibo might be a good option for you.
Screaming Frog vs. Ahrefs
While with Screaming Frog keyword research is pretty much a no-go, that is not the case if you want to get an Ahrefs subscription. The only drawback to doing just that is the pricing as Ahrefs is a lot more expensive compared to Screaming Frog and the billing is monthly.
However, if you have a lot of time on your hands and you also do SEO for clients, Ahrefs might be a better option as it comes with plenty of handy features, whether for keyword research, competition analysis, or anything else you might want to know or do.
And if you have access to the website you want to analyze, you can always use the Batch Analysis tool feature to render up to 200 pages at once and check them for keywords, positions, errors, and more.
While it does come with a lot more features compared to Screaming Frog, you need to know that it’s not primarily made for technical SEO even though you can use it for this — Screaming Frog shows you the data in a much clearer way depending on your purposes.
Finally, the biggest drawback when it comes to Ahrefs as one of the Screaming Frog competitors we have looked at is the cost. The Lite plan is billed at $99 per month, but the best plan for website analysis is the Standard, which costs $199 per month.
Read more: Best Ahrefs Alternatives
SEO Powersuite
This is only a part of what Link-Assistant.com has to offer. There are actually several different tools that you can check out if you want to achieve most of what Screaming Frog can do for you — Rank Tracker, SEO Spyglass, LinkAssistant, and Website Auditor.
The good thing is that you gain access to all of them if you buy the Professional SEO Powersuite plan, but it is billed at $299 per year, so it’s quite a bit more expensive compared to Screaming Frog.
You do get unlimited keywords to track, site crawling and auditing, link prospecting and outreach, scheduled SEO tasks, in-app content optimization, and more. The Enterprise plan costs $499 per year but comes with pretty much the same features, the main difference being that you can export them in pdf, .csv, .html, .sql, and more.
Screaming Frog vs Sitebulb
While it is somewhat newer compared to some of the other alternatives we have mentioned in this article, Sitebulb is very similar to Screaming Frog, so we suggest you check it out.
You do need to install the software on your computer, though, so this is not a web app as some of the other choices we’ve described. The biggest issue with Sitebulb that a lot of users used to complain about is that it would freeze and die in the middle of the process, forcing people to start all over again.
But the point is that Sitebulb is indeed capable of outlining whatever might be wrong with your XML sitemaps, including URLs that are at strange depths or that are linking to pages that aren’t in their silos.
In terms of pricing, there are two main plans available – the Lite, billed at $13.50 per month and the Pro, billed at $35 per month. The second allows for up to 500,000 URLs per audit while the first allows for just 1,000 URLs per audit.
Final thoughts
So there you have it – these are some of the most effective Screaming Frog alternatives. Because we didn’t want to make this article a huge one, we would like to add that there are other options you could consider, such as Botify, Lumar (formerly known as DeepCrawl), Oncrawl, SE Ranking, and even SEMrush.
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