SEO is a key factor to capturing organic traffic and growing your business. Sound SEO strategy involves both on-page and off-page practices.
To boost on-page SEO, users have an array of accessible plugins and solutions. Managing off-page SEO is more tricky.
The first step for better results is completing an SEO audit. Tools like Screaming Frog make the process easier for users by offering crawling software that can be used to identify and fix issues like broken links and duplicate content.
Although this tool has made it easier to optimize websites and achieve better results, it is still far from perfect. The market is full of good alternatives, and users may get a range of features at less cost.
These tools offer similar features to Screaming Frog that may be more affordable or have useful features Screaming Frog lacks.
Whether you are looking for a more affordable option or something with a few more bells and whistles, here are some of the best Screaming Frog alternatives.
What is Screaming Frog?
Screaming Frog is a trusted website crawler that can be used to identify technical errors within a website. Users review the tool’s results in real-time to ensure their website is free of errors such as broken links and content duplication. You can also review all technical elements of a website via its URL structure.
Screaming Frog is considered an easy-to-use tool that can quickly process technical results, maximizing the crawls you get from Google.
Screaming Frog is free for up to 500 URLs. With every result, the HTTP status code of the URL is displayed, allowing you to identify and fix errors. Within the tool, users can sort their URLs by length or other factors. SEO experts routinely benefit from this tool’s features, which help users strengthen their website’s SEO and improve their rankings.
Why Do You Need Screaming Frog Alternatives?
Although Screaming Frog is considered the industry standard web crawler tool, alternatives do exist.
Users can only crawl 500 websites for free. Once they cross that threshold, they have to switch to a paid plan to continue, which can put a strain on any budget.
Other tools offer a similar range of features—and some are free or more affordable. For example, some Screaming Frog features only accessible via the paid plan can be found in Screaming Frog alternatives. Other tools offer lifetime access and unlimited resources at affordable prices.
Best Screaming Frog Paid Alternatives
For users looking for affordable Screaming Frog alternatives, you can choose from these tools. All of these alternatives offer similar features to Screaming Frog.
Unlike many tools, a key differentiator of Ahrefs is data freshness. Results are updated regularly.
This tool can also be used for functions like backlink audits, strategic content promotion and competitor analysis. Since it is a cloud-based crawler, your website’s URL will be scanned when you feed it into the tool and it can help identify common SEO errors on your website.
Users will be able to navigate this tool easily. It has a simple interface and all the reports are displayed in visuals that are easy to review and understand.
A significant benefit of using Ahrefs is that the crawling will be completed within hours. That means you won’t have to wait for days for crawl results, saving you time and energy.
You can use their features to perform a technical audit of your website.
Some highlights from this site crawler tool are:
- Identification and suggestions to fix indexation issues
- Identify pages with thin or duplicate content
- Find broken links and redirects
- Check for the canonical issues and if the website has more than one version
- Ensure proper on-page SEO practices
- Conduct full content audit and identifying gaps
- Check structured data errors
- Verify backlink profiles and linked domains
SEMRush is one of the most popular SEO tools and can be used by both seasoned webmasters and beginners.
In addition to conducting SEO audits, SEMRush can also be used for PPC analysis and researching keywords. It can be used for functions ranging from backlink analysis to ranking position tracking to website audit and content optimization.
Users can utilize this tool for tracking their own website or that of their competitors. With this tool, you get access to their extensive features, including priority optimization, which allows users to prioritize issue identification and fixes.
This tool can also be used to check HTTPS errors and ensure maximum security for your website. It can be used to fix broken images, check for content duplication, error pages, alt texts, redirect issues and more.
With SEMRush, you will get reliable and quick results. It allows you to monitor and upgrade functions and let you check your SEO performance. You can track your own SEO efforts and review how changes are affecting the website’s performance and rankings.
Some of the highlighted features of the SEMRush site crawler tool include:
- Comprehensive indexability and crawlability, allowing you to check your HTTP status code, crawl depth, etc.
- Track fixed errors and check for new ones
- Checks for more than 120 factors
- Checks for HTTPS implementation issues, such as website architecture and security certificates
- Identifies issues with page code and missing values
This tool offers a multitude of benefits to keep your website optimized. It has a simple interface that provides filter options, as well. However, similar to Ahrefs, users do not get a free version and audit tools aren’t available separately.
Netpeak Spider is a desktop tool that can be used to crawl any website (similar to the process used by a search engine).
This tool is useful for detecting primary SEO issues, along with website performance and ranking. Netpeak Spider allows you to identify errors and fix them, ensuring proper functionality of your website.
This tool can only be used with Windows, however, and will not work on Mac or Linux. It comes with an all-function dashboard, allowing users to review audit results.
Netpeak Spider is a unique tool for website auditing. You can use its range of features for a technical and speedy website review.
It does have a free version, which allows users to try the site crawler tool for free and get a handle on features before purchasing a paid plan.
You do not need to share your credit card details to trial the free version.
Some highlighted features of this site crawler tool include:
- Helps you avoid technical errors, such as content duplication and other on-page errors
- Custom rules when enabling crawl for the website (you can crawl your complete website or just some parts of it)
- Checks more than 50 on-page SEO factors while crawling
- Analyzes external and internal links on the page
- Avoid robot.txt issues and other canonical errors
Netspeak Spider is a great tool and that works as a great Screaming Frog alternative.
It identifies several issues affecting your website’s health and its reports can be exported. It will run deeper checks on your site, scoping out more advanced issues. It is desktop software, however. It can be space-intensive and it cannot be integrated with Google’s webmaster’s tool.
Moz Pro is one of the most advanced and popular SEO tools in the industry and gives you a range of solutions for any SEO issues.
Moz Pro helps audit your website, identifies potential errors affecting the website’s health and resolves them to improve performance. As a side benefit, the SEO tools indirectly help you rank higher in search results.
Moz Pro offers interactive dashboard showing you the number of pages crawled, new issues, serious issues, whole issues, and more. This dashboard allows you to identify more complex errors and fix them on a priority basis, as well as colorful charts and pictorial references so you’ll better understand critical and high-priority errors.
Moz Pro allows you to prioritize issue fixes and you can request an instant recrawl to check whether the issue is resolved or not.
Some highlighted features of Moz’s site crawler tool include:
- Auto-crawl option, which sends a notification when a new issue arises
- Colorful reports that will enhance site understanding
- Instant recrawl to check whether the issues are fixed
- The option to flag issues
- Moz Pro checks issues on the entire website and identifies both typical and complex errors
- It allows you to prioritize issues and offers suggestions on fixing them
Moz Pro comes with a range of benefits, including a free 30-day trial.
Its tools can be used to identify more complex issues on your website and you will also get insightful suggestions to fix those issues.
Serpstat can handle a range of SEO tasks. After a site audit, the tool gives you an in-depth analysis that lets you check the efficiency of your website and fix any errors.
Serpstat lets you compare your audit results and so you can make sure you are on the right track for your website goals. This tool also allows you to schedule site crawls and display results on a priority basis.
A unique selling point of this site crawler tool is the SDO Score Dynamics. This feature lets you review changes in an audit history and examine any website loopholes that could affect performance.
Serpstat is an ideal Screaming Frog alternative and allows its users to identify and fix critical errors that can affect the SEO rankings of their websites.
Some highlighted features of Serpstat includes:
- Comparison of audit results and access to historical data for better analysis
- Inspection of simple and complex on-page technical issues that affect the SEO performance of the website
- Visually display site data to allow the user to monitor issues and elements of the website
- Displays score dynamics containing the change in audit results
- Analyze font readability, browser caching and other elements to allow the user to improve the page loading speed
- Check the server for canonical terms and SSL
Serpstat comes with an easy-to-use design and an option to segment results based on several parameters. This tool can provide increased crawling speed and scan your website faster than other options. However, similar to other tools on this list, you don’t get a free version. The tool is also focused primarily on on-page issues.
Best Free Alternatives To Screaming Frog
Some options on this list of Screaming Frog alternatives may be completely free for life, while others are only free for a limited time. Either way, you can try these tools before making a long-term commitment.
This tool is at the top of our list for free Screaming Frog alternatives.
Xenu’s Link Sleuth is considered an affordable and hassle-free alternative to Screaming Frog. It is a simple program that does not give many options to users, but can help scan a website.
You won’t get a range of features or a dashboard, but after providing the tool with the name of your domain, it will go to work.
Once you have added the domain, this tool will provide an organized list of all the links on your page along with their status. You can review all the important site fields with this tool, such as server status code, type of link, size of the page, meta title of the link and more.
This tool is updated regularly and supports SSL pages. You can use this tool to detect and report redirects, but not much more. You cannot use this tool for in-depth inspection.
Since this tool is free, it can be a great tool in your arsenal for checking links and their status on your website.
If you are looking for a simple tool that can help you improve your site links, Xenu Link Sleuth might be an ideal option. However, if you want other features, you should consider other free or paid options on this list.
Scrutiny
ScrutinyScrutiny is a Mac program that is a perfect Screaming Frog alternative for Mac users.
This app is similar to Xenu or Screaming Frog but is intended for Macs. You can use this tool to crawl your pages and inspect the links and their status.
This is a more advanced tool, as it can log into members’ sections, for example, and scan links inside PDFs, as well. It can also be used to render scripts before crawling. You can perform complete SEO scanning with Scrutiny.
This tool can be used to scan meta titles and descriptions. It can also be used to scan content and identify errors, such as thin or duplicate content and keyword stuffing. This tool can export the XML sitemap and run a spelling and grammar check on the website’s content.
The only limitation of this tool is that it can only be used for 30 days for free. After that time period elapses, you will have to pay to use the tool.
Since it offers a range of unique features, it can be a fantastic Screaming Frog alternative.
WildShark SEO is completely free, but users will have to sign up for the firm’s mailing list to use the site crawler tool. WildShark SEO Spider can be used to detect technical issues within your website. It can find out an array of title issues, ranging from duplicate titles to missing titles to overly short or lengthy titles. It can also help you identify and fix missing metadescs.
WildShark SEO Spider is useful for detecting duplicate, overused or missing heading tags. With this tool, you can avoid common mistakes like missing tags or duplicate content and more advanced issues like broken links and image alt-tags.
This tool is also beneficial in scanning your content and alerting you about the pages that have little content. Scans like these allow you to avoid thin content issues and prevent soft 404 errors.
Since this tool offers a range of basic scanning features, it will be a perfect option if you’re only looking for a site crawler tool that can be used for common mistakes.
WildShark SEO does not have any crawl limitations, so you can crawl any site regardless of its size. The software will need a decent amount of time to scan your website, however.
Spotibo is a free site crawler tool that can be used as an SEO crawler.
This tool is considered simple and is used for basic scanning purposes. However, unlike other options, the free alternative of this tool has a crawling limitation of 500 pages, per month.
The major difference between Spotibo and other tools is that Spotibo is a web app and not a downloadable program, so it can be used on any platform. Whether you are a Windows user or a Mac user, you can use this tool to scan your website.
It is considered a strong Screaming Frog alternative since the 500 URL limit is not a lifetime limit, but a monthly limit. It’s perfect for smaller websites that don’t have many pages.
This free site crawler tool can be used to crawl simple elements of your website, such as your pages and links. Spotibo will also report the status code of pages and links.
It looks for server status codes for your pages and will display items ranging from redirects to 404s to other errors. You can also use this site crawler tool for content issues, URL structure scans, meta description issues and meta titles. It will scan images and look for titles, URLs and alt texts.
It also gives you the option to segment the data within a dashboard and analyze it without exporting it.
Visual SEO Studio, or VSS, offers both a free version and a paid version.
The free version offered by the company is somewhat similar to Screaming Frog and can be considered a perfect, free Screaming Frog alternative.
The tool is limited to 500 crawlable pages and a maximum of two concurrent connections. That means crawling websites and searching for crawl errors with this tool takes a little bit longer.
That said, Visual SEO Studio does everything you need it to. It crawls everything from page titles to metadata. It can find errors with HTTP and HTTPS, broken links and will inspect the robots.txt, as well. This tool will also generate XML sitemaps for your website.
Its VSS tool, you get recommendations on how to fix site issues. It provides suggestions for improving the overall technical elements of your website.
The paid version of this tool comes with add-on features. Some of these features include adding a specific URL list crawl, a health check for analytics, readability analysis, performance suggestions, link inspectors and custom filters.
The paid version comes with an extended limit, so users are allowed to crawl about 150,000 pages.
This tool is a perfect Screaming Frog alternative, as it offers an ideal solution for beginners and users who have small sites. If you don’t have extensive requirements and are looking for a free site crawler tool, VSS is worth considering.
Wrapping Up
Screaming Frog is a great tool that works well for most SEO teams, but it might not always be the best fit for those that have particular needs or need a solution that will scale with their business.
To wrap up, the best free screaming frog alternatives are:
Were there any important ones that we missed? Let us know in the comments!
