Comparison
Prerender vs. Screaming Frog
While Screaming Frog can render JavaScript content, it is built to identify underlying SEO issues within the rendered content. In contrast, Prerender is a dedicated JavaScript pre-rendering solution designed to improve websites’ SEO indexing performance.
Dive deeper into the comparison between Prerender and Screaming Frog, and find out why you ultimately need both.
Addressing JavaScript Indexing Challenges: Fixing vs. Spotting
Screaming Frog renders JS content to audit JavaScript SEO issues. This means it can identify and diagnose problems such as delayed content rendering or missing metadata, but it can’t resolve the fundamental problem of poor JavaScript content indexing.
Prerender goes beyond surface-level analysis. It proactively enhances JavaScript content by pre-rendering it, ensuring search engines can easily crawl, interpret, and index it. This results in up to 300x better crawling, 260% faster indexing, and enhanced online visibility.
JavaScript Rendering at the Core
Prerender transforms dynamic JavaScript content into static HTML, caches it, and serves it to crawlers in 0.03 seconds.
Lightning-Fast User Experience
Enjoy speedy server response times (SRT) under 50 milliseconds. This prevents users from bouncing due to slow page load speeds.
Start Free, Upgrade as You Grow
Start with our generous forever-free plan or upgrade to the premium plans starting at just $90 per month for more advanced features.
A Cloud-Based Technical SEO Solution
Get a robust SEO tool that can handle millions of URLs without being tied to a desktop.
Prerender vs. Screaming Frog Features Comparison
With Prerender’s focus on improving crawling and indexing for JavaScript-heavy websites and Screaming Frog’s in-depth SEO auditing capabilities, these tools offer complementary benefits.
Rather than choosing one over the other, a strategic approach is to combine their strengths as one simply cannot do what the other does. By leveraging their complementary capabilities, you can create a website that is loved by search engines and users.
Prerender | Screaming Frog | Overview |
---|---|---|
What the tool does | Pre-render dynamic JavaScript content into ready-to-index files | Conducts comprehensive SEO audits and site crawls |
Main goals | Enhance search engine indexing and technical SEO from a visibility perspective | Optimize overall website SEO performance from an onsite and technical perspective |
Best for | SPAs and large JavaScript-based websites | Small-to-medium-sized websites with a defined crawl |
Distinct features | Dynamic rendering and
customizable recache intervals
| Integrations with Google Analytics and Google Search Console |
Tool accessibility | Cloud-based | Desktop-based |
Crawling, Indexing, and JavaScript Rendering Features | ||
Crawler functions | Fetch, render, and serve pre-rendered content (static HTML) to search engine crawlers | Identify on-page and technical SEO issues |
“Indexing” functions | Accelerate content indexing | Analyze content indexability and index status |
JavaScript rendering | The core function, using Prerender.io’s dynamic rendering solution | A secondary function, using integrated Chromium WRS |
SEO Auditing and Reporting Features | ||
On-page SEO | Limited, via built-in SEO scoring feature | Yes |
Technical SEO | Focus on crawling, indexing, crawl budget, and caching performance | Yes |
Other reporting features | Built-in keyword rank tracker and 404 checker | N/A |
Discover the full range of Prerender features.
Prerender vs. Screaming Frog Pricing Comparison
Screaming Frog’s pricing is primarily based on crawl limits. While the free plan offers foundational SEO auditing features, access to advanced tools and customization requires a paid license.
Prerender offers a flexible tiered pricing model designed to meet diverse website improvement needs. Core features are included in all plans, with additional services like specialized onboarding and enhanced security available as add-ons.
Prerender | Screaming Frog | |
---|---|---|
Pricing based on | Rendered page
(caching, recaching, and when a bot requests an uncached page) | Crawled URLs and advanced features |
Free plan availability | Yes, for 1,000 renders per month | Yes, for 500 URLs |
Paid plan | Start from $90 per month, with a custom pricing option and add-on services
| $259 per year for “unlimited” URLs (highly dependent on your computer’s allocated memory and storage) |
Find out how affordable Prerender pricing can be.
More Reasons to Adopt Prerender for Websites With JavaScript Elements
Mobile-First Renders
Prerender optimizes your mobile site for Google’s mobile-first indexing, ensuring a seamless experience for visitors on the go.
Crawling Reports and Sitemap Monitoring
Monitor crawling activities to detect and address page errors that may impact performance. Additionally, upload your sitemaps to improve SEO monitoring.
Reliable Customer Support
Our customer service team ensures a smooth experience from onboarding to troubleshooting and beyond, boosting your web performance 24/7 with Prerender.
Easy Installation
There’s no need to change your tech stack. Integrating Prerender takes three simple steps, and mastering its powerful pre-rendering solution is equally effortless.
Fix JavaScript Indexing Problems and See Your Traffic Grows
Pinpointing JavaScript SEO issues isn’t enough to improve your website’s ranking performance. Address these challenges head-on with Prerender. Get started with Prerender today.
Prerender vs. Screaming Frog FAQs
Learn more about Prerender and the differences between Prerender and Screaming Frog to help you choose the best JS pre-rendering solution.
1. What is the Biggest Difference Between Prerender and Screaming Frog?
Screaming Frog and Prerender are both valuable tools for website optimization, and they serve distinct purposes. Screaming Frog is primarily an SEO auditing solution that can identify JavaScript SEO issues by rendering the pages. On the contrary, Prerender is a dedicated JS pre-rendering solution designed to accelerate JS indexing and server response time (SRT), among other benefits. See the complete benefits of Prerender here.
2. Screaming Frog vs. Prerender: Which SEO Tool Should You Use?
Rather than choosing between Screaming Frog and Prerender, adopt both for optimal SEO coverage. Use Screaming Frog to analyze on-page and technical SEO, and Prerender to improve and monitor the crawling and indexing of JS-heavy sites. This combined approach helps address all SEO issues impacting your website’s performance. Learn more about how Prerender works.
3. Can Prerender Audit My Website’s SEO Performance?
While Prerender aims to improve the SEO indexing performance of JavaScript websites, it does offer some SEO monitoring features. These include tracking the number of crawled pages, crawler requests, page crawl rate, and indexing and CDN analytics. Additionally, Prerender provides a built-in SEO scoring tool, a 404 checker, and a keyword rank tracker.
Discover more about Prerender’s features and functionality.
4. What are the Best SEO Auditing Alternatives to Screaming Frog?
If you need to analyze the crawling and indexing of your JavaScript website, Prerender is a great alternative to Screaming Frog. It pre-renders pages into 100% indexable content and provides insights into crawl rate, indexing, and crawl budget, helping you monitor the impact of JS rendering on your SEO within one tool.
Explore other alternative SEO auditing tools to Screaming Frog.