SEO is a key factor in capturing organic traffic and growing your business.
To boost on-page SEO, you may have an array of accessible plugins and solutions that can be used for free. But when it comes to managing off-page and technical SEO, there aren’t many reliable tools in the market.
One of the most popular SEO tools for a thorough technical SEO audit is Screaming Frog. It is loved by many for its versatility and accuracy in detecting various technical SEO errors.
That said, Screaming Frog isn’t perfect. There are some Screaming Frog alternatives that you can choose from, with various functions and price categories. We’ll compare the 10 best Screaming Frog alternative tools to help you make informed decisions.
🔍 Want to boost your SEO? Download the free technical SEO guide to crawl budget optimization and learn how to improve your site’s visibility on search engines.
What is Screaming Frog?
Screaming Frog is a trusted website crawler that can identify technical SEO errors. For example, it can detect missing metadata, broken links, duplicate or thin content (to prevent soft 404 errors), and poor URL structure, among others.
Related: Discover 4 effective ways to fix broken links.
Screaming Frog is considered an easy-to-use tool that can quickly discover technical SEO problems, allowing you to wisely spend your crawl budget for content that matters and improve your site’s indexing performance—all of which contribute to better SEO health.
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.
Why Do You Need Screaming Frog Alternatives?
Although Screaming Frog is considered the industry standard web crawler tool, not every SEO professional adores it.
One of the most common reasons some SEO experts prefer other web crawling alternatives is the 500 URL crawl limit. Once you cross that threshold, you have to switch to a paid plan to continue, which can strain those with a small budget.
Other comparative tools offer a similar range of features—and some are free or more affordable. For example, some paid-only Screaming Frog features can be found in some of Screaming Frog’s alternatives. Some of the comparable tools also offer lifetime access and unlimited resources at affordable prices.
Best Free Alternatives Tools To Screaming Frog
Some options on this comparison 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.
1. Prerender
Prerender may not be a dedicated web crawler tool like Screaming Frog. In fact, its main strength is to fix the poor crawl and indexing performance of JavaScript websites. However, since Prerender also includes technical SEO scoring, 404 checker analysis, crawl & render analytics, and page error reports, Prerender is a great contender to be included in the Screaming Frog alternative list.
The best news is you can enjoy all the above-mentioned technical SEO auditing services for FREE! Take a look at the complete feature of Prerender and how Prerender works to get your website more visibility on SERPs.
Pro tip: Why choose only Screaming Frog or Prerender to improve your website’s technical SEO performance? Combine this dynamic duo for a more powerful impact!
2. Xenu’s Link Sleuth
Xenu’s Link Sleuth is 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.
3. Scrutiny
Scrutiny 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 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.
Related: XML sitemap issue is one of the most common Google indexing problems for large websites. Learn how to solve XML sitemap roadblocks in this guide.
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.
4. Spotibo
Spotibo is a free Screaming Frog site crawler alternative 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.
5. Visual SEO
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.
Best Paid Alternatives Tools To Screaming Frog
For users looking for affordable Screaming Frog alternatives, you can choose from these tools. All of these alternatives offer similar features to Screaming Frog.
6. Ahrefs
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 a full content audit and identify gaps
- Check structured data errors
- Verify backlink profiles and linked domains
7. Semrush
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.
Related: Discover the 7 best practices for maximizing the power of alt-text in your SEO strategy.
With SEMRush, you will get reliable and quick results. It allows you to monitor and upgrade functions and lets 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.
8. Netpeak Spider
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, website performance, and ranking. Netpeak Spider allows you to identify errors and fix them, ensuring the 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 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 try 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.
9. Moz
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 its 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 an 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 for 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.
10. Serpstat
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 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 include:
- 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 has an easy-to-use design and an option to segment results based on several parameters. This tool can increase 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.
Screaming Frog for SEO Audit, Prerender for SEO Improvement
While Screaming Frog is great for identifying SEO issues, it doesn’t fix them from the root, especially when it comes to poor crawling and indexing performance for JavaScript websites. To address this problem once and for all, many SEO teams use Prerender.
Our dynamic rendering solution can help you achieve up to 260% faster indexing and a 400x better crawling performance—helping you boost the ranking of your JavaScript-based content on SERPs.
Try Prerender today, and get a FREE 1,000 render per month. Sign up here.
