Alpha Crawler vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Alpha Crawler
alphacrawler.org
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
screamingfrog.co.ukSide by side
| Figure | Alpha Crawler | Screaming Frog SEO Spider |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 9 |
| Spec score · Website Audit software | 8.8 (#2) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Spec score · SEO tools | 8.1 (#83) | 9.5 (#1) |
| Company size | The official pages describe a team but do not state a headcount, legal entity name, funding amount or headquarters address. | LinkedIn lists the company size as 11–50 employees. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Intended users | The maker describes the product as free for website owners and offers custom plans for SEO agencies and large enterprises auditing multiple sites. | The maker describes the tool as designed for experienced SEOs and says it is trusted by professional SEOs, agencies, and brands for technical SEO audits. |
| JavaScript rendering | A rendering mode analyzes client-rendered React, Vue, Angular and Next.js sites alongside server-rendered sites. | Integrated headless Chromium renders JavaScript sites and frameworks including Angular, React and Vue. |
| Site audit | Yes | Yes |
| Support | The site publishes [email protected] and says typical replies arrive within one to two business days. | Paid users receive technical support, while official self-help includes a user guide, tutorials, FAQ and issue library. |
| What it does | Alpha Crawler is a browser-based technical SEO crawler that audits site structure, metadata, links, schema, performance and AI-crawler access. | SEO Spider is a desktop website crawler that audits more than 300 SEO issues. |
Plans
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- FreeFree
- Paid licencePrice not published
- Free VersionFree
- Free VersionFree
- Paid licence (20+)$235 a year
- Paid licence (10–19)$249 a year
- Paid licence (5–9)$265 a year
- Paid licence (1–4)$279 a year
- Paid Version$279 a year
In their own words
Alpha Crawler
Alpha Crawler has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog SEO Spider crawls websites to audit more than 300 SEO issues and support improvements to search performance and user experience. It finds broken links and server errors, checks redirects, and flags page titles and meta descriptions that are missing, duplicated, or too long. For JavaScript-heavy sites, it can render pages with its integrated Chromium WRS, including sites using Angular, React, and Vue.js. Data extraction supports CSS Path, XPath, regular expressions, and custom JavaScript. The crawler connects to Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights APIs, with link-metrics integrations for Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz. Crawls can be scheduled, automated from the command line, exported to destinations such as Google Sheets, and compared across runs or between staging and production. The free version costs nothing and allows 500 URLs per crawl; saving crawls, configuration, and advanced features are restricted. The paid version costs $279 a year per licence, with unlimited crawl size subject to allocated memory and storage. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.