Crab vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Crab
crab.so
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
screamingfrog.co.ukSide by side
| Figure | Crab | Screaming Frog SEO Spider |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 9 |
| Spec score · SEO Audit Software | 8.2 (#10) | 9.0 (#2) |
| Spec score · Website Audit software | 8.2 (#7) | 9.1 (#1) |
| Spec score · SEO Crawler Software | 8.2 (#12) | 8.8 (#2) |
| Spec score · SEO tools | 7.7 (#134) | 9.5 (#1) |
| Accessibility | Crab checks items including image alt text, form labels, and heading hierarchy, then assigns each page an accessibility score from 0 to 100. | The tool uses the open-source axe accessibility rule set for automated checks against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | The maker's comparison page lists Google Analytics, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and other integrations as “Soon.” | It connects to Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights APIs, and lists link metrics integrations for Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz APIs. |
| JavaScript rendering | Crab can render JavaScript sites with headless Chrome, including React, Vue, and other single-page applications. | Integrated headless Chromium renders JavaScript sites and frameworks including Angular, React and Vue. |
| Site audit | Yes | Yes |
| Support | The homepage directs users with questions to GitHub. | Paid users receive technical support, while official self-help includes a user guide, tutorials, FAQ and issue library. |
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
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.