Crawly vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Crawly
getcrawly.com
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
screamingfrog.co.ukSide by side
| Figure | Crawly | Screaming Frog SEO Spider |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 9 |
| Spec score · SEO tools | 7.6 (#156) | 9.5 (#1) |
| API access | Yes | Yes |
| Backlink analysis | Yes | Yes |
| Custom extraction | Users can extract page text or attributes with CSS selectors and search raw HTML with regular expressions. | Users can extract HTML data with CSS Path, XPath or regular expressions. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Headquarters | Chester, England | Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, UK |
| Integrations | Crawly includes an MCP server for Claude Code and the maker says it connects with Claude Code, Cursor and Codex via MCP. | It connects to Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights APIs, and lists link metrics integrations for Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz APIs. |
| Intended users | The maker describes Crawly as a free alternative for Mac teams and says it is built for professionals who need control over how their sites are crawled. | 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. |
| Site audit | Yes | Yes |
| Support | The maker directs users to its support page or GitHub issues for questions and feedback. | 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.