Google Search Console vs Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser
Google Search Console
search.google.com
Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser
screamingfrog.co.ukSide by side
| Figure | Google Search Console | Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $11.58/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 1 | 5 |
| Spec score · SEO tools | 8.5 (#28) | 9.1 (#11) |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Performance metrics | The Performance report provides clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position, grouped by queries, pages, countries, devices, search appearance, or dates. | Reports include average response time, bytes transferred, last response time, referers, and directory-level crawl activity. |
| Purpose | Google Search Console helps monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot a site's presence in Google Search results. | The desktop application analyses access logs to give SEOs insight into search engine and AI bot crawl activity. |
| Support | Google provides a Search Console Help Center, Help Forum, and Webmaster Academy resources. | Support is offered through email and tickets, with the support page stating a target response within 24 hours. |
Plans
Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser
- FreeFree
- Paid$139 a year
- Free VersionFree
- Paid licence$139 a year
- Paid Version$139 a year
In their own words
Google Search Console
Google Search Console helps site owners monitor and troubleshoot how their sites appear in Google Search. It indicates whether Google can find and crawl a site, helps address indexing problems, and supports requests to re-index new or updated content. Its Performance report groups clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position by queries, pages, countries, devices, search appearance, or dates. URL Inspection shows crawl, index, and serving information from Google's index. Alerts flag indexing, spam, and other site issues, and the service shows which sites link to a website. Reports also cover AMP, Core Web Vitals, and structured-data rich results. The free web service includes API access for management, testing, performance and sitemap data, filtering, sorting, and aggregation; the API does not support freeform SQL queries. Performance API data is limited to 50K rows per day per type per property, and API use has a quota. A valid Google account and a recent supported browser with cookies and JavaScript enabled are required.
Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser
Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser is a desktop application for examining access logs and understanding search engine and AI bot activity. It installs locally and keeps log event data in a local database. It accepts Apache, W3C Extended, and Amazon Elastic Load Balancing logs, and can verify supported bots to identify spoofed requests. Reports cover crawled URLs, crawl frequency, response errors, redirects, bytes downloaded, and response times. Users can match imported data containing a URLs column against log activity, including crawls, directives, or external link data. Log files can be added by drag and drop, with analysis exported to CSV or Excel. The software can process millions of events, though capacity depends on hard drive space. It runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows. The free plan allows 1,000 log event lines and one project. The paid licence costs $139 per year and includes unlimited events and projects, subject to storage capacity. Free technical support is listed for both versions.