Google Search Console vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Google Search Console
search.google.com
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
screamingfrog.co.ukSide by side
| Figure | Google Search Console | 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 | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 9 |
| Spec score · SEO tools | 8.5 (#28) | 9.5 (#1) |
| Spec score · Search Engine Optimization Software | 8.3 (#11) | 8.9 (#4) |
| Spec score · Website Optimization Tools | 8.3 (#14) | 8.9 (#6) |
| API access | Yes | Yes |
| Backlink analysis | Yes | Yes |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | A Search Console property can be associated with Google Analytics, Google Ads, Merchant Center, Android and Play Store apps, Chrome Web Store, Google Assistant Actions, and Vertex AI Agent Builder. | It connects to Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights APIs, and lists link metrics integrations for Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz APIs. |
| Intended users | Google identifies business owners, SEO specialists or marketers, site administrators, and web developers as Search Console users. | 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. |
| Purpose | Google Search Console helps monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot a site's presence in Google Search results. | The SEO Spider is a website crawler that audits sites for over 300 SEO issues to help improve SEO and user experience. |
| Site audit | Yes | Yes |
| Support | Google provides a Search Console Help Center, Help Forum, and Webmaster Academy resources. | 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
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 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.