LibreCrawl vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider
LibreCrawl
librecrawl.com
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
screamingfrog.co.ukSide by side
| Figure | LibreCrawl | Screaming Frog SEO Spider |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 9 |
| Spec score · SEO Crawler Software | 8.5 (#7) | 8.8 (#2) |
| Spec score · SEO tools | 8.2 (#64) | 9.5 (#1) |
| API access | Yes | Yes |
| Backlink analysis | No | Yes |
| Founded | 2025 | 2010 |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | The maker lists PageSpeed metrics and Playwright rendering; its API documentation describes REST endpoints for crawl control, settings, and exports. | 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 LibreCrawl for SEO consultants, agency developers, enterprise SEO teams, and open-source contributors. | 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 | It uses Playwright to crawl JavaScript sites, including React, Vue, Angular, and Next.js, in headed or headless mode. | Integrated headless Chromium renders JavaScript sites and frameworks including Angular, React and Vue. |
| Purpose | LibreCrawl is a web-based SEO crawler for website audits and analysis. | The SEO Spider is a website crawler that audits sites for over 300 SEO issues to help improve SEO and user experience. |
| Security and privacy | The maker says LibreCrawl does not track users, collect analytics, or phone home with crawl data, and encourages self-hosting for privacy. | The privacy policy says software use may involve checks of username, licence key, IP address, anonymised machine ID, and timestamp, and that data is stored in secure data centres in the UK and US with access restricted to authorised personnel. |
| Site audit | Yes | Yes |
| Support | The maker directs users to GitHub Issues for bug reports and feature requests, and GitHub Discussions for conversations. | 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
LibreCrawl
LibreCrawl is a web-based SEO crawler for auditing and analyzing websites. It checks technical areas such as meta tags, schema markup, hreflang, social tags and PageSpeed metrics. Playwright rendering lets it crawl JavaScript sites built with React, Vue, Angular or Next.js, in headed or headless mode. The maker says memory profiling and virtual scrolling support stable crawls of more than one million URLs. Results can be exported as CSV, JSON or XML, with custom field selection and no stated export restrictions. LibreCrawl is MIT-licensed and can be self-hosted. Its REST API supports crawl control, settings and exports, and uses session-based authentication for every endpoint. Guest API users are limited to three crawls per 24 hours, tracked by IP address. The maker says the software does not track users, collect analytics or send crawl data back to itself, and encourages self-hosting for privacy. It is free, with no subscriptions or paid tiers. The maker directs bug reports and feature requests to GitHub Issues and discussions to GitHub Discussions.
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.