Open SEO Crawler vs Screaming Frog SEO Log File Analyser

Open SEO Crawler is a free, self-hosted, open-source tool for auditing websites for technical SEO issues. It checks titles, meta descriptions, H1s, canonicals, structured data, redirects, HTTP errors, indexability, hreflang, mobile viewports, mixed content, images and security headers. It detects numerous CMS platforms, including Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, Wix, Squarespace, Kajabi, Ghost, Drupal, HubSpot and Joomla, then applies crawl recommendations. Optional Playwright rendering supports JavaScript-heavy sites, while compare mode identifies content absent from raw HTML.

Bulk reports can be exported to XLSX, and sitemap export is available. Default settings allow 1,500 pages, five workers, a 0.4-second per-host delay and depth 10; the page cap can be changed to unlimited. The crawler runs locally without accounts, telemetry or API calls, though it contacts target sites and checks GitHub for updates when requested. Installers are documented for Linux, macOS 11 or newer, and Windows 10/11. The project uses the MIT license.

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.