Open SEO Crawler vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider

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 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.