Screaming Frog SEO Spider vs WebCrawler Pro
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
screamingfrog.co.ukWebCrawler Pro
webcrawler.proSide by side
| Figure | Screaming Frog SEO Spider | WebCrawler Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $1/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 9 | 7 |
| Spec score · SEO tools | 9.5 (#1) | 8.9 (#16) |
| Spec score · SEO Crawler Software | 8.8 (#2) | 8.6 (#6) |
| Spec score · Technical SEO Software | 8.9 (#2) | 8.6 (#6) |
| Company size | LinkedIn lists the company size as 11–50 employees. | SaaSHub lists WebCrawler.pro as a Romanian startup with 1–9 employees and a 2026 founding year. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Headquarters | Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, UK | Rădășeni, Suceava, Romania |
| Integrations | It connects to Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights APIs, and lists link metrics integrations for Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz APIs. | The FAQ names Google sign-in and support for user-provided OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic API keys; it says the user’s own key stays on their device. |
| Intended 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. | The maker describes the tool as an independent site crawler and says agencies can send its client-ready reports to clients. |
| Purpose | The SEO Spider is a website crawler that audits sites for over 300 SEO issues to help improve SEO and user experience. | WebCrawler Pro crawls websites and scores pages for technical SEO, answer-engine readiness (AEO), and generative engine optimization (GEO). |
| Self-hosting | Every release can run locally, on a dedicated server or in the cloud, including remote concurrent crawls. | The maker says the PHP and vanilla-JavaScript project can be uploaded to any web host and pointed to through the proxy selector. |
| Support | Paid users receive technical support, while official self-help includes a user guide, tutorials, FAQ and issue library. | The contact page says it aims to reply within 1–2 business days, with bug reports and crawl issues usually answered faster. |
| System requirements | A 64-bit operating system is required; supported systems are Windows 10/11 and Server 2016/2019/2022, macOS 11 or later, and Ubuntu or Fedora Linux. | Self-hosting requires PHP 7.4 or newer with pdo, pdo_sqlite, and curl extensions, writable api/scans and api/data directories, and Google OAuth configuration. |
| What it does | SEO Spider is a desktop website crawler that audits more than 300 SEO issues. | WebCrawler Pro crawls websites and scores pages for technical SEO, answer-engine readiness, and generative-engine citation signals. |
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
WebCrawler Pro
- Free guestFree
- Free signed inFree
- Paid tokens$1 a month
- Free daily allowanceFree
- GuestFree
- Signed-inFree
- Prepaid crawl tokens$11,000, paid once
In their own words
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.
WebCrawler Pro
WebCrawler Pro crawls websites and scores pages for technical SEO, answer-engine readiness (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO). Technical checks include titles, meta descriptions, H1s, canonicals, Open Graph tags, response times, page size, duplicate content, orphan pages and thin content. AEO checks include FAQ schema and question-based headings; GEO checks cover author attribution, freshness, factual density, authority links and original-research signals. Reports include crawl-depth charts, score distributions, response-time histograms, page breakdowns and site summaries, with PDF, CSV and JSON exports. Signed-in users can draft titles, FAQs, JSON-LD, alt text, internal links and llms.txt using a hosted model or their own API key. HTML mode fetches server responses; DOM Render executes JavaScript before extracting content. Guests receive 50 requests/day and signed-in users 100 requests/day. Paid tokens are listed at $1 a month. It supports Linux, macOS, Windows, web and self-hosting. Pages behind login walls, blocked by robots.txt or protected by advanced bot detection may not be fully crawlable.