Screaming Frog SEO Spider vs Website Crawler
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
screamingfrog.co.ukWebsite Crawler
websitecrawler.orgSide by side
| Figure | Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Website Crawler |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $10/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 9 | 5 |
| Spec score · SEO tools | 9.5 (#1) | 8.0 (#94) |
| Spec score · SEO Audit Software | 9.0 (#2) | 7.7 (#24) |
| API access | Yes | Yes |
| Custom extraction | Users can extract HTML data with CSS Path, XPath or regular expressions. | Users can configure extraction with CSS or XPath selectors and JavaScript snippets. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | It connects to Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights APIs, and lists link metrics integrations for Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz APIs. | The privacy policy describes Google Search Console integration with read-only account access and a Slack integration for notifications to a selected channel. |
| 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 service for website owners, people analyzing CMS or custom-built sites, and researchers or students needing web datasets for AI projects. |
| JavaScript crawling | It can render pages using its integrated Chromium WRS to crawl dynamic JavaScript sites and frameworks including Angular, React, and Vue.js. | It can render JavaScript-heavy sites and offers Chrome and HTML crawl modes; HTML mode processes raw HTML only. |
| Security and 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. | The privacy policy says collected crawl data is assigned to the crawl-job starter, user data is not sold or shared with third-party companies, and account data is removed when the account is deleted. |
| Support | Paid users receive technical support, while official self-help includes a user guide, tutorials, FAQ and issue library. | The maker says it provides email support on weekdays and weekends and replies within two to three hours. |
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
Website Crawler
- BasicFree
- Starter$10 a month
- Growth$20 a month
- Scale$60 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
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.
Website Crawler
Website Crawler is a cloud-based website analyzer, scraper and data extractor that crawls pages and reports on-page SEO issues. It can flag broken links, canonical links, duplicate titles and meta tags, missing image alt text, thin content and heading-structure problems. Chrome and HTML crawl modes are available for JavaScript-heavy sites, while HTML mode processes raw HTML only. Users can configure CSS or XPath selectors and JavaScript snippets for custom extraction. Crawl results export to CSV, Markdown or JSON, and the API retrieves structured JSON. The service also offers uptime monitoring and alerts for downtime and SSL certificate expiry; paid-plan intervals range from five minutes to one minute. Integrations include read-only Google Search Console access and Slack notifications. The Basic free plan is free and allows 10 pages per day and one project. Starter is $10 a month for 2,000 pages per month and three projects; Growth is $20 a month for 10,000 pages and ten projects; Scale is $60 a month for 50,000 pages and 50 projects. It works with publicly available HTML-page information and does not submit forms.