Screaming Frog SEO Spider vs Yoast SEO
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
screamingfrog.co.ukYoast SEO
yoast.comSide by side
| Figure | Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Yoast SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $5/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | Yes |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Linux | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 9 | 5 |
| Spec score · SEO tools | 9.5 (#1) | 9.3 (#3) |
| Spec score · Search Engine Optimization Software | 8.9 (#4) | 8.4 (#10) |
| API access | Yes | Yes |
| Founded | 2010 | 2010 |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Headquarters | Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, UK | Wijchen, The Netherlands |
| Integrations | It connects to Google Analytics, Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights APIs, and lists link metrics integrations for Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz APIs. | Yoast documents integrations with Elementor, Semrush, Wincher, Easy Digital Downloads, ACF, Algolia, Jetpack, WooCommerce, Site Kit and Mastodon. |
| Praise: support | Trustpilot reviewers report fast, helpful email support and quick bug responses. | Trustpilot review summaries commonly praise Yoast staff as helpful, responsive and knowledgeable. |
| Rating on Capterra | 4.9 out of 5 from 134 reviews | 4.6 out of 5 from 131 reviews |
| Rating on G2 | 4.7 out of 5 from 187 reviews | 4.5 out of 5 from 203 reviews |
| Rating on Trustpilot | 4.2 out of 5 from 14 reviews | 4.6 out of 5 from 895 reviews |
| 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. | Yoast supports the two latest WordPress versions, PHP 7.4 or newer, at least 256 MB PHP memory, MySQL 5.6+ or MariaDB 10.0+ and modern browsers. |
| What it does | SEO Spider is a desktop website crawler that audits more than 300 SEO issues. | Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that provides on-page SEO guidance, readability analysis, structured data, XML sitemaps and AI-oriented features. |
| XML sitemaps | It creates XML and image sitemaps with configurable URL, last-modified, priority and change-frequency fields. | Yoast generates XML sitemaps and documents controls for sitemap output and performance. |
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
Yoast SEO
- Yoast SEOFree
- Yoast SEO Premium$118.80 a year
- Yoast SEO FreeFree
- Yoast SEO Google Docs Add-on$5 a month
- Yoast SEO for Shopify$19 a month
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.