Screaming Frog alternatives: which crawler to pick, and how to leave cleanly

Why move to Sitebulb. It's the tool most like Screaming Frog: a crawler installed on your Windows or Mac machine. The difference is how you read the output. Instead of columns, Sitebulb gives you findings ranked by priority, each with an explanation of why it matters. Users describe it as simpler and just as effective. There's also a cloud version for teams.

Who it's for. Consultants and agencies who deliver audits to clients and want PDF reports and audit-to-audit comparisons.

Who it's not for. Complete beginners: it's still a technical tool with plenty of settings. And extraction power users, who'll find custom extraction less flexible.

Its limit. No free plan. Lite caps you at one user and 10,000 URLs per audit; you need Pro for 500,000 URLs per audit, scheduled audits and comparisons. And like any local crawler, it's still bound by your computer's memory and disk.

How to switch. There's no Screaming Frog config import, so your XPath and CSS rules get rebuilt. The upside: Sitebulb builds a rule when you click the element in a page preview, and lets you check it before the crawl starts. Run the 14-day trial on your largest client, not a small site.

What it costs. Sitebulb lists each plan's price on its pricing page, with 15% off on annual billing and extra seats on Pro. The Pro trial runs 14 days and needs no card.

Why move to Netpeak Spider. It keeps the desktop crawler model but changes how you pay: monthly, cancel whenever. If your audits come in waves, that beats an annual license that keeps running through the quiet months.

Who it's for. Freelancers and small agencies who want a local crawler without a yearly commitment.

Who it's not for. Teams that want a shared dashboard or scheduled cloud crawls. It's desktop software, like Screaming Frog.

Its limit. The trial lasts just 3 days, which is tight for a fair comparison. And the pricing page doesn't clearly say which systems Spider runs on; only the Checker tool is listed as Windows. If you're on a Mac, confirm before you pay.

How to switch. Prepare everything before you start the trial: a test URL list, the checks you usually run in Screaming Frog, and a reference export to compare against. If it isn't a fit, Netpeak refunds within 14 days.

What it costs. $20 a month, cancel any time. Annual bundles take 15% off, for example $390 a year for the Crawl & Check bundle.

Why move to JetOctopus. Once your site is bigger than your computer can crawl, the crawl has to leave the computer. JetOctopus crawls in the cloud, with no memory to tune, and analyzes your server logs too. Close the laptop, the crawl keeps going. Logs also tell you which bots actually hit your pages, Googlebot and AI crawlers included.

Who it's for. Large stores, marketplaces and publishers with hundreds of thousands of pages.

Who it's not for. A site with a few thousand pages: you'd be paying for a tool built for a hundred times that.

Its limit. Price, and a monthly budget. The entry Growth plan covers 500,000 URLs a month and 2 million log lines. Two full crawls of a 300,000-page site already go past it.

How to switch. The 7-day trial needs no card and allows 10,000 URLs: point it at a representative directory, not your homepage. Sort out log access with your host before you start, since that's the slow part.

What it costs. Growth is $349 a month at the discounted price shown, $459 at the regular price. Pro is $809 (2 million URLs) and Ultra $1,559 (5 million URLs).

Why move to Seolyzer. Seolyzer is a French cloud tool that puts crawling and server log analysis side by side. Logs show what Googlebot really visits, not what your crawler assumes it visits. Cross the two and you spot pages Google ignores and sections where it wastes crawl budget. Screaming Frog sells its log analyzer as separate software.

Who it's for. Mid-size stores and publishers who want log analysis without an enterprise contract.

Who it's not for. An agency running twenty sites: the number of sites per plan climbs fast. And teams who need an English-first vendor, since the company and its support are French.

Its limit. Lite covers one site and 100,000 URLs; Advanced 3 sites and 200,000 URLs; Premium 5 sites and 1,000,000 URLs. Above that, it's a quote. Logs also require server or host access, which isn't always easy to get.

How to switch. Start with the logs: ask your host for access before you even sign up. Then run a crawl and compare response codes with your last Screaming Frog export.

What it costs. Priced in euros: Lite €39 a month, Advanced €69, Premium €249, no commitment. Annual billing gives two months free. Free trial available.

Why move to Semrush. If you already use Semrush for keywords and competitors, its Site Audit handles a good share of everyday checks: errors, redirects, broken links, tags. One tool, one bill, and audits that rerun on their own in the cloud. Our Semrush score: 4.2 out of 5.

Who it's for. Marketing teams and consultants who want keywords, rankings and audits in one place.

Who it's not for. Technical SEOs who live in custom extraction and deep analysis: Site Audit doesn't have a dedicated crawler's depth.

Its limit. The page budget. Without a subscription, 100 pages. On the entry plan, 20,000 pages per audit and 100,000 a month, with no JavaScript rendering. Rendering comes with the next plan up (300,000 pages a month), and Advanced (formerly Business) raises the cap to 100,000 pages per audit. The budget resets on the 1st and doesn't roll over.

How to switch. First, count the real pages in your last Screaming Frog crawl and compare them with the monthly budget. A JavaScript site on the entry plan will look empty, so check the plan before you drop Screaming Frog.

What it costs. Site Audit is included in a Semrush subscription at no extra charge. Plan details are in our Semrush review.

Why move to Ahrefs. Two reasons. If you own the site, Ahrefs Free lets you audit it at no cost: 5,000 crawl credits a month per verified project. And on a paid plan, Site Audit comes bundled with the rest of the suite (backlinks, keywords). Only internal HTML pages returning 200 use credits; images, redirects and errors don't count. Our Ahrefs score: 4.2 out of 5.

Who it's for. Site owners who want a regular audit without paying, and teams already on Ahrefs.

Who it's not for. Consultants auditing client sites they can't verify: the free tier requires proof of ownership.

Its limit. 5,000 credits per project per month covers a small site or one section. And like Semrush, it isn't a specialist crawler, so fewer fine-grained settings than Screaming Frog.

How to switch. Verify your site in Ahrefs (Google Search Console is the fastest route), then run a first audit. Keep the free Screaming Frog around for quick checks under 500 URLs.

What it costs. Ahrefs Free costs nothing. The first full plan, Lite, is $129 a month. More in our Ahrefs review.

Why move to SiteOne Crawler. It's free and open source (MIT license), with no URL cap tied to a license. It runs from the command line or as a binary on Windows, Mac and Linux, outputs an HTML report and JSON or Markdown exports, and can run inside a CI pipeline so the site gets recrawled on every deploy.

Who it's for. Developers and technical SEOs comfortable in a terminal, and teams that want checks on every release.

Who it's not for. Anyone who wants a graphical interface and client-ready reports.

Its limit. No Screaming Frog-style interface and no commercial support. By default it crawls with 3 workers at 10 requests per second: raise that carefully, your server has to keep up.

How to switch. Take your exclusion list and user agent from Screaming Frog and pass them as parameters. Start on a staging environment.

What it costs. Free.

Everything hinges on this. While the license is live, you can open and export your crawls. The day after it expires, the software is back on the free version and saved files won't open. Note the date and plan the switch at least a month ahead.

If you bought recently, Screaming Frog gives a full refund on requests within 14 days of purchase, never a partial one.

List what you've built: user agent, URL exclusions, crawl depth, JavaScript rendering, XPath, CSS or regex extraction rules, API connections (Search Console, Analytics, Ahrefs). One screenshot per configuration tab is enough.

No other tool imports a Screaming Frog configuration. Whatever you don't write down, you'll rebuild from memory.

Reopen the crawls you want to keep (client audits, a site's state before a migration) and export them to CSV or Excel. Also back up the .seospider files or the database folder; it copies between Windows and Mac, which helps if you ever renew.

Tip: CSV stays readable by any tool forever. A .seospider file needs an active license.

Trials are short: 3 days at Netpeak, 7 at JetOctopus, 14 at Sitebulb. Don't burn them on a small site that works anywhere. Pick the one that causes trouble: the biggest, the JavaScript-heavy one, the one with thousands of filters.

Have your test URL list and your standard checks ready before you start the clock.

XPath rules don't transfer, so they need rebuilding. Start with the ones you use on every project (price, stock, structured data, author). In Sitebulb, click the element in the page preview and it builds the rule; check it on two or three URLs before crawling.

Run the same site through Screaming Frog and the new tool with the same exclusions. Compare a sample of URLs: pages found, status codes, title tags, extracted data. Gaps almost always come from a setting (robots.txt, JavaScript rendering, depth), rarely from the tool itself.

Schedule recurring audits if the tool allows it, build your client report templates, and check the monthly page budget. Keep the free Screaming Frog installed: 500 URLs is plenty for a quick check of one section or a URL list.