Screaming Frog alternatives for every website audit job

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler for Windows, macOS and Linux. It crawls the URLs of a site and reports the technical SEO issues it finds. The free version stops at 500 URLs, and the paid licence costs €245 per licence per year for one to four licences.

That works well for many audits. But some jobs need cloud crawls for very large sites, months of log data, round-the-clock change alerts or a free option past 500 URLs. These 16 alternatives cover those gaps.

Comparison of the best Screaming Frog alternatives 

16 Screaming Frog alternatives for website audits

1. Sitebulb

Sitebulb is an excellent Screaming Frog alternative. It comes in two versions, and both render JavaScript.

Sitebulb Cloud runs in the browser and can crawl millions of pages. It has no project limits and no crawl credits, so large crawls never need rationing. It uses the same Evergreen Chromium engine as Google, and it adds team access, crawl automation and scheduled reports. Plans start from £95 a month, and large-team plans go above £20k a year.

Sitebulb Desktop installs on Windows or Mac. JavaScript crawling is included in all plans. Lite allows 10,000 URLs per audit, and Pro allows 500,000, rising to 2 million depending on the machine. The 14-day trial is fully featured and needs no card, but there is no free plan.

2. Lumar

Lumar is the new name for Deepcrawl, which renamed itself in September 2022. Its crawler is built for enterprise-scale websites.

The platform has four parts. Analyze crawls the site, Monitor tracks changes in core metrics, Protect runs automated QA tests before releases, and Impact reports on results. It suits in-house teams that want SEO checks inside the release process. Pricing is custom, so a quote is needed.

3. Botify

Botify pairs a crawler with log analysis. SiteCrawler crawls pages from mobile and desktop views, and LogAnalyzer lays server logs over that crawl to show which pages bots visit and which they skip.

Speed is the main draw. Botify crawls HTML at 250 URLs per second and renders JavaScript at 100 URLs per second, so a one-million-page analysis takes about three hours. Pricing is custom, and the site offers a demo.

4. JetOctopus

JetOctopus is a cloud-based technical SEO platform and is a great Screaming Frog alternative. Its Log Analyzer comes in every plan, and it publishes prices, which is rare at this scale.

The Growth plan lists $459 a month, with a lower $349 rate also shown. It covers 500K crawled URLs and 2 million log lines a month. Pro covers 2M URLs, and Ultra covers 5M. There is a free seven-day trial after a demo, with no card needed.

5. Oncrawl

Oncrawl is a cloud SEO crawler with two plans. Basic covers audits, crawls and analysis. Core adds automation, monitoring and log analysis for organic and bot traffic.

It fits projects where crawl data needs to be joined to business numbers. Oncrawl does not publish prices, so a demo is needed to get a quote.

6. Ahrefs Site Audit

Ahrefs includes Site Audit in its free account, with 5,000 crawl credits a month per project. Site ownership must be verified first.

The audit scans for 170+ issues and can execute JavaScript. It also validates structured data against 190+ Google and Schema.org rules. Paid plans raise the cap: Lite costs $129 a month with 100,000 crawl credits, Standard costs $249 with 500,000, and Advanced costs $449 with 1.5 million. Enterprise starts from 5 million crawl credits with custom pricing. The $29 Starter plan does not list Site Audit credits.

7. Semrush Site Audit

Semrush Site Audit comes with the SEO Toolkit. Pro costs $139.95 a month and allows 100,000 pages to crawl per month. Guru costs $249.95 for 300,000 pages, and Business costs $499.95 for 1,000,000 pages.

It makes the most sense when a team already pays for Semrush, because the audit sits next to the keyword data the team checks every week.

8. SE Ranking

SE Ranking gives the most audit pages per dollar of the three big suites. Core lists $129 a month, with $103.20 shown at the 20% discount, and allows 250k audit pages a month. Growth lists $279 and allows 2 million.

There is a 14-day free trial with no card. For a fuller look at limits and costs, read this SE Ranking review.

9. Seobility

Seobility offers free SEO tools that need no sign-up, while its full Website Audit sits in the paid plans. The audit flags broken links, crawl errors, duplicate content, thin pages and canonical errors.

Premium costs €59.90 a month for three projects and 25,000 pages per crawl. Agency costs €209.90 a month for 20 projects and 100,000 pages. Each plan has a 14-day free trial.

10. Netpeak Spider

Netpeak Spider is a desktop crawler for Windows and macOS. It lists 100+ issues with priorities and crawls JavaScript pages with a recent Chromium build. It also detects broken links, which makes the free plan handy for quick link checks.

The free plan crawls 500 URLs with five threads, the same cap as the free version of Screaming Frog. Pro removes the URL cap and costs $20 a month or $193 a year. There is also a $496 one-time lifetime licence. Both tiers allow two devices per user.

11. Google Search Console

Google Search Console is free and adds data no crawler can fake.

The URL Inspection tool shows how Google sees one page. Its live test fetches the URL in real time and shows the raw HTML, HTTP headers, JavaScript console output and loaded resources. A screenshot of the rendered page appears only in the live test, so it is worth running on every template type of a JavaScript site.

The Crawl Stats report shows total crawl requests, host status and responses by type, broken down by file type and Googlebot type. It works only for root-level properties, so add a Domain property for every site. If robots rules look off, this robots.txt best practice guide covers the common mistakes.

12. Conductor Monitoring

Conductor Monitoring is the product once sold as ContentKing. It monitors websites 24/7 and sends real-time alerts about selected changes.

Content Monitoring tracks page elements, so a changed title or template shows up quickly. Technical Monitoring prioritizes key pages. Pricing is not on the page, but there is a three-week free trial and a demo.

13. Little Warden

Little Warden watches the boring things that break sites. It checks domain and SSL expiry, robots.txt changes, broken redirects and tracking tags, plus Core Web Vitals and content changes across 30+ checks.

Freelancer costs £24.99 a month for 20 URLs and up to 10 checks per URL. Agency costs £59.99 for 650 URLs. It can be used free for 40 days with no card.

14. PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights reports two kinds of data. Field data comes from real Chrome users over the previous 28-day period, and lab data comes from Lighthouse.

The Core Web Vitals in the report are LCP, INP and CLS. Field data reflects real users, while lab data is useful for debugging. If a page has no field data, the lab score is all that is available. This list of six technical SEO areas shows where page speed sits among the rest.

15. WAVE

The WAVE extension checks accessibility in Chrome, Firefox and Edge. It checks the rendered page, so content built by scripts is evaluated too. No page data goes to the WAVE server, so it works on intranet and password-protected pages.

For site-wide checks, WebAIM offers a Subscription API from $10, and there is a Stand-alone API for self-hosting. Pope Tech, built on WAVE, prices by pages scanned.

16. Lighthouse

Lighthouse is open source under the Apache-2.0 licence. It installs with npm install -g lighthouse and needs Node 22 or later. One command then writes an HTML report by default.

The CLI audits four categories: performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, so a team can test every key template on each deploy. It does not crawl a whole site, though, so it pairs best with a crawler.

A checklist before switching away from Screaming Frog

Run through these questions before buying or switching tools:

1. How many URLs does the site have? Under 500 works on free plans. Past 100,000 needs a cloud crawler such as Sitebulb Cloud, JetOctopus, Lumar or Botify.
2. Are server logs available? If yes, JetOctopus or Botify is the pick.
3. Does the site rely on JavaScript? If yes, rendering must be in the plan.
4. Does the team already pay for a suite? If so, start with its Site Audit.
5. Are alerts needed between audits? If so, add Conductor Monitoring or Little Warden.
6. Is the price published? If not, budget time for a demo and a quote.

For crawl basics, this guide on making your site easy for search engines to crawl still holds up.

What SEOs ask when replacing Screaming Frog

Is there a free alternative to Screaming Frog?

Yes. Netpeak Spider Free crawls 500 URLs, the same cap as the free version of Screaming Frog. The free Ahrefs Site Audit also gives 5,000 crawl credits a month per verified project.

Which Screaming Frog alternative works on a Mac?

Sitebulb Desktop runs on Mac, and so does Netpeak Spider. Screaming Frog itself also has a macOS download. Cloud tools such as Sitebulb Cloud run in any browser.

What can I use instead of Screaming Frog for very large sites?

For sites past 100,000 URLs, Sitebulb Cloud, JetOctopus, Lumar or Botify are the main options. They crawl on remote servers, so a laptop is not the limit. JetOctopus and Botify also add log analysis.

Is Lumar the same as Deepcrawl?

Yes. Deepcrawl renamed itself Lumar in September 2022. After that, it moved from a pure technical SEO crawler to a wider website intelligence platform.

What happened to ContentKing?

ContentKing is now part of Conductor and sold as Conductor Monitoring. It still offers 24/7 monitoring and real-time alerts. The old contentkingapp.com domain now carries the Conductor Monitoring name.