Comparison
DIY SEO Hub vs Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is the desktop crawler most technical SEO people learned on, and it is very good. We built a free browser one. Here is where each wins, including the parts where we lose.
Prices and feature lists change; check theirs before deciding on anything that matters.
The short version
Screaming Frog is a professional tool that installs on your machine and does far more than this does. This is free, runs in a browser, crawls a useful amount, and hands you the whole crawl as a database.
| DIY SEO Hub | Screaming Frog | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | In our browser tab; the crawl happens on our servers | On your computer, Windows, macOS or Linux |
| Free tier | 5,000 pages a scan, no account, no card | 500 URLs per crawl |
| Paid tier | None for crawling; the limits are the same for everybody | Annual licence lifts the URL limit and unlocks most features |
| JavaScript rendering | No: the HTML as served | Yes, with a rendering mode |
| External links | Recorded, not fetched | Checked, including status codes |
| Checks | Fifteen, plus a security review and an AI fix plan | Far more, plus custom extraction with XPath or CSS |
| Integrations | None | Search Console, Analytics, PageSpeed, link tools |
| Data you keep | The entire crawl as SQLite, page bodies included | CSV and Excel exports; crawl files reopened in the app |
| Crawling a staging or intranet site | No: public addresses only | Yes, it runs on your network |
| Scheduled re-crawls | Yes, with a free account, e-mailing only on change | Yes, with a licence |
Where Screaming Frog is simply better
Rendering. If your content arrives via JavaScript, we will not see it and Screaming Frog will. For a single-page app that is the whole ballgame.
Custom extraction. Pulling a price, a schema field or an author name off every page with an XPath is a standard audit move, and we have nothing like it.
Depth of checks. Hundreds against our fifteen, and the long tail matters on a large site.
It is yours. It runs on your machine, on any site you can reach, including the one behind your VPN, and nothing leaves your network.
Where this is better
Nothing to install, nothing to sign. Paste a domain and a crawl starts. For somebody who needs an answer today about one site, that difference is most of the work.
The data comes out whole. A CSV is the columns somebody chose. Our download is the crawl itself: URLs, links, resources, and the stored bytes of every page, in a file you can query with twenty lines of SQL years later.
It keeps crawling when you close the laptop. The crawl runs on our side, so a big site does not tie up your machine or your connection.
Things Screaming Frog does not do at all. A passive security review of headers, cookies and library versions; a written fix plan ordered by what to do first; a public report page per domain.
Questions people ask
- Is there a free alternative to Screaming Frog?
- This is one, for the common case. Screaming Frog's free tier stops at 500 URLs; a scan here goes to 5,000 pages with no account and no licence. Past that, or when you need JavaScript rendering or custom extraction, buy the licence: it is inexpensive next to the time it saves.
- Which one should I use?
- If you audit other people's sites for a living, Screaming Frog, and it is not close. If you have one site, want the technical faults found, and would rather not install anything, start here and buy the licence the day you hit a wall.
- Can I get the raw crawl data out of both?
- Screaming Frog exports CSV and Excel, and with a licence can store crawls in its own database format for reopening in Screaming Frog. Here the crawl is a SQLite database, including the stored bytes of every page, and it downloads with no account at all.
Try the free one first
Read next
- Compared with Sitebulb — the other desktop crawler people ask about.
- Compared with Ahrefs Site Audit — the cloud one inside a bigger subscription.
- What our crawler does — the whole feature list, plainly.