Screaming Frog alternatives: free, cloud and cheaper site crawlers compared

What does Screaming Frog's free version do?

Screaming Frog's SEO Spider is a desktop crawler: you install it on your own computer, give it a start URL and it follows links across the site, listing titles, descriptions, headings, status codes, redirects and canonicals for every URL it finds. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs per crawl.

A paid licence, listed at £199 a year as of November 2026, removes the 500-URL limit and lets you save crawls and use the full configuration. Because it runs on your machine, there is no monthly quota and it can crawl any public site, not only sites you own.

Why look for a Screaming Frog alternative?

Most people switch for one of four reasons: where it runs, the free limit, re-crawling, or how technical it is.

• It runs on your own computer. The crawl uses your machine and your connection, and stops if the laptop sleeps. A cloud crawler runs on the vendor's servers instead.
• The free tier stops at 500 URLs per crawl. Fine for a small site; a shop or blog with thousands of URLs needs the licence or another tool.
• No scheduled cloud re-crawls on the free version. You start each crawl yourself, so nothing checks the site while you are away.
• It is a technical tool. Its many tabs and settings reward people who know what they are looking for, and can overwhelm someone who just wants a list of fixes.

To be fair: for deep custom crawls (your own extraction rules, crawl settings and exports) and for large sites, Screaming Frog is the better choice, and the alternatives below do not replace it. They are better when you want something lighter, in the cloud, or free for a site past 500 URLs.

Screaming Frog vs free and cloud alternatives

Five options cover most reasons to switch: Ahrefs Free, Bing Webmaster Tools Site Scan, Google Search Console and MrKeyword, set against both versions of Screaming Frog.

Ahrefs Free (Ahrefs Webmaster Tools)

Ahrefs Free gives verified site owners Ahrefs' Site Audit at no cost, checking for 170+ technical and on-page issues with 5,000 crawl credits per verified project each month. Its product page says credits are only used on HTML pages that return a 200 status. It runs in the cloud, but only on sites you can verify, so it cannot audit a competitor the way Screaming Frog can.

Bing Webmaster Tools Site Scan

Bing's Site Scan is a free, on-demand cloud crawl for sites you have verified in Bing Webmaster Tools. You choose the whole website, one sitemap or a list of URLs, set a page limit, and Bing crawls as bingbot. Results come as errors, warnings and notices with a CSV download. Your monthly page quota is set by Bing and cannot be raised on request, and you can keep up to five scans. Our Bing Webmaster Tools guide covers setup.

Google Search Console

Search Console is not a crawler you run, but it is the only free tool that shows which of your pages Google actually indexed. Its Page indexing report lists pages Google found but left out, with a reason for each (robots.txt, noindex, redirect, duplicate, 404 and more). Pair it with any crawler on this page.

MrKeyword

MrKeyword's free SEO checker checks any single page with no sign-up, and crawls a whole site against 68 checks on a free account. We make it, so here is exactly what it does:

• Whole site, free account: 100 crawled pages a month on 1 website, checking 68 issue types in seven categories (6 critical, 26 warnings, 36 notices), each with the fix written out. Pages under 200 words are flagged as thin.
• Runs in the cloud: at most two requests a second, robots.txt and Crawl-delay obeyed, identified as MrKeywordBot. Nothing to install.
• Scheduled re-crawls on paid plans: weekly or monthly, each compared with the last (new, fixed, still there). Starter is $10 a month for 2,000 pages, Growth $19 for 10,000 across 3 websites. See pricing.
• Beside your search data: connect Search Console and the audit sits next to your queries and positions. The Site Audit feature page covers the crawl diff.

Which Screaming Frog alternative should you pick?

Pick by the job, not the brand.

• You run one small site. Use Google Search Console for what Google indexed, plus one free crawler: Screaming Frog free if the site is under 500 URLs and you like the detail, or Bing Site Scan, Ahrefs Free or MrKeyword if you want it in the cloud with a ready list of fixes.
• You are an agency with many sites. Screaming Frog's licence crawls any client site with no URL limit, which is hard to beat for one-off deep audits. For ongoing monitoring, a cloud crawler with scheduled re-crawls saves you starting each crawl by hand; MrKeyword Growth covers 3 websites.
• You are a developer who wants AI help. MrKeyword's MCP server lets Claude or another AI assistant read your audit and Search Console data and work through the fixes with you. Our SEO audit with Claude guide shows the flow.

What MrKeyword's audit does not do

MrKeyword is a lighter tool than Screaming Frog, and it is fair to say where.

• It does not render JavaScript. It reads the HTML your server sends, as most AI crawlers do, and flags pages whose content needs JavaScript to appear instead of rendering them.
• It does not crawl a domain you have not added to your workspace, so it is not a competitor audit tool.
• It has no custom extraction rules or crawl configuration like Screaming Frog's paid version.
• It does not ignore robots.txt to reach a page, even on your own site.
• Its Free plan has no scheduled re-crawls; those are on paid plans.

Auditing for the first time? Our SEO audit checklist works with any of these tools, and the Ubersuggest site audit comparison covers the same free options from the Ubersuggest side.

Questions and answers