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Which tools can crawl a website instead of Screaming Frog?

Published · Editor: Kaz (pen name)

Summary

Sitebulb is the main desktop alternative, and in the cloud there are Sitebulb Cloud (from £95 a month) and the Site Audit tools in Ahrefs, SE Ranking and Semrush. Screaming Frog costs $279 per user per year and has no fixed URL cap on the paid version. Cloud tools meter pages per month or per project, so the right plan depends on how big your site is and how often you crawl it.

Another desktop crawler: Sitebulb

Sitebulb Lite is for one user and stops at 10,000 URLs per audit. Pro defaults to 500,000 URLs per audit, which you can raise to 2 million, and adds audit comparisons, scheduled audits, custom PDF reports and more than 300 Hints. Extra Pro users start at £7 a month, yearly plans save 15%, and there's a 14-day trial with no credit card. The Lite and Pro prices load by currency on the pricing page and didn't appear in its text, so they aren't quoted here.

For comparison, Screaming Frog's free version stops at 500 URLs per crawl and locks crawl configuration, saved crawls, JavaScript rendering, custom extraction and API integrations. The paid license removes those limits and can store crawl data on disk for large sites. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. Licenses are per user, and the price drops to $265 each for five to nine and $235 each for 20 or more.

Cloud audits and their meters

  • Sitebulb Cloud: from £95 a month, up to 10 million URLs per audit, no project limits. The Small plan covers two users and includes two Sitebulb Pro desktop licenses. There's no free trial.
  • Ahrefs: Lite ($129) has 100,000 crawl credits a month and a 25,000-page cap per project; Standard ($249) has 500,000 credits and 50,000 pages per project.
  • SE Ranking Core ($129): 250,000 audited pages a month, up to 250,000 per project.
  • Semrush SEO ($139): includes Site Audit; the pricing page doesn't list a page allowance.

A 30,000-URL site crawled weekly

Four crawls a month comes to about 120,000 pages. SE Ranking Core's 250,000 pages cover that, with room for a second site. Ahrefs Lite can't audit the whole site in one pass, because its per-project cap is 25,000 pages; Standard, at 50,000 pages per project, can. Screaming Frog and Sitebulb Pro have no monthly meter, but the crawl runs on your own computer, which has to stay on until it finishes.

Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.

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Sources

Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.