Screaming Frog alternatives: desktop, cloud and free crawlers

Most people look for alternatives because Screaming Frog is a desktop app bound to one machine and one licence per user. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and its paid crawl limit depends on the memory and storage you give it.

The free version stops at 500 URLs. A paid licence is $279, or £199, per user per year, with small volume discounts from five licences. Two people need two licences.

The output is the other reason. Screaming Frog gives an expert raw, complete crawl data. People who aren't technical SEOs often want the tool to rank issues, explain them or turn them into tasks, and that's where alternatives differ most.

Log file analysis is also a separate product, the Log File Analyser, so teams that want crawl and log data together often look at cloud platforms.

We picked crawlers and audit tools that replace a specific reason for leaving, then checked each vendor's site on 2 Oct 2026.

• Where it runs: desktop, cloud or both.
• How large a site it can crawl, and whether it renders JavaScript.
• Whether findings are prioritised and explained, or left as raw data.
• Price per user, and whether a free tier exists.
• Extras Screaming Frog sells separately, such as log analysis.

We left out Oncrawl and Botify because neither publishes prices. Both are worth a demo if you run an enterprise site.

Here is what each tool is, why a Screaming Frog user would switch, its trade-offs and its starting price.

1. Sitebulb

Sitebulb is a website crawler for SEO audits with two products: Desktop, up to 500,000 URLs per audit, and Cloud, up to 10 million URLs with team collaboration. Why switch from Screaming Frog: you want each issue prioritised and explained, not only listed.

Pricing: Lite at $18 a month and Pro at $42 a month for one user, less paid yearly. Cloud starts at £95 a month.

2. JetOctopus

JetOctopus is an enterprise SEO platform for large sites that combines crawling, log analysis, Search Console and GA4. Why switch from Screaming Frog: your site is too big for one machine, and you want logs and crawl data in one place.

Pricing: Growth at $349 a month billed annually, or $459 billed quarterly. 7-day trial capped at 10,000 URLs.

3. Lumar

Lumar is a cloud platform for AI visibility, technical SEO, site speed, accessibility and web analytics, with Monitor and Protect modules for change tracking and QA. Why switch from Screaming Frog: you need ongoing monitoring across many sites, with automated QA testing on top.

Pricing: by quote through Lumar's form.

4. Ahrefs Site Audit

Ahrefs Site Audit checks 170+ SEO issues, executes JavaScript and runs always-on audits in the cloud. Why switch from Screaming Frog: you want a free cloud audit of your own site without installing anything.

Pricing: free for verified sites. Paid plans start at $129 a month (Lite) with 100,000 crawl credits.

5. Semrush Site Audit

Semrush Site Audit crawls your site, runs 140+ technical and on-page checks and tracks progress across scheduled audits. Why switch from Screaming Frog: your team already pays for Semrush and wants audits next to keyword and rank data.

Pricing: included in Semrush plans from $139 a month. The Free plan has one demo project.

6. Seobility

Seobility is all-in-one SEO software with a site crawler, rank tracking, backlink monitoring and keyword tools. Why switch from Screaming Frog: you run small sites and want a free or low-cost audit in the browser.

Pricing: Premium at €59.90 a month (25,000 pages per crawl), Professional at €99.90 and Agency at €209.90. 14-day trial.

7. LogNorm

LogNorm is a growth engine, not a crawler for technical SEOs. It crawls your site, runs 29 SEO rules and a GEO audit for AI crawlers, and turns each issue into a move with its URLs attached, ranked with the rest of your growth plan.

Why switch from Screaming Frog: you crawled, exported and the spreadsheet never got fixed. With LogNorm, Claude Code, Codex or Cursor fix the cause in your codebase, and Validate fix re-checks the affected pages on the live site.

Pricing: Free (100 pages per crawl), Starter $99, Growth $149 and Scale $299 a month. Scheduled audits run on paid plans and the 14-day trial.

The table compares where each tool runs, its free option, starting price and crawl size. Prices checked on 2 Oct 2026.

The right choice depends on whether you're a technical SEO who wants better crawl data or a team that wants issues fixed.

• You want a desktop crawler that explains issues: Sitebulb.
• Your site has millions of URLs and you need logs: JetOctopus, or Lumar for enterprise monitoring.
• You want a free audit of your own site: Ahrefs Free, then Seobility for small sites.
• You already pay for Semrush: use its Site Audit before buying another crawler.
• You're a startup that wants fixes shipped and verified: LogNorm, with your coding agent doing the work.

Screaming Frog is still the best tool for a technical SEO who wants full control of a crawl. Custom extraction with XPath, CSS Path and regex, JavaScript rendering, crawl comparison and GA, Search Console and PageSpeed integrations are all in one licence.

At $279 a year per user, it's also cheap for what it does. Recent versions can even run AI prompts against pages during a crawl with OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic or Ollama.