Top 5 Screaming Frog Alternatives

TL;DR:

• Letterdrop automatically fixes on-page and site-wide issues for content-heavy sites.
• Ahrefs offers detailed recommendations for improvement and has a user-friendly interface.
• ContentKing provides real-time site performance tracking.
• Lumar is scalable and customizable for large and complex websites.
• Botify offers a holistic view of site performance by analyzing how search engines interact with your site.

Site crawlers like Screaming Frog keep you updated on your website's technical and SEO issues and save you the trouble of finding them yourself.

But site audit tools should be doing more for you than just pointing out these issues, especially as websites scale and you try to keep up with all your other responsibilities. Otherwise, everyone would stick with Google Analytics.

You should be getting actionable steps to fixing those issues to improve UX and your visibility on search engines. And ideally, the tool you use should be able to automate some of these fixes for you.

I've compiled a list of Screaming Frog alternatives and focused on what makes them stand out. Hopefully, these picks will help you choose the tool that best helps you scale a healthy site and meet demand.

1. Letterdrop Can Auto-Fix All Content Page Issues and Push Them to Any Site

Letterdrop was founded by former PMs on the Google Search team, and its suite of SEO tooling is part of an end-to-end content management system.

For most websites, your blog and content pages probably form the bulk of your pages.

Letterdrop identifies and automatically fixes on-page and site-wide issues for your content. This is what sets it apart from all the other audit tools out there.

It can directly connect with Webflow, WordPress, Hubspot, Contentful, or any frontend and make the fixes for you instead of just identifying them.

It integrates with Google Search Console to monitor content pages and auto-publish changes. It identifies:

• which pages are almost ranking
• which pages have declining traffic
• which pages need better distribution
• opportunities for People Also Ask
• which pages are being cannibalized
• pages that are ranking low for disparate keywords and need to be split

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It can also:

• automate internal links (as shown in the above demo)
• automate People Also Ask snippets
• automatically fix broken links and 301 redirects

Who is Letterdrop Best For?

Letterdrop offers teams a broader SEO toolset that can help increase revenue from content.

Its focus on content pages makes it perfect for all teams with content-heavy sites. It can automate fixes and publish them directly to any custom site or CMS, including Webflow, WordPress, HubSpot, Contentful, Sanity, and more.

You're able to scale quickly without the drag of manual fixes.

Letterdrop User Review from Scribe

Pro

"Letterdrop is a MASSIVE help for content project management, and their SEO features are a cut above. We use Letterdrop to manage our entire content publication process from ideation to publish, and they integrate directly with Webflow so the content can go live immediately. Letterdrop has saved us so much time and helped us create more powerful blogs. They also have incredible customer success!"‎ — Lauren Funaro, Head of Content at Scribe, from G2 review

Con

"Since they're new, there are definitely still some bugs." — Lauren Funaro, Head of Content at Scribe, from G2 Review

2. Ahrefs Gives Detailed Recommendations for Improvement

Most marketers know Ahrefs as one of the best keyword research tools on the market, but it also has a Site Audit feature to crawl your site.

It pinpoints all the technical SEO issues on your site and, unlike Screaming Frog, presents this data along with detailed "how-to-fix" recommendations. This helps you tackle issues as they come up.

It identifies and recommends fixes for the following technical issues (and more):

• incoming and outgoing links
• performance issues
• missing HTML tags, including metadata and meta descriptions
• resource problems, and more.

The Site Audit also comes with a Data Explorer that lets you use more specific parameters when performing your audit. From displaying data on a specific property for a segment of pages to screening it out entirely across every crawled page, you can filter URLs:

• based on a previous or current crawl
• based on their HTTP status code
• based on specific content parameters, such as word count or title length
• based on whether they're indexable, and more

Who is Ahrefs' "Site Audit" Best For?

Ahrefs keeps all its reports in one place and has a very user-friendly interface, making it a great choice for both new and experienced technical SEOs.

Ahrefs User Review on G2

Pro

"Ahrefs meticulously analyzed my site, revealing hidden issues that held back its SEO performance. Broken links, sluggish pages – it highlighted them all, giving me a crystal-clear roadmap for enhancements. Armed with this knowledge, I could optimize my site's performance, ensuring a seamless user experience." — Ali S, Digital Marketing Executive, Electronic Manufacturing (Mid-Market)

Con

"I won't sugarcoat it – Ahrefs has a learning curve." — Ali S, Digital Marketing Executive, Electronic Manufacturing (Mid-Market)

3. ContentKing Offers Real-Time Performance and Change-Tracking

ContentKing stores data in the cloud, which means you don't have to wait for a crawl to complete before getting your site data.

It starts analyzing your website as you're registering for the tool, which is one of its most unique features.

It identifies:

• overall webpage health
• missing metadata
• missing heading structure
• webpage indexability
• schema.org
• content hierarchy open graph

You're also able to track any changes to your site in real-time, avoiding the usual back-and-forth when you're chasing the origin of site changes.

This includes changes like:

• pages are suddenly redirected
• pages becoming non-indexable 
• meta data is removed
• canonicals are changed
• if products have gone out of stock (for e-commerce businesses)

And just like Ahrefs, you can configure the parameters of your crawl and choose to skip certain issues.

Who is ContentKing Best For?

ContentKing's real-time change tracking is particularly useful when there are multiple people working on a site simultaneously. Alerts are also useful if the site is larger and more complex.

More specifically, we would recommend ContentKing to:

• Owners of large sites
• Small businesses
• Technical SEOs

ContentKing User Review on G2

Pro

"Content King helps us to ensure 24/7 tech SEO monitoring of eCommerce websites. We are mainly working with JS-heavy websites and Content King crawls JS-heavy websites well (not every tool is capable of it)." — Lina I (Mid-Market)

Con

"It takes effort to track dynamic issues. We had cases when an error first affected only a few pages, however, within 1-2 days appeared on the majority of eComm store pages, but we received only 1 alert covering the initial wave of errors. Meaning we might underestimate the issue." — Lina I (Mid-Market)

4. Lumar Can Handle Millions of Pages and Multiple Domains At Once

With Lumar (formerly DeepCrawl), you can schedule your audits and assign specific tasks the crawler should look out for (and how many pages you want it to crawl.)

You can crawl up to 450 URLs per second, making Lumar one of the fastest site crawlers on the market.

It's also deeply customizable. You're able to combine technical SEO data with SERP, traffic, conversions and behavior data and integrate with business intelligence platforms like Google Data Studio to create custom dashboards.

Lumar dashboards help you identify these issues (and more):

• Primary Problems:
  • Broken links, unlinked pages, and pages with 4xx status codes.
  • Detailed information on each problem when clicked.
• Changes:
  • Track changes over time by initiating a new crawl.
• Non-200 Pages:
  • Identifies pages lacking the status code 200 for proper indexing.
• Uncrawled URLs:
  • Lists URLs that couldn't be crawled with justifications.
• Non-Indexable Pages:
  • Highlights intentionally excluded pages from indexing with reasons.
• Orphaned Pages:
  • Identifies pages not linked from any other pages.
• Source Inclusion:
  • Checks inclusion in specified sources (Search Console, Analytics, sitemaps).

Who is Lumar (formerly DeepCrawl) Best For?

Its robust capabilities and scalability make it perfect for enterprises and agencies with large and complex websites.

Lumar User Review from G2

Pro

"Fantastic pro-services team is there for anything we need in the world of technical SEO, from ad-hoc asks about setup and hreflang, to more in depth projects around internal linking.
Lumar's cloud-based crawler is able to handle our massive site with millions of URL's which is super helpful for analysis." — Ben J (Enterprise Level)

Con

"Features can be a bit overwhelming for a one-man-band SEO team. [...] I'd also like to see more initiatives coming from the team - e.g we think implementing this would be a big win, or we've seen great success with this project for another client, what do you think to trying this on your site." — Ben J (Enterprise Level)

5. Botify Analyzes How Search Engines Interact With Your Site

Botify lets you combine crawl, performance, and Googlebot log file analysis to get a thorough overview of SEO.

You can use this data to make the best use out of your crawl budget and avoid going overboard.

Botify helps you:

• Migrate your site. Crawl staging sites for QA, monitor logs post-migration to find and fix issues quickly. You can also group pages by performance.
• Improve site architecture. You can review and visualize internal link data at scale and identify orphan pages.
• Audit and track structured data at scale. Automatically collect structured data types and properties for all pages.
• Get an in-depth analysis of JavaScript Elements. With this feature, you can compare pre- and post-rendered pages and get daily reports on search engine crawling of JavaScript to optimize slow-loading resources.

Who is Botify Best For?

Botify is used by renowned enterprise-level brands like The New York Times, and is great for a more holistic view of your site performance.

Botify User Review from G2

Pro

"The ability to parse out so many different page types and data sets in Botify is a huge plus for a large e-commerce site." — Steven C (Enterprise Level)

Con

"While the Custom Reports are a great tool, these tools are more limited than other portions of Botify and have limited amounts of data charts that I can add, which can cause me to have to create several custom reports for the same work track." — Steven C (Enterprise Level)

Factors to Consider Before Choosing a Site Audit Tool

Before I get into my recommendation, there are a couple of questions you need to ask before picking a site audit tool for your business:

1. Does it cover our SEO bases, taking into account our links, crawlability, technical fixes, and more?
2. Is there a steep learning curve or is it easy to onboard?
3. Is it scalable? Am I able to customize site crawls and more for our specific needs?
4. Does the tool have robust integrations with other tools to streamline our workflow?
5. Is the tool regularly updated and improved? Is it keeping up with the industry and allowing me to do more with less?
6. Is the tool within our budget? If not, are its offerings just that good that we can justify its pricing?

Answering these questions will help you rule out potentially unhelpful contenders and bring you a step closer to the right decision.

And if you still aren't happy with your options, you can always focus on using Screaming Frog for larger site crawls and integrating with another tool to cover its gaps.

Our Recommendation

As with most tools in your tech stack, your site audit tool should be helping you do more with less.

Screaming Frog is a dependable tool for an overview of site performance, but any of the other tools mentioned in this list will better equip you with the steps you need to take to make a difference in UX and SEO performance.

It's also about time that these tools incorporated automation and AI.

It's becoming more and more difficult to know what to look for and fix all the right problems as websites continue to scale. Automation can help cut down that time.

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are free web crawlers you can get away with using instead of any of the above tools, which is why they need to offer you something unique and helpful to justify the price.

Other FAQs About ScreamingFrog

Are there free Screaming Frog Alternatives?

Yes, there are several free Screaming Frog alternatives:

• Spotibo
• Xenu
• Scrutiny
• Perender

Free alternatives have limits on the number of URLs you can crawl, though, and don't accommodate for automatic fixes.

Choose A Site Audit Tool That Helps You Do More With Less

These alternatives to ScreamingFrog all have their standout features, but none of them are capable of automating these fixes. You need tools that help you take tasks off your plate.

We're thinking about how to take the mundane off your hands at Letterdrop while still optimizing for the future of SEO.

If you're interested in seeing how our tooling can help you produce 32% more SEO content that actually ranks, reach out to us.