Screaming Frog alternative: a cloud crawler you pay for by the page.
Crawl up to 10,000 URLs and get Site Health, 9 theme scores and 173 checks for 1¢ per 10 URLs crawled. No licence, nothing to install, and it runs on a schedule while your computer is off.
$5 credit for personal accounts · No card · Prices checked October 2026 · We make AuditAE
Which crawler fits which job.
Pick AuditAE for a cloud crawl you pay for per URL, run or schedule yourself or from an AI agent, on sites up to 10,000 URLs.
Keep Screaming Frog for JavaScript rendering, bigger sites, custom extraction, log files, and crawls behind a login or on staging. It is the deeper tool, and it says so in its price: $279/year per user.
Want it free? Screaming Frog’s free version crawls 500 URLs, Ahrefs Free audits sites you verify, LibreCrawl is open source, and our free AI search audit checks 5 pages for AI-readiness. The free options.
$279/year per user, or free to 500 URLs.
The SEO Spider licence is $279/yearper user (£199 or €245), cheaper per licence from five. A paid crawl has no URL cap beyond your computer’s memory and storage. It runs on Windows, macOS and Ubuntu (64-bit), with 4 GB of RAM at minimum and 8 GB recommended for crawls under 200,000 URLs.
The free version crawls up to 500 URLs and includes sitemap generation and site visualisations. Everything below needs a licence.
| Licences | Per user per year |
|---|---|
| 1–4 | $279 |
| 5–9 | $265 |
| 10–19 | $249 |
| 20+ | $235 |
| Free version | $0, up to 500 URLs |
Paid licence only
- Scheduling
- Crawl configuration
- Saving and opening crawls
- JavaScript rendering
- Crawl comparison
- Near duplicates
- Custom robots.txt
- Structured data validation
- Spelling and grammar
- Custom extraction
- Custom source code search
- Custom JavaScript
- Crawling with OpenAI and Gemini
- Google Analytics, Search Console and PageSpeed connections
- Link metrics
- Accessibility
- Mobile usability
- AMP
- Forms authentication
- Segmentation
- Looker Studio export
- Support
Source: screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/pricing and the SEO Spider user guide, checked October 13, 2026 (version 24.3). Verify current pricing before you buy.
What each does, feature by feature.
Screaming Frog paid against the AuditAE Site Audit. The third column lists what isn’t on Screaming Frog’s published feature list, which is as far as it claims; the first is longer, and that’s the honest shape of it.
Screaming Frog only
- JavaScript rendering
- Crawls over 10,000 URLs
- Custom extraction, custom JavaScript and source code search
- Crawling behind a login or basic auth, private staging or localhost
- Ignoring robots.txt, or a custom user agent
- Log file analysis (a separate Log File Analyser)
- Site visualisations and sitemap generation
- Spelling, grammar and accessibility checks
- Google Analytics, Search Console and link metrics joined to each URL
- Looker Studio export and segments
Both
- URL list crawls
- Include and exclude rules
- Redirects and redirect chains
- Canonicals, hreflang, robots.txt and sitemaps
- Structured data checks
- Near-duplicate content
- Crawl comparison
- Scheduled crawls (Screaming Frog's run on your machine)
- Core Web Vitals via PageSpeed (AuditAE samples 10 pages)
- CSV export (AuditAE's is one row per page)
Not on Screaming Frog’s feature list
- Runs in the cloud, nothing to install
- Pay per URL crawled; team seats are free
- Scheduled crawls with no computer left on
- Hosted MCP, REST API and AEBOT chat that start and schedule crawls
- Site Health and 9 theme scores
- An AI Search theme: 25 checks, incl. llms.txt, AI bot access and Content-Signal
- Large images resized and compressed with optimize_image
- Fixes applied through the free WordPress plugin
- AI citation tracking in the same account
Per URL crawled, against a yearly licence.
AuditAE bills 1¢ per 10 URLs crawled, including redirects, error pages and URLs that fail to load. The link, image and script checks, the site checks and Core Web Vitals are included. You set the page limit, and the most a crawl can cost shows before it starts.
One licence ($279/year) buys 279,000 URLs a year at that rate. Monthly crawls of any size AuditAE allows stay under it (10,000 URLs monthly is $120 a year). Weekly crawls cross it at about 5,400 URLs, so a weekly 10,000-URL crawl is cheaper on Screaming Frog.
| One crawl | AuditAE | Screaming Frog |
|---|---|---|
| 500 URLs | $0.50 | $0 (free version) |
| 1,000 URLs | $1 | $279/year licence |
| 2,000 URLs | $2 | $279/year licence |
| 5,000 URLs | $5 | $279/year licence |
| 10,000 URLs | $10 | $279/year licence |
| Repeated crawl | AuditAE per year | Screaming Frog |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly, 1,000 URLs | $12 | $279/year |
| Monthly, 2,000 URLs | $24 | $279/year |
| Monthly, 10,000 URLs | $120 | $279/year |
| Weekly, 2,000 URLs | $104 | $279/year |
| Weekly, 5,000 URLs | $260 | $279/year |
| Weekly, 10,000 URLs | $520 | $279/year · cheaper |
Teams. 3 Screaming Frog users cost $837 a year. AuditAE seats are free (5 per workspace by default, more on request) and everyone spends from one balance. Team workspaces start at $0; personal accounts start with $5.
Agencies. 30 client sites of 500 URLs, each crawled monthly on a schedule, come to about $180a year. Sites that size fit Screaming Frog’s free version, so by hand they cost $0 there; what the money buys is the schedule, no machine to run, and every crawl saved and compared. Reading, comparing and scheduling crawls is free; see credits and prices.
When to keep Screaming Frog.
AuditAE is not a full Screaming Frog replacement for big or JavaScript-heavy sites. If any line on the right describes you, keep the licence.
Switch to AuditAE if
- You're on a Chromebook, a tablet, or a work machine you can't install software on.
- You audit now and then: about $1 per 1,000 URLs, against $279/year per user.
- You look after many small sites and want them crawled on a schedule: 30 sites of 500 URLs crawled monthly is about $180 a year, with each run saved and compared. Screaming Frog free crawls each one by hand for $0, but can't schedule, save or compare.
- You want weekly or monthly crawls with a summary email and no machine left running.
- You already work in Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor and want the agent to run the crawl.
- You need AI search checks: 25 checks feed the AI Search score, with citation tracking in the same account.
Stay on Screaming Frog if
- Your site renders its content with JavaScript.
- Your site has more than 10,000 URLs.
- You need custom extraction, custom JavaScript or source code search.
- You crawl private staging, localhost, login- or password-protected or robots.txt-blocked pages, or need a custom user agent.
- You rely on log files, visualisations, spelling or accessibility checks, or GA and Search Console data per URL.
- You crawl more than about 5,400 URLs every week, where the licence costs less.
- Your crawls are one-offs of 500 URLs or fewer, which the free version does for $0.
173 checks, 9 theme scores.
Every check is an error, a warning or a notice, with the affected URLs, why it matters and how to fix it. Errors and warnings set Site Health (0–100); the themes are Crawlability, HTTPS, International SEO, Core Web Vitals, Site Performance, Internal Linking, Markup, AI Search, On-page and content.
- Up to 5,000 links, images and scripts checked per crawl, so broken links and oversized images are covered.
- Site checks: the TLS certificate and HTTP/2, HTTP to HTTPS, www and non-www, a real 404, llms.txt, and whether a firewall blocks ChatGPT’s fetcher.
- Core Web Vitals from PageSpeed on up to 10 pages.
- Settings: whole site, sitemaps or a list of URLs (up to 5,000 from the dashboard, 10,000 over the API), up to 20 include and 50 exclude rules, ignored parameters, up to 25subdomains, another bot’s robots.txt rules, desktop or mobile, and speed.
- Each crawl is compared with the one before, free, and crawl history lists the last 12 with their Site Health. Export to CSV, one row per page.
We crawled our own site
auditae.app · October 13, 2026- URLs crawled
- 1190 failed, 107 indexable
- Billed
- 12¢1¢ per 10 URLs
- Time
- 82.7 spages in about 21 s (5.7 URLs/s)
- Site Health
- 970 errors · 126 warnings · 569 notices
| Theme | Score |
|---|---|
| Crawlability | 99 |
| HTTPS | 98 |
| International SEO | 100 |
| Core Web Vitals | 45 |
| Site Performance | 98 |
| Internal Linking | 94 |
| Markup | 100 |
| AI Search | 94 |
| On-page and content | 94 |
What it flagged
- Low text-to-HTML ratio on 116 of 119 pages (about 6% text).
- 2 titles over 70 characters: /docs/google (72) and /docs/mcp (81).
- Largest Contentful Paint of 4.7 s on /chatgpt-brand-monitoring, and 9 of 10 sampled pages between 2.9 and 3.9 s.
- 64 image URLs over 200 KB (mostly resized copies of a few blog images) and 58 pages with images missing width and height.
- 6 meta descriptions outside 70–160 characters; the 3 sampled were all over 160, the homepage's (162) included.
- No X-Content-Type-Options or frame protection header.
It also checked 392 links, images and scripts, skipped 41 linked URLs our robots.txt blocks (the dashboard), and measured Core Web Vitals on 10 pages in another 34.9 s.
Times are from a test run of the same crawler code, not a production crawl; they vary with the site and server load.
Weekly or monthly, with nothing left running.
Schedule a crawl weekly on a day you pick, or monthly on a day from 1 to 28, with a summary email after each run: Site Health and its change, new and fixed issues, and what the run cost. It runs on our servers. The default page limit is 20% above your last crawl, so a growing site isn’t cut short, and you pay for the URLs actually crawled. A schedule pauses if your balance reaches $0.
There is no daily option: a 10,000-URL site crawled every day would cost about $300 a month.
Screaming Frog’s paid licence schedules crawls too, with email notifications that since version 24 list every issue found, and Auto Compare Crawls for scheduled runs. Each scheduled crawl starts on the computer (or cloud VM you set up) running Screaming Frog, so that machine has to be on.
Ask Claude to crawl the site, nothing to install.
AuditAE’s MCP server is hosted: Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor connect to one URL, signed in to an AuditAE account with credit. The agent can start a crawl, read its checks, compare it with the last one, schedule it and shrink the large images it found. Scripts use the same crawl over the REST API.
crawl_site · get_latest_crawl · get_crawl_issue · compare_crawls · schedule_crawl · optimize_image · POST /api/v1/crawl
Screaming Frog has an official MCP server too, since version 24.0 (May 2026): paid licences only, running locally next to the app, with database storage mode and Node.js, and setup guides for Claude Desktop and LM Studio. Sitebulb’s MCP server is hosted and reads finished audits; Ahrefs and Semrush have MCP servers on their paid plans. Screaming Frog’s MCP guide.
> Crawl yoursite.com and tell me what to fix first.
crawl_site · 412 URLs · billed 42¢ · Site Health 88 · 2 errors, 9 warnings
get_crawl_issue broken_internal_link · 14 links on 6 pages, with the pages linking to them
compare_crawls · +3 since last month · 5 fixed · 2 new
Fix the 14 broken internal links first: here are the 6 pages and the links to change.
Screaming Frog alternatives at a glance.
Prices as listed on each vendor’s site on October 13, 2026, billed monthly unless stated. We make AuditAE, so it’s listed first; the trade-offs are stated for every tool, ours included. A dash means the vendor doesn’t publish it; n/a means it doesn’t apply.
| Tool | Price | Free tier | Pages per crawl | Runs on | JavaScript rendering | Scheduled crawls | MCP / API |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AuditAE | 1¢ per 10 URLs crawled | $5 credit (personal accounts) | 10,000 | Cloud | No | Weekly or monthly, with email | Hosted MCP + REST API |
| Screaming Frog free | $0 | 500 URLs | 500 | Windows, macOS, Ubuntu | No | No | No |
| Screaming Frog paid | $279/year per user | n/a | Unlimited (memory and storage) | Windows, macOS, Ubuntu or your own cloud VM | Yes | Yes, on the machine running it, with email | Local MCP + CLI |
| Sitebulb Desktop | Lite $18/month, Pro $42/month | 14-day trial | Lite 10,000, Pro 500,000 | Windows, macOS | Yes, all plans | Pro only | Hosted MCP (reads audits) |
| Sitebulb Cloud | From $125/month billed yearly ($1,500/year), 2+ users | — | No published cap | Cloud | Yes | Yes | Hosted MCP (reads audits) |
| Semrush Site Audit | From $139/month (suite) | 100 pages a month | 20,000 per site; 100,000 on Advanced | Cloud | Pro+ ($299/month) and Advanced | Weekly, daily or once | MCP on all plans; API on Advanced |
| Ahrefs Site Audit | Lite $129/month (suite) | Ahrefs Free: 5,000 credits per project a month | 25,000 per project on Lite | Cloud | — | — | MCP + API on Lite and up |
| LibreCrawl | Free (MIT) | Free | Your hardware | Self-hosted | Yes (Playwright) | Not documented | No MCP |
1. AuditAE Site Audit
1¢ per 10 URLs crawledA cloud crawl of up to 10,000 URLs with 173 checks, Site Health and 9 theme scores, scheduled weekly or monthly with a summary email. You, AEBOT or any MCP client can start, read, compare and schedule crawls. Personal accounts start with $5 of credit, no card.
- Best for
- Sites up to 10,000 URLs, occasional audits, many small client sites, and teams working through an AI agent.
- Watch out for
- No JavaScript rendering, no crawling behind a login, no custom extraction or log files.
2. Sitebulb
Desktop from $18/month; Cloud from $125/month billed yearly ($1,500/year), 2+ usersDesktop Lite audits up to 10,000 URLs and Pro ($42/month) up to 500,000, both with JavaScript crawling. Pro adds scheduled audits. Sitebulb Cloud runs crawls on Sitebulb's servers with recurring crawls. Every plan, the 14-day trial included, has a hosted MCP server that reads finished audits.
- Best for
- The closest like-for-like switch from Screaming Frog, with clearer reports and JavaScript crawling on every plan.
- Watch out for
- Desktop runs on your machine (Windows or macOS); scheduling is Pro only; the MCP server reads audits rather than starting them.
3. Semrush Site Audit
Inside Semrush, from $139/monthThe site audit in every Semrush plan: up to 20,000 pages per site on SEO, Starter and Pro+, 100,000 on Advanced, with weekly, daily or one-off runs. JavaScript rendering needs Pro+ ($299/month) or Advanced. MCP access is on all four plans; the API is Advanced only.
- Best for
- Teams already paying for Semrush who want audits next to keyword and backlink data.
- Watch out for
- You pay for the whole suite; JavaScript rendering starts at $299/month.
4. Ahrefs Site Audit
Free for verified sites; Lite $129/monthAhrefs Free (formerly Ahrefs Webmaster Tools) audits sites you verify with 5,000 crawl credits per project a month, spent only on HTML pages that answer 200. Paid plans raise the pages per project (25,000 on Lite) and add API and MCP access.
- Best for
- Auditing your own sites for free, or teams already on Ahrefs for backlinks.
- Watch out for
- Which paid plans include JavaScript rendering and scheduled audits isn't published.
5. LibreCrawl
Free, open source (MIT)A self-hosted crawler with a web interface, installed with Docker or pip. It renders JavaScript with Playwright and runs on your own hardware.
- Best for
- Technical users who want a free crawler with no URL cap and are happy to host it.
- Watch out for
- You run and update it yourself; scheduled crawls aren't documented.
6. SE Ranking
$129/month (Core)A cloud SEO suite whose website audit covers 250,000 pages a month on Core and 2 million on Growth, with rank tracking, AI prompt tracking, MCP and API credits.
- Best for
- Teams that want audits, rank tracking and AI tracking in one cheaper suite.
- Watch out for
- A monthly subscription even if the crawler is all you need; 14-day trial, no free plan.
Sources: screamingfrog.co.uk, sitebulb.com/pricing and /cloud, semrush.com/pricing and the Semrush knowledge base, ahrefs.com/pricing and /webmaster-tools, the LibreCrawl GitHub repository, seranking.com/subscription.html, seobility.net/en/pricing; checked October 13, 2026. Vendors change plans often, so verify current pricing before you buy.
Is there a free Screaming Frog alternative?
- Screaming Frog free: the same app, up to 500 URLs, without scheduling, JavaScript rendering or saved crawls.
- LibreCrawl: open source (MIT), self-hosted with Docker or pip, renders JavaScript with Playwright. No URL cap beyond your hardware.
- Ahrefs Free: Site Audit for sites you verify, 5,000 crawl credits per project a month.
- Semrush free account: 100 pages a month. Seobility Basic: 1 project, 100 pages per crawl.
- AuditAE’s free AI search audit: no login; it checks the page you enter plus up to 4 more for AI-readiness (crawler access, text without JavaScript, authorship), not a full SEO crawl. Run the free audit.
The AuditAE Site Audit itself is paid per URL, 1¢ per 10 URLs. Personal accounts start with $5 of credit and no card; team workspaces start at $0.
Sources: screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/pricing, the LibreCrawl GitHub repository, ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools, semrush.com/pricing, seobility.net/en/pricing; checked October 13, 2026.
Questions worth asking.
Direct answers on Screaming Frog’s price, limits and the alternatives.
Screaming Frog's own free version crawls up to 500 URLs. Beyond it: LibreCrawl is open source (MIT) and self-hosted, Ahrefs Free audits sites you verify with 5,000 crawl credits per project a month, Semrush's free account audits 100 pages a month, and Seobility's free Basic plan crawls 100 pages for one project. AuditAE's free AI search audit checks the page you enter plus up to 4 more, for AI-readiness only; it isn't a full crawl. The AuditAE Site Audit itself is paid per URL; personal accounts start with $5 of credit.
$279 per user per year (£199 or €245), less per licence from 5 licences ($265 each for 5–9, $249 for 10–19, $235 for 20 or more). The free version costs nothing and crawls up to 500 URLs. Prices as listed on screamingfrog.co.uk in October 2026.
500 URLs per crawl. Scheduling, JavaScript rendering, saving and opening crawls, crawl comparison, custom extraction and the Google Analytics and Search Console connections need a paid licence.
Not a hosted one. Screaming Frog is a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Ubuntu; its documented cloud route is installing it on your own Google Cloud virtual machine. AuditAE runs entirely in the cloud: crawls, schedules and reports run on our servers with nothing to install.
Yes, since version 24.0 (May 2026), on paid licences only. It runs locally: the AI client launches it, or connects to the open app over local HTTP, and it needs database storage mode and Node.js. Screaming Frog documents setup for Claude Desktop and LM Studio. AuditAE's MCP server is hosted: Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor connect to a URL, signed in to an AuditAE account with credit, and can start, read, compare and schedule crawls.
No. It reads each page's HTML as the server sends it, as most AI crawlers do, and flags pages whose content needs JavaScript. For JavaScript-rendered sites, use Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or LibreCrawl, which render pages in a browser.
Up to 10,000 URLs per crawl, which costs at most $10. You set the limit before it starts, and you pay for the URLs actually crawled.
No. AuditAE is a web app, a hosted MCP server and a REST API, so it works from a Chromebook, a tablet or a work machine you can't install software on.
Yes, from the dashboard, one row per page (URL, status, depth, indexability, title, description, canonical and more). Over MCP and the REST API, crawls and checks come back as JSON.
Yes. Add the domain as a site (free), then crawl it; AuditAE-Bot obeys its robots.txt. Add your own site first, because the first site in a new account normally starts an AI citation audit.
Semrush and SE Ranking are cloud SEO suites with a site audit inside a monthly plan (Semrush from $139/month, SE Ranking from $129/month). Sitebulb is the closest like-for-like crawler: a desktop app from $18/month with JavaScript crawling on every plan, plus a cloud version. Screaming Frog is a yearly desktop licence with the deepest configuration.
Crawl your site in the cloud.
Add your site, pick how many pages, and see the most it can cost before it starts. About $1 per 1,000 URLs, with $5 of credit for personal accounts.
No card required · No licence · Nothing to install
Comparing suites too? See Semrush pricing, Ahrefs pricing, the best SEO tools for agencies, or every comparison.