# Crawlwise vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider

> Crawlwise vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider: an honest comparison. Where Screaming Frog SEO Spider is better, where Crawlwise differs, and what cannot be compared.

Canonical: https://crawlwise.site/vs/screaming-frog

Comparison · honest

Crawlwise vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider: an honest SEO audit tool comparison. The desktop crawler most technical SEOs already have open.

**Price:** Crawlwise plans start at $14.99 a month, and the free tools need no account. [Compare plans](https://crawlwise.site/plans).

## What it is

A Java desktop application that crawls a whole site from your own machine, with a paid licence that removes the 500-URL cap.

## Where Screaming Frog SEO Spider is better

This section is the reason to read the page. A comparison that only lists our wins is marketing, and you would know it was.

- It crawls an entire site, with no URL cap once licensed. Our free tier audits a single page; paid plans crawl a site but stop at 250, 2,500 or 10,000 pages per crawl from Starter to Agency, so a 50,000-page e-commerce catalogue is not something this product can do today.
- It renders JavaScript with an embedded Chromium. Our checks read the HTML the server returns, so a client-rendered page looks thin to us and fine to it.
- It has a log file analyser, custom extraction with XPath and CSS selectors, a visual sitemap, scheduled crawls and a config file per client. We have none of that.
- It is a one-off licence with no per-use cost, so crawling a large site repeatedly costs nothing extra.

## Where we differ

- It runs on your machine and stores nothing for you. Two audits six weeks apart are two CSVs unless you keep them yourself; our monitoring keeps the history and tells you what changed.
- It reports what it found. We answer whether GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended can actually reach the page — by fetching it as each of them — which no crawler does.
- Its issue list is mechanical. Ours is grouped into things to fix, things worth considering with a real opt-out, and things that were not measured.
- You have to be at your desk. This runs from a URL.

## What cannot be compared

- A free desktop tool with no account against a hosted service with a credit balance.

## Judge it yourself without paying either of us

Run the free [seo + generative search checklist](https://crawlwise.site/tools/seo-checklist) on your own site — no account, no credit, no email. Then [audit one page](https://crawlwise.site/), which the trial credit covers, and read the [limits page](https://crawlwise.site/limits) to see what it will not tell you before you spend anything.