Free alternatives to Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler for Windows, macOS and Linux. The free version crawls up to 500 URLs, and that is a full crawl of most product sites: every status code, title, description, heading, canonical, directive, redirect and internal link.

The licence is what unlocks unlimited crawls, custom extraction, scheduling and API connections. Nothing about the free tier is crippled for a small site; it is simply capped.

• Scale: how many URLs you genuinely need crawled, after excluding parameters and filters.
• Installation: are you allowed to install software on this machine.
• Interpretation: do you want tables to read, or issues explained in an order.
• Ownership: is this your site, verified in your accounts, or someone else's.
• Frequency: once a quarter by hand, or something that runs on its own.

A crawl that blows through the cap on a site with two hundred real pages is telling you something before you upgrade anything.

1. 1

   Look at what is multiplying

   Sort the crawled URLs and look for patterns: sort orders, filters, session parameters, calendar pages, tag archives, paginated lists.

2. 2

   Exclude the patterns and crawl again

   A crawler lets you exclude URL patterns before the crawl. Excluding parameter combinations usually brings a small site back under the cap.

3. 3

   Decide what should be indexable

   The exclusions you just wrote are the beginning of a robots and canonical policy. Facet combinations with no search demand do not deserve to be crawled by anyone.

4. 4

   Then, if it still overflows, pay

   A site with thousands of pages that all deserve indexing has outgrown free tools. The licence costs less than the hours you will spend working around it.

Three kinds, and they answer different questions.

• Another crawler. Sitebulb is a desktop crawler for Windows and macOS with a cloud version, known for explained audit hints with priorities and visual crawl maps. Its trial is the way to see whether explanations suit you better than tables; check its own site for current terms.
• Your own accounts. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is free for verified sites and includes Site Audit and Site Explorer on your own site. Bing Webmaster Tools is free and carries a site scan beside its keyword and backlink reports. Both crawl the site for you, without installing anything.
• Search Console itself. It does not crawl on demand, but it reports what Google's crawl found: the pages it indexed, the ones it refused and why, the redirects, the soft 404s and the Core Web Vitals of real visits. For a site owner this is the most useful crawl data that exists, and it is free.

Half the reasons to run a crawl are a single question. Those do not need a crawler at all.

We publish free tools for most of those questions on this site, and there are good ones elsewhere. They are not a substitute for a crawl of a whole site, and they are faster than one when you already know which page is wrong.

• Sitebulb: a desktop tool like the one you are replacing, so installation is still required, and its full use is paid.
• Ahrefs Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools: only your own verified sites, and the checks are theirs rather than yours to configure.
• Search Console: no crawl on demand, no custom fields, and it only knows what Google chose to fetch.
• Single-purpose tools: one page or one file at a time, so they find the fault you suspected rather than the one you did not.
• All of them: no custom extraction. Questions like "which pages still load the old script" are answered by a crawler with extraction, or by grep in your repository.

• The site genuinely holds thousands of pages worth indexing.
• You crawl client sites, so the work is repeated and billable.
• You need scheduling, so a regression is caught without you remembering.
• You need custom extraction or API connections for a question nobody else checks.
• You are spending more hours working around the cap than the licence would cost.

Everything else is a small site pretending to be a large one. A founder with 120 pages, the free crawler tier, Search Console and a handful of single-purpose tools is not missing anything that would change their next month.