See what Screaming Frog SEO Spider costs, its crawl features, and whether the desktop SEO crawler fits your technical audit workflow in 2026.
Visit Screaming Frog Website →
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu desktop application that crawls websites like a search engine bot to uncover technical SEO problems. Built by the UK agency Screaming Frog, founded in 2010, it has become one of the most widely used tools in the SEO industry for site audits and migrations.
The tool is locally installed rather than cloud-based, meaning crawl data is stored on the user's own machine unless exported, which many agencies value for handling client data privately.
The SEO Spider surfaces broken links, redirect chains, duplicate titles and meta descriptions, missing alt text, malformed structured data, and orphaned pages. It supports JavaScript rendering for crawling modern web apps, custom extraction using XPath, CSS Path, or regular expressions, and integrates directly with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and the PageSpeed Insights API to pull performance and traffic data into the same crawl report.
Additional capabilities include crawl and directory-tree visualizations, XML sitemap generation, scheduled crawling, and a command-line interface for automation, making it suitable for both one-off audits and recurring monitoring.
The free version crawls up to 500 URLs and includes most core features. The paid license costs 199 GBP per year per user and removes the crawl limit, subject to available memory and disk space, while unlocking JavaScript rendering, API integrations, and scheduling. Volume discounts apply starting at 5 licenses and scale up to 20 or more licenses purchased together.
Yes, a free version is available that crawls up to 500 URLs with most core features. Crawling beyond that limit requires a paid license.
A single license costs 199 GBP per year (about 279 USD), billed annually per user, with volume discounts for 5 or more licenses.
Yes, it runs natively on Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu.
Yes, the paid version supports JavaScript rendering to crawl single-page applications and dynamically loaded content.
Yes, both integrations are available in the paid version, letting users combine crawl data with traffic and search performance metrics.
No, it is a locally installed desktop application; crawl data stays on the user's machine unless manually exported.
Log file analysis is handled by a separate companion product, the Screaming Frog Log File Analyser, sold independently.
No, licenses are sold per user; each additional user requires its own license, though volume discounts apply.