CrawlDude vs Screaming Frog
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the desktop crawler most SEO teams use, and it does far more than CrawlDude. CrawlDude covers the core technical audit for free, with no URL limit. Here's what each one has.
The short version
Choose Screaming Frog if
- you crawl JavaScript-heavy sites built with React, Vue or Angular
- you need custom extraction, Google Analytics or Search Console data, or link metrics in your crawls
- you run scheduled crawls, compare crawls, or audit accessibility and spelling
- you work on Windows or Linux today
Choose CrawlDude if
- you want a full technical crawl of a site over 500 URLs without paying for a licence
- you want to know how ready a site is for AI search: llms.txt, AI crawler access and page signals in one report
- you like projects with a health score you can follow from crawl to crawl
- you're on a Mac and want something simple to start with
Feature by feature
| Feature | CrawlDude | Screaming Frog |
|---|---|---|
| Price and platforms | ||
| Price | Free | Free up to 500 URLs. €245 per user per year for unlimited crawling, with discounts from 5 licences |
| URL limit | None. Your computer's memory is the limit | 500 URLs free. Unlimited with a licence, limited by memory and storage |
| Operating systems | macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel). Windows and Linux coming | Windows, macOS and Linux |
| Source code | MIT licensed; source code to be published | Closed source |
| Support | Free technical support with a licence | |
| Core technical audit | ||
| Broken links, server errors, redirects, chains and loops | Yes | Yes |
| Titles, meta descriptions and headings | Yes | Yes |
| Canonicals, noindex, meta robots and X-Robots-Tag | Yes | Yes, plus pagination |
| hreflang | Read and shown per page; no checks yet | Audited |
| robots.txt | Respected, with blocked URLs and the matching rule shown | Respected, plus downloading, editing and testing a custom robots.txt |
| Crawl as Googlebot or another user agent | Yes, with presets; follows that bot's robots.txt rules | Yes, including AI crawlers |
| XML sitemap audit and orphan pages | Yes | Yes, plus generating XML and image sitemaps |
| Duplicate content | Exact duplicates and thin pages | Exact, near-duplicate and semantic duplicates, plus low-content pages |
| Images | Missing alt text; status and size when image checking is on | Yes |
| Mixed content and security | Mixed content | Mixed content, insecure forms and missing security headers |
| Internal linking | Inlinks, outlinks, crawl depth, anchor text and dead-end pages | Inlinks, outlinks, crawl depth, anchor text and an internal Link Score |
| Beyond the basics | ||
| JavaScript rendering | Not yet | Yes, with a built-in Chromium browser |
| Structured data | JSON-LD types and invalid JSON-LD blocks | Validation against Schema.org and Google's rich result features |
| Custom extraction (XPath, CSS, regex) and source search | No | Yes |
| Google Analytics, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights | No | Yes |
| Link metrics from Ahrefs, Majestic and Moz | No | Yes |
| Accessibility (WCAG) | No | Yes |
| Spelling, grammar and readability | Word count only | Yes, in 25+ languages |
| Crawl comparison | Not yet. Health score history per project | Yes, including staging vs production |
| Scheduled crawls and command line | No | Yes |
| Site architecture visualisations | No | Yes |
| Login-protected sites | No | Yes, forms-based authentication |
| AI search | ||
| AI search readiness report | Score from 10 checks, with llms.txt and llms-full.txt checks, link checking and llmstxt.org format validation | Not listed on the product page |
| AI crawlers in robots.txt | robots.txt evaluated for 20 AI crawlers, split into search, assistant and training bots | Crawl as AI crawler user agents |
| AI page signals | Pages that need JavaScript, snippet limits, noai, dates, authors and schema | Not listed on the product page |
| AI prompts during crawls | No | Yes, with OpenAI, Gemini, Anthropic or Ollama |
| Workflow | ||
| Projects and crawl history | Every crawl saved to its project automatically, with a 0–100 health score | Save and reopen crawls; hybrid storage for very large sites |
| Export | CSV of any view, a full issues report, and the AI readiness report | Spreadsheet exports, Google Sheets and Looker Studio reports |
Where CrawlDude falls short
Screaming Frog has been around since 2010 and covers far more ground. If your work depends on JavaScript rendering, custom extraction, integrations, crawl comparison or scheduled crawls, CrawlDude can't replace it today. JavaScript rendering and crawl comparison are on CrawlDude's roadmap.
The two also work well side by side: CrawlDude for quick, unlimited audits and the AI search report, and Screaming Frog when you need its deeper tooling.
Try it
CrawlDude is free, with no licence key and no URL limit. Download it for Mac or read the documentation.
Compared on 15 October 2026 against Screaming Frog SEO Spider 24.3, using the SEO Spider product page and pricing page. "Not listed on the product page" means we couldn't find the feature there, not that it doesn't exist. Prices and features change; check their site for the latest. Screaming Frog is a trademark of Screaming Frog Ltd. CrawlDude is not affiliated with or endorsed by Screaming Frog. Spotted a mistake? Email hello@crawldude.com.