Screaming Frog's SEO Spider is free to crawl 500 URLs at a time. That number is the one every comparison quotes, and it is the smaller half of the limit: the same pricing table that sets the cap marks 24 other feature rows as unavailable in the free version. This is for the in-house SEO or growth lead who hit the wall part way through a crawl and would rather not buy a licence to find out whether it was worth it. It covers what each free alternative reads, what each gives up, and what a crawl that stops early does to the report you read afterwards.
The short version
- The URL cap is not the restriction that bites first.
Crawl Configurationis one of the 24 rows crossed out for the free version, so a free user cannot narrow a crawl to make it fit inside the 500.- The free options compared here split three ways: desktop downloads that need no account, hosted crawlers that need one, and single-page checkers that are not crawlers at all.
- Ahrefs Free gives 5,000 crawl credits a month, but only per verified project. It cannot read a site you cannot prove you own.
- GrowthHasten reads up to 5,000 pages per crawl, free with an account, and joins the crawl to your own Search Console and Analytics figures. It does no custom extraction, no log file analysis, allows one crawl per website per 24 hours, and it is new.
- Before you read a single finding in any crawl report, check whether the crawl finished.
What does Screaming Frog's free version actually include?
Seven feature rows and a 500 URL crawl limit. Every other row in that table is paid.
Read off Screaming Frog's own pricing page on 1 October 2026, the free version is ticked for exactly seven things: broken links, errors and redirects; page titles and meta data; meta robots and directives; hreflang attributes; exact duplicate pages; XML sitemap generation; and site visualisations. That is a real technical audit, and on a small site it is often all you need.
The same table crosses out 24 rows for that tier. They group into four kinds of loss:
- Scale and workflow:
Scheduling,Save & Open Crawls,Crawl Comparison,Segmentationand the Looker Studio crawl report. A free crawl runs once and cannot be reopened or compared against the last one. - Depth:
JavaScript Rendering,Structured Data & Validation,Near Duplicate Content,Mobile Usability,AMP Crawling & Validationand accessibility auditing. Without rendering, a free crawl reads the HTML the server sent rather than the page a browser builds, and on plenty of sites those are different documents. Our guide to how search engines render JavaScript covers why that gap matters. - Extraction:
Custom Extraction,Custom Source Code SearchandCustom JavaScript. These are the features people buy the licence for, and the reason a paid Screaming Frog is hard to replace. - Joins: Search Console, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights and link metrics integrations. A free crawl tells you what your pages say about themselves and nothing about how they perform.
A licence was priced at $279 per licence per year for one to four licences on 1 October 2026, on a page served in US dollars, with volume discounts above five licences. Licences last a year.
One thing the free version does better than every hosted alternative here: it needs no account, no email and no verification, and it runs on your own machine. You can download it and crawl a competitor or a staging environment in the next five minutes. That is a real advantage and nothing below takes it away.
Why does 500 URLs run out faster than people expect?
Because the free version will not let you shrink what gets crawled. Crawl Configuration is crossed out for that tier, so the usual escape route, excluding a path or turning off a resource type before you start, is closed. The cap and the inability to configure around it are the same problem, and the second half is the one that decides whether the first can be worked around.
When I run a free crawl on a site around that size, the 500 almost never lands on the 500 pages that matter. A 200-page marketing site with a tag archive, a paginated blog index and a parameterised filter generates far more crawlable URLs than its sitemap lists, and the crawler reaches them in the order it finds them. The budget drains into pagination before it reaches the product pages, and on a paid licence you would exclude the pattern and start again.
Keep this separate from Googlebot's crawl budget, which is Google's decision about how much of your site to fetch. The limit in this article is a cap your own tool imposes on itself, and the two have nothing to do with each other beyond the shared word.
What does a crawl that stopped at its budget do to the report?
It does not report a smaller version of the truth. It reports a different one.
Orphan detection is the clearest case. A page counts as orphaned when nothing in the crawl links to it. If the crawl stopped at 500 URLs, the page linking to it may be page 1,400, never fetched. The report is not wrong about the data it holds. It is answering a question about your site from a sample it never told you was a sample.
Site-wide counts behave the same way. Twelve pages missing a canonical means twelve out of however many got read, not twelve out of your site, and the second is the one a reader assumes.
That is a correctness problem rather than a limits problem, and it drove a build decision in GrowthHasten's Site Audit. Orphan checks refuse to run on a crawl that stopped at its budget, because a page looks orphaned when the page linking to it is one nobody read. Performance findings say measured pages rather than pages, because performance is sampled. A dimension the crawl could not measure is reported as unmeasured, never as zero. A blank is honest; a zero is a claim.
You can apply the same test to any tool, including ours. Before you trust a crawl report, ask two questions: did the crawl finish, and did the tool tell you either way?
What does each free crawler actually give up?
Across the nine results we read for this query on 1 October 2026, every page states a URL cap and stops there, and none of them says what the free tier loses besides pages. That second column is the one that decides whether a free tool can do your job.
| Tool | Free limit | What it gives up |
|---|---|---|
| Screaming Frog (free) | 500 URLs per crawl | 24 further rows, including crawl configuration, JavaScript rendering, saving and reopening crawls, structured data validation, custom extraction and the Search Console and Analytics joins |
| Ahrefs Free | 5,000 crawl credits per verified project per month | Site ownership is mandatory. Backlinks and keywords are visible 1,000 at a time, and higher allowances need a paid Ahrefs plan |
| Seobility (Basic) | 100 pages per crawl | One website project, 10 tracked keywords, 5 daily tool credits, and what Seobility itself calls a Limited Website Audit |
| SEOmator free audit | One page per run | It is a page checker, not a crawler. Its own page says it cannot find orphan pages or site-wide duplicate content |
| GrowthHasten | 5,000 pages per crawl, free with an account | One crawl per website per 24 hours, no custom extraction, no log file analysis, and no rank tracking, search volume, keyword difficulty or CPC |
| Sitebulb | No free plan. A 14 day trial, no credit card | Everything, once the trial ends. Lite audits 10,000 URLs and Pro audits 500,000, and JavaScript crawling is on every plan |
Each figure above comes from the vendor's own page, read 1 October 2026. Ahrefs Free, formerly Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, states that credits are spent only on HTML pages returning 200, so redirects and non-HTML files are not counted. Seobility's pricing page calls the Basic account's audit limited in its own words, which tells you more than the page count does. Sitebulb publishes no free plan, so it sits here as a paid recommendation rather than an alternative.
Which ones need an account, and where do they run?
That distinction decides whether you can check a site today, and it is easy to lose in a feature list. A desktop download and a hosted crawler behind a login give different answers to "can I crawl this site before the call".
| Tool | Needs an account? | Where it runs |
|---|---|---|
| Screaming Frog (free) | No | Desktop application on your own machine, Windows, macOS or Linux |
| Ahrefs Free | Yes, plus verified ownership of the site | Hosted, in the Ahrefs web app |
| Seobility (Basic) | Yes, free, no credit card | Hosted, in the browser |
| SEOmator free audit | No. Its page says no account, no email | Hosted, and it reads one page per run |
| GrowthHasten | Yes, free | Hosted. The analysis runs server side against saved state |
| Sitebulb | Not stated on its pricing page. The trial needs no credit card | Desktop software on Windows or Mac, with a separate cloud product |
The SEOmator free audit tool is worth singling out, because it is the only other entry here that asks for nothing before it runs, and the one most often filed as a crawler when it is not. It is deep on a single URL and useful for that. It is not a crawler, and its own page says so.
Where is GrowthHasten better than Screaming Frog, and where is it not?
We build one of the tools in this comparison, so the deficits go first. There are four of them and they are not small.
| Capability | Screaming Frog (paid licence) | GrowthHasten |
|---|---|---|
| Custom extraction | Yes | Not produced |
| Log file analysis | A separate product, the Log File Analyser | Not produced |
| Scheduling and saved configurations | Yes | One crawl per website per 24 hours, no scheduler |
| Track record | A mature desktop crawler with years of releases | New |
| Rank tracking | Not in its feature table | Not produced |
| Search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC | Not in its feature table | Not produced |
| Pages per crawl, free | 500 | 5,000 |
| Search Console join | Paid licence | Optional connection, free, 16 months of history |
| Analytics join | Paid licence, Google Analytics integration | Optional connection, free, GA4 |
The Screaming Frog column is read from the feature table on its own pricing page on 1 October 2026, so "not in its feature table" means exactly that and nothing more.
The honest recommendation: if you need custom extraction, log file analysis or scheduled crawls, buy the Screaming Frog licence. Nothing free in this comparison replaces those three, and a tool that implies otherwise will cost you a week before you find out.
What GrowthHasten does is narrower. It reads up to 5,000 pages from your domain, runs more than 120 deterministic checks across 12 categories, keeps the crawl in a project you can reopen, and reads it alongside your own Search Console and GA4 figures if you connect them. Both connections are optional and everything else works without them. It renders in three modes and records whether a page needs JavaScript to render at all. It is free, and an account takes a minute.
How should you pick, given the site you have?
Four cases cover almost everyone, and each one has a condition where it is the wrong answer.
- Under 500 URLs, and you want it on your own machine: Screaming Frog free. When not to: when the site depends on client-side rendering, or when you need to crawl it repeatedly and compare.
- A site you can verify in Ahrefs: Ahrefs Free, with 5,000 crawl credits a month. When not to: anything you cannot prove you own, which rules out prospects, competitors and most staging environments.
- One page you want read deeply, right now: SEOmator's free audit, no account. When not to: anything needing the whole site, including orphan pages and site-wide duplication, which it says outright it cannot do.
- A few thousand pages, and you want the crawl read beside your own Search Console and Analytics figures: GrowthHasten. When not to: custom extraction, log files, a scheduler, or more than one crawl of the same site in a day.
If none of those fit, buy a licence rather than build a workaround. Knowing what to check, and in what order matters more than which crawler produced the list.
What can no crawler replace?
Google Search Console. A crawler reports what your pages say about themselves. It cannot tell you what Google did with them: whether a URL was crawled, whether it was indexed, which canonical Google chose, or what it ranks for. No crawler here has access to that, and Search Console is free.
Crawl first, check the handful of pages that matter in URL Inspection, and treat a disagreement between the two as the finding. Our guide to how to run an SEO audit sets out the full order, and the rest of a free SEO stack covers the jobs a crawler was never going to do.
Run one crawl of your own site this week and write the page count the tool reached beside the URL count in your sitemap. That comparison is the first thing I check in any crawl report, ahead of a single issue, because if the two numbers disagree then every site-wide figure below them describes a fraction of the site rather than the site. Knowing which fraction is the difference between a report you can act on and one you have to run again.
See What Your Site Needs Fixed First.
GrowthHasten is free SEO and content software. Point it at your domain and it reports what is broken, ranked by what to do first. An account takes a minute and costs nothing.
Start FreeFrequently Asked Questions
What is the best free alternative to Screaming Frog?
It depends on what you can prove you own. Ahrefs Free gives 5,000 crawl credits a month, but only for a website you have verified. Seobility's free Basic account crawls 100 pages and runs what it calls a limited audit. GrowthHasten reads up to 5,000 pages per crawl and is free with an account. SEOmator needs no account at all, but it reads one page per run, so it is a page checker rather than a crawler.
How many URLs can Screaming Frog crawl for free?
500 URLs per crawl, as stated on Screaming Frog's own pricing page. The more useful number is the one beside it: 24 further rows in that same table are marked unavailable in the free version, including JavaScript rendering, saving and reopening crawls, Search Console integration and crawl configuration. Because configuration is one of them, a free user cannot narrow a crawl to fit inside the 500.
Which Screaming Frog alternative handles JavaScript rendering?
Not the free version of Screaming Frog, which lists JavaScript rendering as a paid feature. A paid licence adds it, and Sitebulb includes JavaScript crawling on every plan. GrowthHasten renders in three modes and records whether a page needs JavaScript to render at all. If you are diagnosing a JavaScript site, rendering is the first capability to check for, not the URL cap.
Do I need an alternative if I already use Ahrefs or Semrush?
Often not, if the site is one you have verified. Ahrefs Free includes 5,000 Site Audit crawl credits per verified project per month, which covers most mid-sized sites. The gap appears when you need to crawl something you cannot verify, such as a prospect's website or a staging environment, or when you want the crawl read alongside your own Search Console and Analytics figures rather than in a separate tool.
What should I check before trusting a crawl report?
Whether the crawl finished. A crawl that stopped at a page limit does not report a smaller version of the truth, it reports a different one: pages look orphaned when the page linking to them was never read, and site-wide counts describe a fraction of the site. Compare the page count the tool reached against the URL count in your sitemap before you read a single finding.
Anshuman Sinha
AI SEO Specialist, GrowthHasten
Anshuman Sinha is an AI SEO Specialist and Computer Science Engineer with over three years of experience in SEO and five years in web development. He specializes in Technical SEO, AI Search Optimization (AEO and GEO), SaaS SEO, and building high-performance websites with modern technologies.
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