SECrawl vs Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is the industry-standard desktop crawler, and for good reason. SECrawl is a cloud crawler built around a different workflow: audit, fix, then prove each fix landed — by you or by your coding agent.
| SECrawl | Screaming Frog | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it runs | In the cloud — nothing to install, crawls keep running with your laptop shut | Desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux |
| Free tier | Free plan: 1 crawl/month, 1,000 pages max — no card, no expiry | Up to 500 URLs per crawl |
| Paid price | From £5/mo, billed monthly | £199 per licence, per year (less from 5 licences) |
| MCP server for AI agents | Hosted — connect Claude Code or Cursor with a URL and an API key | Official local MCP server since v24 (May 2026); runs alongside the installed SEO Spider |
| Verifying fixes | Mark issues resolved, recheck just those URLs, get verified_fixed or regressed per issue (Professional and up) | Compare two whole crawls of a project |
Where Screaming Frog is better
- • Depth and maturity: years of configuration options, custom extraction and list-mode crawling.
- • Crawl size is limited by your machine, not a plan, on one flat yearly price.
- • A huge community, and documentation for almost any edge case.
Where SECrawl is better
- • Nothing to install or keep running.
- • Issue status that persists across crawls — resolved, verified fixed, regressed — so you track fixes, not just diffs.
- • A hosted MCP server your coding agent can use to find, fix and verify issues end to end.
- • Bigger free crawls (1,000 pages vs 500 URLs), though only one a month — and monthly billing, no yearly commitment.
Choose Screaming Frog if you want maximum configurability on your own machine and are happy to run and compare crawls yourself.
Choose SECrawl if you want a cloud audit you, or your coding agent, can work through and verify fix by fix.
Competitor details checked on 23 September 2026 against: Screaming Frog pricing, SEO Spider v24 release notes (MCP server). Prices and features change — spotted something out of date? Tell us.
Also compare: SECrawl vs Sitebulb · SECrawl vs Semrush Site Audit