Screaming Frog alternative
This page compares Screaming Frog and Stillindexed on price, check cadence and alerts. We make one of these two, so the short version first: if you are auditing a site, use Screaming Frog. It is the better tool for that and we are not trying to replace it. The question this page settles is what happens in the weeks after the audit, when nobody is crawling anything. Facts about the SEO Spider read from screamingfrog.co.uk on 26 August 2026.
What the SEO Spider already automates
More than it gets credit for, and worth stating plainly before any comparison. On the licensed version you can schedule crawls to run at chosen intervals, export the results automatically, compare one crawl against another to see what changed, and receive an email once a crawl has completed. Anyone claiming it is a purely manual tool has not opened the scheduling dialog.
So the difference is not automation. It is narrower and more specific than that, and it sits in one sentence: the email tells you a crawl finished, not that something broke. You still have to open the tool and read the comparison to learn what changed. That is the correct design for an auditing tool. It is the wrong design for the night your CMS ships a noindex to the pricing page.
Different jobs, in one table
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | stillindexed | |
|---|---|---|
| The job | Audit a site: find everything that is wrong, once | Watch a short list of URLs and say when one changes |
| Scope | The whole site, every URL it can reach | The URLs you choose, and their site-level signals |
| Runs on | Your machine, Windows, macOS or Linux | Our servers |
| Frequency | Scheduled at chosen intervals, licence only | As often as every 15 minutes |
| What arrives | An email saying the crawl completed | A message saying what changed, and on which URL |
| Seeing changes | Compare Crawls, which you open and read | A confirmed change, pushed to you |
| Price | £199/year, free version capped at 500 URLs | $39/mo Starter, $79/mo Agency, published |
The gap is the calendar, not the feature list
Say you audit a client site properly every quarter. That is diligent, and far more than most sites get. It also means a directive that changes the week after an audit has almost three months to sit there before anyone crawls the page again. The audit was not wrong. It was simply not happening on the day the problem started.
Running the scheduled crawl nightly narrows the window to a day, which is a real improvement, and it costs a full crawl of the site every night on a machine that has to be awake. It still ends with a comparison waiting for someone to open it. The thing a monitor adds is not more data. It is that nobody has to remember to look.
When Screaming Frog is the right answer and we are not
- You are auditing a site for the first time and need to see everything.
- You need JavaScript rendering, XPath extraction, or the Google API integrations.
- You are working on one site intensively, sitting in front of it.
- You want unlimited URLs for a flat annual fee. At £199 a year for unlimited crawling, nothing here competes on that.
When a monitor is the right answer
- You look after client sites you are not actively working on this week.
- You want to hear about a noindex in minutes, not at the next audit.
- You want the alert to reach a phone, not a machine that has to be switched on.
- You want a client to get a weekly report without you assembling it.
Use both, honestly
This is not a page arguing you should drop the Spider. Nearly everyone monitoring client sites properly audits with Screaming Frog and watches with something else, because the two tools are answering different questions. Audit to find what is wrong today. Monitor so that the next thing that goes wrong does not wait for your calendar.
Questions people actually ask
- Can Screaming Frog monitor a site automatically?
- Partly, and more than most people assume. The licensed SEO Spider schedules crawls to run at chosen intervals, ships a Compare Crawls feature that shows what changed between two crawls, and can email you once a crawl has completed. What it does not do is tell you what changed. The email announces that the crawl finished; you then open the tool and read the comparison yourself.
- How much does Screaming Frog cost?
- The SEO Spider is £199 per year, with bulk discounts from £189 for five licences down to £169 for twenty or more. There is a free version limited to 500 URLs per crawl, but scheduling is a licensed feature, so automated crawling requires the paid licence. Prices read from screamingfrog.co.uk on 26 August 2026.
- What is the real difference between Screaming Frog and stillindexed.com?
- Screaming Frog is an auditing tool and stillindexed.com is a monitor. An auditing tool answers questions you went looking for; a monitor answers a question you were not awake to ask. The Spider crawls a whole site so you can dig through everything, and it runs on your own machine, which means a scheduled crawl runs when that machine is running. stillindexed.com watches a chosen list of URLs from our servers, as often as every 15 minutes, and messages you when a directive actually changes.
- Do I need both?
- Most people who buy one still want the other, and they are not substitutes. Use Screaming Frog to audit: crawl the whole site, find everything, fix it. Use a monitor for the weeks between audits, when nobody is looking and a deploy quietly adds a noindex. Auditing without monitoring means you only ever find problems at audit time, which can be a quarter after they started.
- Is Screaming Frog better than stillindexed.com?
- At auditing, yes, and it is not close. It crawls entire sites, renders JavaScript, extracts with XPath, visualises architecture and integrates the Google APIs. stillindexed.com does none of that and never will. It watches a short list of URLs for a specific set of directive changes and tells you the moment one moves. They are different jobs, not a bigger and a smaller version of the same one.
The longer version of this argument, without the product comparison, is inwhat to do after an SEO audit.
See what stillindexed costsOr run any of our checks free, with no account
Other comparisons: Semrush alternative · Sitebulb alternative.
Check it yourself before believing any of this
We make one of the products being compared, so the useful thing we can offer is not another claim. These run one check against any URL, free, with no account and no email.
If a result surprises you on a client site, that is the thing this category exists to catch. Six checks when a site disappears from Google walks the same ground by hand.