Apify vs. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Apify is great for web scraping, web crawling, and data extraction. I'm sure it's great for other things I don't use it for, but that's what I can confirm. I use it for pulling weekly analytics of 50+ TikTok UGC creators that I hire for brands. If you want a nice UX platform to share with clients, you would need to vibe code it and feed it the Apify data or use a more costly program.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is well suited to auditing brand new websites, when you need a quick, holistic view of the websites technical issues. Its great for providing a top line view of a websites architecture, perhaps for a new business approach where you need to assess the scale of work to maintain a website. Its also a useful tool in situations where you might need to see whether a large scale change in the website has taken place, you can see word counts, pages and their https response codes. Screaming Frog may be less useful if you need an idea of the customer experience on a website, it doesn't really provide information that helps assess how fast a website loads, what issues might come up when trying to convert or faults with the payment process. Screaming Frog is largely a technical SEO focused tool, it also can't assess the quality of a websites, layout or the quality of the content used on the website. As mentioned, its niche, but very useful within that niche.

• comprehensive array of actors. whatever you need, there's an actor for it. I don't have to go on multiple websites with different logins - everything is all in one place.
• Integrations with make.com and other no-code platforms.
• Super easy-to-use api endpoints, have not had many issues at all.

Incentivized

• Crawling client sites of up to thousands of pages. Gives you almost every tool that you need to do a proper SEO audit.
• Custom extractions using CSSpath, Xpath, or Regex. I'm not even a techy, but their support section here is a huge help with the provided examples.
• Customer service and support - Dan is ALWAYS very prompt to respond with helpful answers on Twitter if needed.

Incentivized

• sometimes the devs are working on one of the scrapers when it breaks and you don't really get a notice for that, it just doesn't work. Esp starts to be a problem when it's supposed to be running in the background.
• Loading cookies into the different actors is kind of a pain.
• vague pricing models. all the actors are priced differently, and the difference between "usage" "result" and "event" is pretty confusing

Incentivized

• Requires Java. This isn't a huge deal as many computers already have it installed, but it's yet another 3rd party component.
• The free version has a crawl limit of 500 pages per site. This is fine for smaller sites, but if you're running a big e-commerce site then you'll need to pay for Pro version.
• The user interface isn't very pretty. This is an analytics tool so it doesn't really have to be, but it might be helpful for improving the overall user experience.

Incentivized

It's the best because you can just load in a limited amount of money and limit your financial exposure to using a tool like this. so renewing isn't a big consideration... i know that i'm going to need the tool in the future and i'll load it with money accordingly when im ready.

The tool has become integrated into our teams daily workings and I have yet to find a tool other than scremaing frog to replicate all of our use cases for it. It's a great tool and we're sticking with it

Incentivized

The site is laid out pretty well. There is a learning curve, but it is not steep. Integrations are fairly straightforward using the API and JSON files. Integrates well with Make automations, which is essential for our team and organization. I am pleased with the performance and flexibility of the platform.

Incentivized

The main problem of Screaming Frog SEO Spider is it being an offline software which limits itself to a single pc and that creates problem when multi user agents want to get involved or even work on it, it’s a difficult task to collaborate on it and do research for keywords at one place

Incentivized

I was very happy with the support I received from Apify. They are always ready to answer all your questions and help solve problems you have.

Screaming Frog is a relatively primitive system, and doesn't need to be supported by devs or other software. Screaming Frog does interface directly with some programs that are most needed (Google Analytics, Search Console, Page Speed Insights), so that's convenient. It isn't widely supported by other programs, but it also doesn't need to be.

Incentivized

If the software was a little easier to use for beginners, there really wouldn't be an issue

Incentivized

The reason we prefer Apify to other alternatives is that it has more functionality and APIs that serve different purposes. In addition, thanks to its libraries prepared for easy integration into many programming languages, it becomes very easy to integrate into every project in different languages. In this way, it deserves to be ahead of its competitors.

Incentivized

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is probably the best non-client facing SEO audit tool in terms of technical SEO. There are other tools on the market that do a more complete job of keyword tracking, competitive analysis, and backlink profiles...however, for analyzing the technical SEO health of any website, Screaming Frog is the best

Incentivized

• No need to search for high-quality web-scrapers
• Its more costly than finding free solutions, but the advanced product of Apify will make up for that
• No need to worry about multiple different implementations for different products. You only have to care about the Apify implementation which saves you a lot of time

Incentivized

• Increased employee efficiency - We spend many less hours tracking down and reporting simple meta tags.
• Better Client Servicing - We are able to ensure we have a total look at a client's site before we recommend anything.
• True Pricing Structure - We are able to more accurately predict how much help a client may need based on factors such as size of site, number of redirects, proper use of meta tags, etc.

Incentivized