Screaming Frog SEO Spider vs. Semrush

Screaming Frog tracks the crawl level, internal links, outbound links, title tags, and meta descriptions of the pages it crawls. It also adds HTTP status codes, title tag length, meta description length, H1, H2 tags and lengths, and canonical tags. Many of these elements are also broken into their own tabs at the top so that you can easily focus in on problem areas. You can right-click on any URL for many more options. The program is definitely valuable to anyone who is looking to gauge factors regarding SEO. However, if you are not a web designer/admin, you're going to lack an understanding of the information it provides.

Incentivized

This is suited to plan for keywords in a single market, but it struggles when you need to consolidate several markets. It is well-suited to discover new keywords directly related to the ones being used currently to expand the content the company is creating to get better results.

Incentivized

• Collects all indexed HTML pages of the site. This helps for when we are redirecting old URLs to the URLs of a clients new site.
• Finds all page titles that are too long or too short and allows us to address them more quickly than waiting for a program such as Moz. It's more immediate.
• If we have duplicate meta data on pages, this program allows us to find them, sort them, export them and take care of them in a timely manner. In our business (as for many) time is money.

Incentivized

• Great visuals for keyword position tracking, love that you can see the page that is ranking
• Enjoyed the auto-generated reporting feature (specifically in the context of keyword position tracking)
• Shows many different and useful views for competitive research
• Great templated keyword research tools for those who are not as hands-on with SEO
• I LOVE the Keyword Magic Tool for honing in on longtail, high-opportunity keywords

• Customizing the crawler - It takes a little bit of playing around with the settings to understand what each of them controls and what options need to be checked or unchecked to get the right amount of information.
• Cannot Crawl a large site - Screaming Frog runs out of memory when asked to crawl a large site, even after playing around with memory settings and allocating additional memory.

Incentivized

• Extra seats can be expensive, as [an] agency with multiple team members this can be frustrating
• Backlink data is not great, misses out a lot of backlinks (better off using a specialist backlink tool like Link research tools LRT)
• Tracking multiple keywords, across multiple clients can be costly

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

I [previously] used Semrush for many years and I cannot find any other tool being so complete and easy to use.

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

The interface is a little less intuitive than it could be. The data is often available but filtering and manipulating the data can be a little difficult at times. Expanded comparisons would be helpful since most of the time seeing more than a few competitors at a time allows for a better sense of how to forecast.

Incentivized

Semrush available when you need it!

SemRush performs well with few errors!

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

I'm in a FB group for Semrush paid users and it amazing! They are fast to respond, take suggestions and help with questions. I have not felt alone in using this product at all. Highly recommend their support team. When I had an issue I can jump into the group and they will help get me the right person to help or even tag their programmers to look at something that is going on. Love the group!

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

Incentivized

I did it by myself and do not have a comment!

The biggest difference between DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog is cost. Screaming Frog is significantly cheaper, and fits within a budget much easier. For most websites that aren't huge it crawls quicker to. DeepCrawl is the better tool for analysing larger websites and is easier to use in some ways, with a very friendly interface and some extras features that are useful. Ultimately price was the deciding factor though.

We have used both Ahrefs and Semrush extensively at our agency and Semrush remains the tool of choice. We find that Semrush has the largest selection of tools & features to use, with the highest accuracy, and provides top-tier analysis recommendations. It's really is the ultimate all-in-one tool when comparing other performance measurement tools in the digital marketing space.

Incentivized

Semrush is flexible and scalable software which can be deployed across multiple departments and sites as needed.

• It has allowed me to make impactful and intelligent recommendations to clients. This has in turned deepened the client relationships and led to steady ongoing ROI.
• It has also allowed me to diagnose interesting technical issues for non-client sites (like Forbes) which formed the basis for very cool company blog posts.
• The investment is very low - this tool does 99% of what I need for a fraction of what other industry crawlers costs. Kudos to the Screaming Frog team!

Incentivized

• Using Semrush on behalf of our clients, we have seen some impressive growth in organic visibility, traffic, conversion and revenue, across multiple industries.
• The site checks available with Semrush have helped us to pitch and sell our services, securing new clients.

Incentivized