SEO PowerSuite vs Screaming Frog: Four Apps or One Crawler

The short answer: if the job is crawling websites and nothing else, the Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the specialist: free up to 500 URLs, then £199 a year per user (Screaming Frog pricing, checked on 24 October 2026). SEO PowerSuite makes sense when the same person also tracks rankings and backlinks, because its $349 Professional licence bundles its crawler, WebSite Auditor, with three other apps (SEO PowerSuite pricing). If you want only that crawler, WebSite Auditor on its own costs $149 a year.

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What to settle first:

1. Price the people, not the product. Screaming Frog licences are per user, so three crawling colleagues pay 3 x £199 = £597 a year, falling to £189 each from five licences, per its pricing page. One person who also needs rank tracking and backlinks pays $349 for the whole SEO PowerSuite, on its pricing page. The two pages quote in pounds and dollars respectively.
2. Subtract what you already own. If a rank tracker and a link tool are already paid for, three of SEO PowerSuite's four apps duplicate them, and the comparison shrinks to crawler against crawler.
3. Size the crawl against your hardware. Screaming Frog says its paid crawl limit depends on allocated memory and storage (pricing). Both run on your computer, so a 200,000-page shop needs a machine that can hold it.
4. Agree the yardstick. Crawl once, fix for 30 days, crawl again and count what changed. Screaming Frog compares crawls built in; in WebSite Auditor you rebuild the saved project.

Crawler against crawler

Where they part

One app, or four

SEO PowerSuite is a suite first. Its homepage lists Rank Tracker for keywords and positions, WebSite Auditor for crawling, SEO SpyGlass for backlinks and LinkAssistant for outreach, under one licence. Screaming Frog sells a crawler and treats everything else as an integration: Analytics, Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and link metrics feed into the crawl (SEO Spider). If you want one window for the whole job, the suite. If you want the sharpest crawler and already own the rest, the Spider.

Depth of the crawl itself

The Spider reports on more than 300 issues, renders pages in headless Chromium when asked, checks accessibility against the AXE rule set, spell-checks in over 25 languages and maps staging URLs to production for a migration, per its product page. WebSite Auditor covers the core audit, crawling as Google, Bing or Yahoo, and adds editing of robots.txt and sitemaps with upload by FTP (WebSite Auditor). For a technical lead on a large or JavaScript-heavy site, the Spider's depth is the reason to pay.

Reports someone else reads

Here the costs move. WebSite Auditor Professional prints reports with watermarks; saving, emailing and scheduling reports and exporting CSV start on its $359 Enterprise licence, per the pricing page. On the full suite, white-label reports start on Enterprise at $599 a year. Screaming Frog connects crawl data to a Looker Studio report (SEO Spider). An agency that sends PDFs to clients should price the Enterprise tier, not Professional.

Run both free versions on one site

Both crawlers are free to 500 URLs and install on the same three systems. Pick a section of your site under that size, a blog folder or one product category, and crawl it in each on the same afternoon. Compare the issue lists line by line, then check five issues by hand in the browser. The free test answers most of the question: which list you trust, and which interface you would open every week.

Licences and prices, checked on 24 October 2026

From the Screaming Frog pricing page, which shows pounds by default and falls to £169 a licence from 20, and the SEO PowerSuite pricing page, in dollars. Both licences last a year and renew.

The MAX card lists a guest post on the vendor's blog, a certified partner badge, a free year of a sister product and a course. A top tier padded with extras is built to make the step up look like value. The right licence is the one whose limits you hit, which for most teams is Professional or Enterprise.

Alt text written in the crawl, checked by a person

Screaming Frog documents an AI integration: connect an OpenAI, Gemini or Anthropic key, or a local model through Ollama, and configure up to 100 prompts that run against crawl data (AI tutorial). One step of an accessibility clean-up: set a segment for the issue Missing Alt Text, attach an alt-text prompt to that segment only, and crawl. The model writes alt text for those images alone, which spends far fewer credits than prompting every URL. The output lands in the AI tab and the Internal tab for export. A person reads each suggestion against the page before anything goes into the CMS; the tutorial itself urges a thorough review of generated meta descriptions before they go live.

The WebSite Auditor pages and the SEO PowerSuite pricing page document no comparable AI integration.

Choose SEO PowerSuite if your job is

• Rank tracking, link research and site audits by one person, on one licence.
• Unlimited tracked keywords and crawled pages for $349 a year.
• Editing robots.txt and sitemaps in the same tool that audits them.

Choose Screaming Frog if your job is

• Deep technical crawls of large or JavaScript-heavy sites.
• Migrations, with staging compared against production.
• Running AI prompts against crawl data at scale.

The SEO PowerSuite entry covers the four apps, and how to use SEO PowerSuite follows a first audit in WebSite Auditor.

FAQ

Can I buy WebSite Auditor without the rest of SEO PowerSuite?

Yes. It is sold alone at $149 a year for Professional and $359 for Enterprise, per the SEO PowerSuite pricing page, checked on 24 October 2026.

Does Screaming Frog's free version expire?

No. It needs no sign-up and stays free, limited to 500 URLs per crawl, with saving, crawl configuration, JavaScript rendering, custom extraction and API integrations reserved for the licence (SEO Spider).

Does one Screaming Frog licence cover a team?

No. Licences are per user, so two people need two, with discounts from five licences bought together (pricing).