7 Free Screaming Frog Alternatives, Reviewed

Screaming Frog's SEO Spider has a free version, and so does Netpeak Spider. Both stop at 500 URLs per crawl. If your site is bigger than that, or you'd rather not hit a wall halfway through an audit, seven other desktop crawlers are free with no URL cap at all. We checked each one against the vendor's own site rather than copying another roundup, so here's what they actually offer, what's genuinely good, and what's worth knowing before you download.

This page is about downloadable crawlers, not the paste-a-URL, in-browser checkers that answer a single question about a single page. If that's what you're after instead, our own free tools run in the browser with no download and no signup.

The free-tier crawlers you already know about

Before the seven newcomers, the two obvious names, because most searches for a free Screaming Frog alternative land here first.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a permanently free version with no time limit. It crawls up to 500 URLs and switches off 24 of its 31 features, including saving and reopening a crawl, scheduling, JavaScript rendering, and the Search Console and Analytics integrations. For a quick check on a small site it costs nothing. For anything you need to save, configure or run again, the 500-URL wall and the missing features are the point at which people start looking for something else.

Netpeak Spider ships a permanent free edition too: 500 URLs, 5 threads. Same shape as Screaming Frog's free tier, and the same wall for anyone auditing a site bigger than a few hundred pages.

Seven crawlers that are free with no URL limit

Checked against each vendor's own site, 14 September 2026.

LibreCrawl

MIT-licensed and open source, at librecrawl.com and on GitHub. It isn't a native installer: it runs as a local Python Flask web app, so you start it and use it through a browser tab rather than launching an .exe or .app. In exchange you get full Playwright integration for crawling JavaScript-heavy sites built with React, Vue or Next.js, multi-session support, and a real-time memory dashboard for very large crawls. The project states it will "always be free and open source" with no paid tiers ever, and that it handles crawls well past 1M URLs.

FreeCrawl

A native Windows installer with no signup, at freecrawl.net and github.com/kemalai/FreeCrawl-SEO-Tool, MIT-style licensed. It runs 167 SEO checks across 32 tabs (titles, meta descriptions, headings, duplicate content, broken links, redirects, canonicals, hreflang, structured data, security headers), aimed at crawls past 1M URLs on a single machine with no native dependencies to install first. No telemetry, by its own documentation.

Crab

Open source, at crab.so and github.com/TryCrab, with native builds for macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows and Linux. Its own site is the most direct about the comparison it's making: "no trials, no premium tiers, no 'free for 500 URLs' nonsense. Free forever." Full-site audits, no URL limit stated anywhere on the site.

Crawly

Free with no URL limit, built and maintained by Dynamically, a Liverpool-based SEO agency, at getcrawly.com. Native app for macOS, Windows and Linux. Not open source. Its own pricing page states "£0 / forever" and "everything included, no tiers, no upsells", while noting paid features for teams may arrive later without the core crawler ever charging. The one feature none of the others have: a Claude Code MCP integration that lets you query your crawl database directly from an AI coding assistant.

BeamUsUp

The most established of the seven: free since 2013, on Windows, Mac and Linux, with no page limit and no licence key. It checks Google PageSpeed scores via the Google API, reads X-Robots-Tag headers, and covers the usual ground (broken links, redirects, duplicate content, external link status). Its own site is candid that Screaming Frog and Netpeak are more capable tools, but that BeamUsUp is the strongest fully-free option if budget is the constraint.

WildShark SEO Spider

Real, and free, provided you're comfortable giving an email address to download it. It runs on Windows only, checks titles, meta descriptions and thin content, and its differentiator is a keyword-focused "which page should rank for this term" tool similar to an on-page grader. One thing worth knowing before you go looking for it: as of 14 September 2026, WildShark's own domain (wildshark.co.uk) 302-redirects to an ad-tech affiliate tracking link rather than serving the tool's page directly. That doesn't mean the software itself is unsafe, but it's not the tidy, current vendor site the other six have, and we'd rather say so than link it without comment.

Xenu's Link Sleuth

The oldest tool here by a long way: version 1.3.8, released September 2010, still distributed from its original author's own page at home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html. Windows only, and genuinely just a link checker: it verifies links, images, frames, style sheets and scripts, and reports what's broken, but it doesn't look at titles, meta descriptions or headings the way the other six do. If a broken-link report is literally all you need, it still does that one job, for free, with nothing to sign up for. The developer's own page actively discourages donations. It is not a Screaming Frog replacement for anything beyond link checking.

When a free crawler is the right call, and when it isn't

If you're auditing your own small site, checking a client's work before a call, or doing a one-off crawl under a few thousand URLs, a genuinely free tool with no cap is the right answer, and there's no honest reason to route you toward a paid trial instead. Crab, LibreCrawl, FreeCrawl, Crawly and BeamUsUp all do that job with no catch.

Where the free tools stop is ranking data. None of the seven pull in Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster data or Core Web Vitals alongside the crawl, so you're still opening two or three other tabs to see how a page actually performs, not just whether it's technically clean. That's the gap a paid crawler is for, whether that's Crawl Cove or Screaming Frog's paid licence: one audit that already has your ranking and speed data sitting next to the technical findings.

To be direct about where Crawl Cove fits, since this is a roundup and not a pitch: it costs money, on a monthly plan, after a 14-day trial with every feature unlocked and no card required, and it's a genuinely different price shape to a Screaming Frog licence: see how the pricing compares. If a tool that costs nothing, ever, does your job, use one of the seven above. If you want Search Console, Bing and Core Web Vitals in the same view as the crawl, start the trial, or read the full breakdown against Screaming Frog first.

Every free tool on this page can change its pricing, licence or hosting at any point after 14 September 2026. Check the vendor's own site before you rely on any of it.