WebSite Auditor vs. Screaming Frog software review & compare
Once in a while, people ask our technical support team: why is WebSite Auditor better than Screaming Frog, or any other its alternative? Surely, a reply to the ticket cannot fit all those lovely things we would like to say about our software, let alone no less lovely features of another tool.
Thus, the support team started to stalk people from the marketing department by saying: "Ain't you in the marketing? How about some tool review for comparison?"
It was not possible to say no. Why, we love helping people.
As you have guessed, this review is looking into the important features of two popular SEO audit tools: WebSite Auditor and Screaming Frog. Both the tools have their pros and cons, fans and skeptics. However, it is better to try them both (or as an addition to each other) before making any conclusion.
Let's hold a quick website audit!
As Team WSA plays at home, they are entitled to reveal
Key killer features of WebSite Auditor:
- Crawl your site with an exquisite SEO spider. Find and audit every resource your site has, both internal and external. It allows you to crawl websites as any search engine.
- Run deep technical SEO audits and reveal every single issue on your site that can affect search engine indexation, rankings, and UX. Solve problems graciously with thorough how-to-fix instructions.
- Generate robots.txt & XML sitemaps with no sweat; review and edit the existing files right in the app.
- Run an intelligent on-page site audit and see optimization rates for any page (both desktop and mobile) and any keyword based on the same metrics of your competitors. Follow optimization advice to become the master of a perfect site.
- Optimize your pages right in the app either following the principle of WYSIWYG or in HTML. Edit your titles and meta descriptions, preview your Google snippet, and save HTML to your hard drive for further upload to your site.
- Create beautiful SEO reports for digital marketing, use customizable templates and white-label, and share them with your business clients via email or in the cloud.
- Use TF-IDF (term frequency — inverse document frequency) to do efficient on-page optimization in the age of semantic search by measuring the relevance of a given keyword. It shows you whether any terms are relevant to the topic, whether they are used properly, whether they should be used less or more. More here.
- Visualize your site structure to create beautiful interactive graphical maps of your site where you will immediately see any problems with the site architecture and crawl budget. More here.
OK, I'm stunned, I want to download this tool!
Here comes a comparison table that reviews all the important features of both Website Auditor and Screaming Frog. Check out the tables and the comments afterwards, and decide what's more important to you.
Website Auditor vs Screaming Frog Review: General features
WebSite Auditor |
Screaming Frog |
|
|---|---|---|
| Main benefit | Comprehensive SEO audit and in-app content optimization | Flexible and quick crawling |
| Free version | ||
| Pricing model | Yearly subscription | Yearly renewal of a license |
| Education | Video tutorials + FAQ + guides + educational materials |
FAQ + guides |
| Technical support | Only in the paid version |
|
| Google Analytics Integration | Only in the paid version |
|
| Integration with Ahrefs and Majestic | ||
| Integration with Mozscape | ||
| Google Search Console integration | ||
| Data export | HTML, TXT, CSV, or SQL |
CSV/Excel |
| Use software in several languages | English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian, Russian |
|
| Find pages | Unlimited Up to 500 URLs in the free version |
Unlimited Up to 500 URLs in the free version |
| Specify crawler settings | Only in the paid version |
|
| Use custom search/custom extraction | Only in the paid version |
|
| Use proxy | ||
| Find tips on how to fix errors and issues | ||
| Start a few tasks simultaneously | ||
| Optimize an unlimited number of websites | ||
| Run scheduled tasks automatically | Only by means of the command line |
|
| Save & upload crawl projects | ||
| Save & upload crawl projects | ||
| Store projects in the cloud |
Both Screaming Frog and Website Auditor, being primarily a SEO spider, are good to crawl a website and get the complete picture of its web pages, URL addresses, redirect chains, missing tags and meta descriptions, and much more. They are both great to do quick and easy SEO audits for site migrations, pre-launch and after-launch checks. SEO spider helps ensure that your on-site SEO changes don't break anything, or find issues that affect crawl budget.
Both SEO spiders boast the ability to crawl websites quite quickly, but if your projects are huge, this may take time. For that reason, there are several modifiers for the crawlers that make them handier to use. Quite often you may want to crawl only part of your website – for example, only the URLs you've recently modified. In Screaming Frog, you can set the crawl mode to List and manually define the URLs to crawl in an uploaded list. Similarly, in WebSite Auditor you can limit the scan depth, the crawl speed, set to execute Javascript code found on pages, etc.
In both the tools you can pick the user agent, to crawl as desktop or mobile bots, or select to crawl password-protected sites. Screaming Frog SEO spider can verify bots through log file analysis.
VS
The tools are different in the way they present the results of your website audit for analysis. Screaming Frog has a pretty simple user interface and so is easy to use. Screaming Frog organizes the crawled data with tabs, rows and columns in spreadsheets. You can set a filter and go through the details to quickly spot the issues.
The WebSite Auditor keeps its SEO audit data logically clustered into subtopics. The tool has a more explanatory interface, giving additional information related to the SEO errors found on-site.
While appearance is a matter of taste, with Screaming Frog you've got to be aware of what source demands special attention. WebSite Auditor not only helps to identify SEO issues, but also recommends how to fix them, something that Screaming Frog users really miss.
Website Auditor vs Screaming Frog Review: Technical site audit
|
WebSite Auditor |
Screaming Frog |
|
|---|---|---|
| Find broken links, redirects & indexing errors | ||
| Create and manage robots.txt files | Only in the paid version |
|
| Create and manage XML sitemaps | ||
| Audit hreflang in XML sitemaps | ||
| Find broken images and empty alt texts | ||
| Check for mobile-friendliness | ||
| Analyze titles and meta descriptions for errors | ||
| Visualize a site structure | It is only possible to export a crawl path report. |
|
| Export a crawl path | It is only possible to check click depth and visualize a site structure |
|
| Analyze links to/from pages | ||
| Analyze internal & external resources | ||
| Check page's search engine authority | The app has InLink Rank, a Google PageRank alternative |
|
| Analyze social media engagement | ||
| Analyze traffic coming to pages | ||
| Check the number of visitors every page gets |
Website Auditor, the same as Screaming Frog, is a great tool to identify and fix technical SEO issues. Technical SEO audits will help you discover all site-wide issues that spoil your on-site SEO: find broken links or missing tags, review the backlink profile, measure mobile-friendliness and implement localization.
VS
Both the tools include a useful visualization functionality to see internal linking of pages and the structure of the website. The visualization tree from Website Auditor is actionable: you can add links and new pages and rebuild the project to see how changes affect the total picture.
Website Auditor vs Screaming Frog Review: On-page optimization
|
WebSite Auditor |
Screaming Frog |
|
|---|---|---|
| Optimize titles & meta tags | ||
| Make changes to a SERP snippet in-app | Changes are saved in HTML |
Changes are saved in CSV/ Excel |
| Optimize page speed | All the page speed factors are displayed as one block |
It is necessary to analyze each page speed factor separately |
| See response times for each page | ||
| Optimize landing pages' content in-app | ||
| Optimize mobile pages | ||
| Check TF-IDF |
Both the tools allow auditing mobile-friendliness site-wide by means of mobile bot crawls. For holding SEO audits of individual pages, Screaming Frog leads to Google's test for mobile friendliness and Page Speed Insights, while Website Auditor gives access to the technology in-app.
Screaming Frog is not able to optimize content: it only scrapes the necessary information for a further analysis and optimization with additional tools. An interesting editing feature is its special tab to optimize and review the snippet in SERPs. In the licensed version, Screaming Frog reviews your document spelling and grammar.
VS
While WebSite Auditor shares many similar features with Screaming Frog, it is more than just a SEO spider. Website Auditor has a Page Audit submodule looking at SEO issues on specific pages. The tool has an in-built content editing app that allows on-page optimization on the fly. There is also the TF-IDF module which recommends what keywords you should be using more or less. After all the changes made, check the SEO optimization score recalculated.
Besides, there is the Keyword Mapping module that will help you map the keywords to their landing pages and keep all optimization efforts in order.
Website Auditor vs Screaming Frog Review: SEO reports to automate your business workflow
|
WebSite Auditor |
Screaming Frog |
|
|---|---|---|
| Create SEO auditing reports | ||
| Create on-page SEO reports | ||
| Customize and brand your reports | ||
| Export reports | Available in the Enterprise version, export in PDF and HTML |
Export in CSV/Excel |
| Make reports available online | Available in the Enterprise version |
|
| Email reports to clients from the app | Available in the Enterprise version |
If you dig spreadsheets, then both WebSite Auditor and Screaming Frog will serve you excellent CSV files with the necessary information.
However, if you are more into visually rich and vocal reports for your SEO audits (and customizable ones!), then it is better to go with WebSite Auditor. WebSite Auditor allows its users to extract practically any chunk of data as a CSV file, but it also generates marvelous reports that will impress your company clients and teammates.
VS
One of the most exciting things is that the report function allows users to customize what a future report will look
like and which data it will show. And even to preset color and font settings!
And finally, it is possible to save a report to your computer, share it with your digital marketing team via a
shareable link, email to clients, or upload to a website.
Screaming Frog allows its users to export reports only in CSV format and Excel. And though they will surely contain comprehensive data, it will be a challenge to impress the clients with it.
Pricing plans
|
WebSite Auditor |
Screaming Frog |
|
|---|---|---|
|
Free: $0
Unlimited time Unlimited sites Up to 500 URLs Technical support |
Free version: $0 Up to 500 URLs | |
|
Professional: $125/year
Unlimited sites Unlimited URLs Technical support |
Paid version: £149.00/year
Unlimited URLs Technical support |
|
|
Enterprise: $299/year
Unlimited sites Unlimited URLs Custom PDF/HTML reports Data export in .txt, .csv, .html, .sql Technical support |
When you want to check your own website with several hundred URLs, free versions will be absolutely enough for all your needs.
If you run an online business, especially if it's an SEO company or a digital agency, you will need to have reports: for clients, for the boss, or for your team of copywriters and webmasters. Creating beautiful reports that will speak to your clients without any additional explanations from your side may become a real pain in the neck. Imagine a level of relief when your auditing tool is able to do automatized tasks, create workable reports and send them without bothering you.
The bottom line
It is obvious that WebSite Auditor is not just a web crawler with a sophisticated design, it is so much more than that. It is able to both do technical SEO audits and cater to site's optimization. It is more client-friendly when it comes to company reports.
At the same time, Screaming Frog, being a specifically auditing tool, is very fast and efficient in what it does. It has an old-school design which is a thing of its creators — they know that people love the tool as it is and they do not hurry to kill its authenticity.
Thus, this tool review compares in what way Website Auditor and Screaming Frog SEO spider are different at large, and how much they're helpful to handle your on-site SEO. They both have some unique functions that can be more appealing when choosing a SEO audit tool. Anyway, everybody makes their own choice, the comparison table is just the facts. We hope it is as useful as we intended to present it. Happy SEO!
