Budget analogues of Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider

Now it isn't easy to imagine the work of an SEO specialist without the use of crawling services. The most popular such services are paid Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Neatpeak Spider. We decided to analyze whether it is possible to save on this service without harming the quality.

Budget analogues of Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider

Let's start with the very concept of "crawling." Crawling is the process of crawling by a search robot (in some sources, you may come across the name "spider" or "crawler") of new pages or recently updated to add them to the index. Most often, the resources with which such audits are usually carried out are the paid Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Neatpeak Spider programs.

Screaming Frog is the most popular SEO crawl that specializes in website architecture analytics in general, finding 404 errors, is a great assistant in calculating the crawl budget, etc. Some users note the slow operation of the resource with large volumes and the difficulty of learning how to work with it.

Netpeak Spider — a professional program that specializes in deep SEO audits of your website pages. The program has broad functionality and is constantly updated.

Using these resources is quite expensive (of course, in this case, the price is relevant to the quality, but not for every business). Large companies use them because they are the most popular resources in the niche. Most importantly, their budget is designed to purchase such software; small companies, beginner SEO specialists, and freelancers can only sometimes afford such expenses.

Our editors decided to consider analogs of such resources, but with one crucial criterion - these resources are free. So let's go save money!

1. WildShark

A free resource that is well suited for beginners, as it is easy to use while it has good functionality for analytics. For example, these analytics criteria include:

• Internal URLs
• External URLs
• Redirects
• Broken links
• Images
• Open Graph markup properties (Rich snippets)
• Keyword search
• Speed

Pros:

• It has good basic functionality

Minuses:

• Not suitable for extensive audits

2. Webbee

Webbee — it's a resource for a PC that crawls your site like the main search bots and has a pretty good basic set of features.

Pros:

• The set of analyzed parameters is wider than in many other analogs, including WildShark
• Has an integration with Google Analytics

Minuses:

• The number of analyzed parameters is still insufficient for large audits
• No filters by custom fields
• Incomprehensible visualization on the charts

3. IIS SEO Toolkit

IIS SEO Toolkit — free crawling tool from Microsoft. It has sufficient functionality for analytics (of course, not as comprehensive as in paid programs, but it can also become a practical assistant in working with SEO).

Pros:

• Easy to use
• Nice interface, makes it easy to use
• It has a lot of functions. For example, it analyzes internal links and looks for layout errors, redundant code, broken links, errors in titles, titles and meta tags, and redirect chains.

Minuses:

• No integration with Google Analytics
• And most importantly, it is not supported on Windows above version 8.

If you want to use this tool on newer versions of Windows, we can recommend you the following algorithm:

1. Go to "Programs" in the control panel and click "Turn Windows features on or off."
2. Make sure the checkbox for Internet Information Services is checked.
3. Open Regedit.exe (type it into the search bar)
4. Expand "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE" followed by "SOFTWARE" then "Microsoft" and "InetStp."
5. Open the "Open Major Version Attribute"
6. Now you have a number in front of you indicating the Windows version. Here change 10 to 7.
7. Run the IIS SEO Toolkit installer.
8. In the same way, change seven back to 10.

4. Beam Us Up

Beam Us Up — an effective PC tool with a basic set of features. Smart filters are built to showcase the most common SEO mistakes you want to find during your website audit.

Pros:

• Convenient and fast export of reports to Excel
• Supports Windows, Linux, and macOS
• Helps in dealing with duplicate pages of the site

Minuses:

• It hasn't been updated in a long time
• HTML only

5. SiteAnalyzer

SiteAnalyzer is the highest quality analog of Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Neatpeak Spider. In some aspects, it can be even more convenient than these services. It has a wide range of features and is an ideal option for free analytics.

Pros:

• Convenient grouping of site technical errors
• High-quality interface
• Optimization of your work: all sites are stored in one database. That is, you can select the required project and get information about all pages and detailed information about them in a few clicks.
• Visualization of links on the graph
• Displays the site's internal linking and helps identify hub pages and sections.
• PageRank calculation
• Quick sitemap.xml generation
• You can find out which pages on your site get the most internal links and adjust the site's linking, which will help redirect link juice to more important pages.

Minuses:

• There is no handy SEO reporting of site issues.

Conclusions

Resources such as Screaming Frog and Netpeak Spider are the most versatile in the SEO crawling industry and justify their cost, as free resources still need to be improved.

But, if your company is starting its development path or you are freelancing, some of them still deserve your attention.

We also separately note the SiteAnalyzer service, which has a wide range of functions for your audit and, at the same time, surprises SEO specialists with its accessibility, as for its distinctive features, which only some paid resources provide: it provides visualization of links on the graph and PageRank calculation.

Which resource to use is up to you. Its functionality should be relevant to its price and cover your needed tasks.