Ahrefs vs Screaming Frog
Both are seo tools. Here is what separates them.
| Ahrefs | Screaming Frog | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | SEO | SEO |
| Pricing model | paid | freemium |
| Price from | Paid | Freemium |
| Upvotes | 5 | 11 |
| What it does | The backlink index most SEO arguments are ultimately settled with. | A desktop crawler that finds what a site audit tool politely omits. |
What Ahrefs is
Ahrefs is a paid SEO toolset built around a backlink and keyword index, used to work out what competitors rank for, track your own positions and find the technical faults holding a site back. The suite is split into named tools: Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Rank Tracker, Site Audit, Content Explorer, Brand Radar, Web Analytics and Bot Analytics. Keywords Explorer is the research end. It holds 28.7 billion keywords across 217 locations, and for any one of them returns Keyword Difficulty, search volume, traffic potential and the parent topic the term sits under, along with a reading of intent as commercial, navigational or informational. Site Explorer handles the competitive side across 185 locations, and goes beyond organic data to report a rival's ad spend, ad copy, CPCs and ad positions country by country. Site Audit is the technical half. It crawls at up to 170,000 URLs per minute, checks for more than 170 technical and on-page problems and rolls the result into a single SEO health score. It executes JavaScript while crawling, so pages that assemble themselves in the browser are audited as a visitor would see them rather than skipped. What separates the plans is mostly scale and memory. Lite, at $129 per month, covers 5 projects, 750 tracked keywords and 100,000 crawl credits, with six months of historical data. Standard at $249 raises that to 20 projects, 2,000 keywords, 500,000 credits and two years of history, and Advanced at $449 goes to 50 projects, 5,000 keywords, 1,500,000 credits and five years. Site Explorer's index reaches back more than ten years, so on the lower plans you are buying access to a shorter window of it rather than a smaller archive. Enterprise, at $1,499 per month on an annual commitment, removes the history limit and adds SSO and uncapped API access. A Starter plan sits at $29 per month. Extra seats are charged on top at $40 per user on Lite, $60 on Standard and $80 on Advanced, capped at 2, 5 and 10 users respectively. Paying annually is stated to save up to 17 percent. Two things sit outside the plan ladder. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is free and gives Site Explorer, Site Audit and Web Analytics, but only for sites you have verified ownership of, so it is a diagnostic for your own properties rather than a way to research anyone else's. Brand Radar AI is sold separately from $199 per month, and on the standard plans tracked AI prompts are capped at 5 on Lite, 10 on Standard and 20 on Advanced.
What Screaming Frog is
The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler that fetches a site's URLs and reports technical SEO problems. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and checks for more than 300 distinct SEO issues. The crawler can render JavaScript, so client rendered pages are crawled as a browser would see them. Custom extraction pulls arbitrary data out of pages using XPath, CSS Path or regular expressions, spelling and grammar checking covers more than 25 languages, and crawls can be scheduled to run automatically. The crawler also connects to Google Analytics, Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights to pull their data in alongside the crawl data. Because the crawl runs on your own machine, that machine sets the ceiling. The application starts in database storage mode with 2GB of RAM allocated, which is generally sufficient for crawls under 200,000 URLs. Memory storage mode keeps the crawl in RAM instead and typically handles 10,000 to 100,000 URLs at the same 2GB default allocation. Crawling more than a million URLs is recommended on an SSD with 16GB of RAM or more, and the stated minimum is a 64 bit operating system with at least 4GB of RAM available. The free version stops each crawl at 500 URLs. A paid licence makes the crawl limit unlimited, bounded only by the machine's memory and disk, and costs 199 pounds per year. Licences are per user, so two people need two separate licences, and each licence runs for one year and must be renewed to continue working. Buying in volume lowers the rate to 189 pounds each for 5 to 9 licences, 179 pounds for 10 to 19 and 169 pounds for 20 or more. Prices can be displayed in pounds, US dollars or euros. The Log File Analyser is a separate product that ingests server logs, verifies search engine bots and reports which URLs those bots requested. It reads Apache logs, the W3C Extended Log File Format and the Amazon Elastic Load Balancing custom log format. The free version is limited to 1,000 log events and one project at a time, and a licence is listed at $139 per year.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.