ReachKit vs Screaming Frog

What Screaming Frog does better

Scale, and it is not close. ReachKit reads one page. The SEO Spider walks every URL it can reach and reports across the whole set — broken links and server errors, page titles and meta descriptions that are missing, duplicated, too long or too short, meta robots and directives, hreflang attributes, exact duplicate pages, and XML sitemap generation. If your site has more than a handful of pages, a page-at-a-time checker cannot tell you what a crawl can.

The free version is unusually generous about how it is free. It crawls up to 500 URLs in a single crawl, and Screaming Frog states plainly that it is free to download and use without any sign up or email capture — no form, no daily cap, no drip sequence. For a small site, 500 URLs is often the entire thing.

The paid licence is £199 per year, and it removes the crawl limit and unlocks the parts the free version withholds: crawl configuration, saving and reopening crawls, scheduling, JavaScript rendering, crawl comparison, near-duplicate content, custom robots.txt, mobile usability, structured data validation, accessibility auditing, segmentation and free technical support. Licences last one year and must be renewed.

Where it leaves a solo founder stranded

It is a professional instrument, and it assumes a professional is holding it. The SEO Spider is a desktop app you install, configure and run; it produces a spreadsheet-shaped view of tens of thousands of cells, and it has no opinion whatsoever about which of them matters. That is a deliberate and defensible design — it is a measurement tool, and measurement tools should not editorialise — but it means the analysis is entirely your job.

It also has no idea what you sell. A crawl can tell you 40 pages have short titles. It cannot tell you that one of those 40 is the page your buyers would land on if you ranked for the query your rival currently owns, because nothing in a crawl knows what that query is. The list is complete and unordered, and completeness is not the founder's problem — priority is.

And 500 URLs is a crawl limit, not a usage limit. There is no free tier that keeps working as your site grows past it; there is a £199 licence.

What ReachKit does instead

ReachKit measures 8 on-page signals — page title, meta description, heading structure, content depth, structured data, canonical URL, social share tags, and images & alt text — from your live HTML, in the browser, with nothing to install. The free checker at reachkit.app/tools/on-page-check takes no signup and no email, and allows 30 checks per hour.

State the trade plainly: 8 signals on one page is a tiny fraction of what a 300-issue crawl surfaces, and ReachKit will never find your broken links, your orphan pages or your hreflang mistakes. If those are your problem, download the Spider.

What ReachKit adds is the half a crawler structurally cannot have. The 8 signals are combined by geometric mean with your raw search footprint — how many real queries you already rank for — into one 0–100 Discoverability Score, so the number reflects whether people can find you rather than how many assertions passed. It is deterministic: same URL, same score, and no language model touches it.

The paid plan turns that into a ranked weekly action plan — one task surfaced per day, each item citing the evidence it came from — and the next weekly scan re-measures, so a score gain is attributed to the on-page fix you shipped. €29.50/month, the 50% launch price, locked for life, normally €59.

Who should pick which

Pick Screaming Frog if your site has more than a page or two worth auditing, if you are doing a migration, or if you want the raw, complete, unopinionated measurement and are happy to do the thinking. At £199 a year for unlimited crawling it is one of the best-value tools in the industry.

Pick ReachKit if you do not want to install anything, if the site is small enough that the crawl would return one row that matters, or if you have already got the list and what you need is the order.