Free redirect mapping tools: what they do and where they stop

redirect mapper — decides the target. Given the old urls and the new ones, it pairs each old url with its closest new equivalent, on the path, the slug, the title or the content, and tells you how sure it is.

301 redirect generator — writes the rules. Given pairs that are already decided, it prints them as .htaccess lines, an nginx map or a platform’s csv. Useful, and trivial: one line of shell does the same (csv to .htaccess and nginx, Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare).

Most searches for a “free 301 redirect generator” during a relaunch are really looking for the first. The pairing is where the hours go; the formatting is a minute.

The browser mappers and Redirect Buddy all export .htaccess, nginx and csv; Patrick Stox’s also writes Cloudflare _redirects and Bulk Redirects. The notebooks (another by Sally Mills, more in redirect mapping tools compared) output a spreadsheet you format yourself.

Four of the six options above start from a list of old urls. That list is the hardest part of the job, and a free tool that skips it has not made it free; it has handed it back to you. A complete old list means the pages the navigation links to, plus the sitemaps, plus the pages nothing links to any more but which still get clicks or backlinks (finding orphan urls). The new list has the same problem on a staging domain.

The free ways to get the lists: Screaming Frog’s free version up to 500 urls, the sitemaps read by hand, the Search Console pages export (the interface caps it at 1,000 rows). Combined, that covers most small sites, at the cost of merging and de-duplicating three files before the mapper sees anything.

Nothing is held back except the page count. On the free tier you get:

• the crawl of both sites, robots.txt and sitemaps included, plus any url list you paste: a Search Console export, an old redirect file.
• the matching: identical paths first, then slug, title and h1, with every row sorted into exact, fuzzy, needs review or unmatched (how matching works).
• the editing: re-map a row, verify rows, redirect a whole folder with one directory rule, import traffic data and sort by clicks.
• every export: Webflow, Shopify, Redirection, Yoast, Rank Math, Squarespace, .htaccess, nginx and plain pairs, plus the generic audit csv.

The limit is 50 pages per site: the old site has its own count and the new site its own, so a relaunch where both sites stay within 50 pages is free from start to finish. No signup, no email. A crawl that reaches the limit still matches, shows and exports what it found, and estimates how big the old site really is from the sitemap and the queue, so you see the size before deciding anything.

A relaunch map is a list of a client’s pages before they are public, which makes “free” worth a second look: what does the tool do with the data?

browser mappers — Patrick Stox’s tool runs parsing, matching and exports locally in the browser and only goes to the network for the optional sitemap import, content matching and liveness checks. Growthack’s says the url lists never leave your computer. For lists that must not leave the machine, these are the strongest choice.

upload tools — Redirect Buddy works on the file you upload; read its terms if the lists are confidential.

colab notebooks — run in your Google account, on files you put into it.

Silentfrog — a browser may not read another site’s html, so page fetches go through our server, which fetches a batch of urls and returns the result without storing it. The queue, the matching, every edit and the saved session stay in your browser, and there are no accounts. The desktop app fetches from your own machine instead, free up to the same 50 pages, and reaches staging sites behind an ip allowlist.

Stay free when the site is small, you already have complete lists of old and new urls, and the pages kept their names. A browser mapper and twenty minutes of review will do. Stay free, too, if you are comfortable in Python and want full control over the matching; the notebooks are excellent.

Pay when one of these is true:

• you do not have the lists. Assembling them by hand from a crawler, sitemaps and Search Console is the part a crawling mapper replaces.
• the old site is past the free limits and the alternative is splitting it into batches or pairing hundreds of rows yourself.
• the file has to go into a platform with its own import format and wildcard notation, and you would rather not reformat it.

For scale: Silentfrog’s Medium plan covers an old site of up to 150 pages for 46 €, Unlimited any size for 150 €, each once per relaunch rather than per month; the hosted crawl stops at 2000 pages per site. Weigh that against the hours of pairing it replaces, not against zero. If the honest answer is “one afternoon in a spreadsheet”, the spreadsheet wins (spreadsheet vs automated).

• A mapper decides the targets; a 301 generator only formats pairs you already have.
• Free browser mappers and Colab notebooks match url lists or crawl exports you bring.
• Redirect Buddy is free to 500 urls; Screaming Frog's free version collects up to 500 urls but does not map.
• Silentfrog crawls both sites and is free up to 50 pages per site, with every feature and export.
• Pay when the lists are missing, the site is large, or the import format matters; otherwise free is enough.