Screaming Frog alternatives for a site migration

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the default crawler for good reasons, and this page is not an argument against it. For a one-off relaunch, though, three things push people to look elsewhere:

• The free version stops at 500 urls and leaves out javascript rendering, crawl comparison and near-duplicate content (pricing page). Near duplicates are what its own migration tutorial uses to build a redirect map.
• The licence is per user, per year: £199, $279 or €245 for one to four licences, as listed 3 october 2026. That is good value for someone who crawls every week and an odd fit for a relaunch every few years.
• There is no dedicated old-to-new matcher. The tutorial calls the near-duplicate result “a base to work from” that needs careful analysis. We compare the two approaches in detail in Silentfrog vs Screaming Frog.

does it read sitemaps and url lists? — a crawler that only follows links misses the pages nothing links to any more, which are often the ones with backlinks. The inventory needs sitemaps, a Search Console export and any old redirect list as seeds.

does it crawl a staging site? — the new site is usually on a staging domain or behind an ip allowlist before launch. A desktop app reaches what your machine reaches; a cloud crawler needs it public or allowlisted.

does it render javascript? — only matters if either site builds its links in the browser. Most cms sites do not.

what does it export? — for the map, the file your platform imports. For the checks, a list of urls with status code and final target.

how is it priced? — per year, per month, per project or free. A one-off relaunch and an agency with ten a year want different answers.

Dedicated mappers that work from url lists rather than crawls (redirection.io, URLMatcher, Redirect Buddy, the free browser tools and Colab notebooks) are compared in redirect mapping tools compared; this page is about replacing the crawler.

Sitebulb — the closest like-for-like replacement: a desktop crawler with an audit report on top, and a cloud version for teams. Desktop Lite crawls up to 10,000 urls per audit, Pro up to 500,000; there is a 14-day trial without a card, and Sitebulb Cloud starts at £95 a month (pricing; desktop prices are shown per currency on the page and not repeated here). Its own migration guide uses it to plan the inventory and to re-crawl the old urls after launch, not to generate the map. Pick it if you want a full seo crawler with better-explained reports and are happy to pay monthly.

JetOctopus — a cloud crawler with log-file analysis, aimed at large sites. Plans start at $349 (€299) a month for 500,000 crawled urls, with 25 % off yearly, and a 7-day trial covering 10,000 urls (pricing). Logs are the useful part in a migration: they show which old urls Googlebot still requests weeks after launch. Pick it for a site in the hundreds of thousands of urls where a desktop crawl runs out of memory.

Lumar — formerly Deepcrawl, an enterprise cloud crawler. Prices are by quote only (pricing). Pick it if you are an enterprise team that already buys tools this way and needs scheduled crawls across many sites.

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools — free, for sites you verify. Its site audit checks for more than 170 technical issues with 5,000 crawl credits per month per project, and credits are only used by html pages that answer 200, so redirects and broken links do not count (Ahrefs Webmaster Tools). That makes it a good post-launch check on a domain you own: the redirects you are testing cost nothing. Pick it if you can verify the domain and the site is small enough for the monthly credits. It does not crawl a staging site you cannot verify, and it does not map.

httpstatus.io — no crawl at all: paste urls, get status codes, response headers and the full redirect chain, up to 100 urls at a time for free, with export to csv or Google Sheets (httpstatus.io). Pick it for the after-launch check of a small site: paste the old url list, look for anything that is not one 301 followed by a 200.

Silentfrog — does only the middle job. It crawls the old and the new site, reads their robots.txt and sitemaps, pairs identical paths first and scores the rest on slug, title and h1, flags the uncertain rows for review, and writes the file your platform imports: Webflow, Shopify, the WordPress plugins, Squarespace, .htaccess, nginx or plain pairs. Free up to 50 pages per site without signup; a relaunch with a bigger old site is 46 € or 150 € once, not a subscription. Pick it if the map is the job. It does not render javascript, does not compare body text, and does not test the live redirects afterwards; pair it with one of the checkers above. The hosted version crawls up to 2000 pages per site, the desktop app up to 100000 and reaches staging behind an ip allowlist.

If the goal is a single relaunch without buying a crawler licence, the free tiers above fit together into a complete workflow, each tool doing the part it is good at:

• Inventory. The old site’s sitemaps, the Search Console pages export and any list of redirects the site already carries. Silentfrog reads the sitemaps itself and takes the other two as a pasted url list; for a crawl report beyond that, Screaming Frog’s free version covers 500 urls.
• Map. Silentfrog crawls both sites and matches them, free up to 50 pages per site. Larger sites either pay once for the relaunch or fall back on a browser mapper fed with the lists from the first step.
• Import. The export in your platform’s format, imported before dns moves, so the redirects are live the minute the new site is.
• Verify. httpstatus.io, 100 old urls at a time, straight after the switch; Ahrefs Webmaster Tools once the domain is verified, for a recurring audit in the weeks after.

What this stack does not do is render javascript or compare page content. A site whose links only exist after scripts run, or a redesign that renamed every page and rewrote every title, is where a paid crawler with rendering or embeddings earns its licence.

• A migration needs an inventory, a map and a post-launch check; no single crawler does the map.
• Sitebulb is the closest desktop replacement; JetOctopus and Lumar suit very large sites in the cloud.
• Free: Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for verified sites, httpstatus.io for 100 urls at a time, Screaming Frog's own 500-url version.
• For the old-to-new map, Silentfrog crawls both sites and exports your platform's file, free up to 50 pages per site.
• Whatever builds the map, check every old url after launch: one 301, then 200.