SHORT ANSWER
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a general technical-seo crawler. It has no dedicated feature for matching the urls of an old site to a new one: its own migration guide builds a redirect map from near-duplicate detection or vector embeddings, and calls the result a base to check by hand. Silentfrog, which we make, does only that job — it crawls both sites, matches every old url on slug, title and h1, flags the uncertain rows for review and exports the map in your platform’s import format. Screaming Frog stays the better tool for auditing the redirects once they are live.
The short comparison
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Silentfrog | |
|---|---|---|
| what it is | general seo crawler, desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux | redirect mapper for relaunches, in the browser or as a macOS app |
| old → new matching | no dedicated feature; near duplicates or vector embeddings as a workaround | built in: exact path first, then slug, title and h1 |
| matches on | page content (near duplicates, embeddings) | url slug, title and h1 — not body text |
| review workflow | export to a spreadsheet and check there | rows sorted into exact, fuzzy, needs review and unmatched; edit and verify in the table |
| whole directories | by hand | one wildcard rule, written in the importer's own notation |
| export | csv of the crawl data | Webflow, Shopify, Redirection, Yoast, Rank Math, Squarespace, .htaccess, nginx, plain pairs |
| javascript rendering | yes (paid) | no — server-rendered html only |
| checking live redirects | yes — list mode, redirect chains | no |
| free version | 500 urls, no near duplicates, no crawl comparison | 50 pages of the old site, no signup |
| paid | £199 / $279 / €245 per licence per year (as listed 24 september 2026) | 46 € or 150 € per relaunch, 249 € once for the desktop app |
Screaming Frog facts come from its pricing page and its own tutorials, linked below where they are used.
How a redirect map is built in Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog’s site migration tutorial describes the route: crawl the old and the new urls together in list mode with near duplicates switched on, then sort the near-duplicate export in a spreadsheet so each old url sits next to its closest new one. The tutorial is frank about what comes out — it “won’t always be perfect and will require you to analyse carefully, but it can give you an easy 1:1 url redirect mapping base to work from”.
Since 2025 there is a second route: a vector embeddings tutorial that sends page content to OpenAI or Gemini (or a local Ollama model) and reports the closest semantically similar address for each url. It needs an api key on top of the licence, and Screaming Frog describes it as “not a purpose-built redirect mapping feature”.
What is not a mapping tool, though it sounds like one: the crawl comparison has a “url mapping” option, but it maps one url structure onto another with regex so that two crawls can be compared — staging against live, before against after. It does not produce a redirect list.
Near duplicates, crawl comparison and the ai integrations are all unavailable in the free version, which also stops at 500 urls.
How the same map is built in Silentfrog
Two urls start a run: the old site and the new one, a staging domain like your-site.webflow.io included. Both are crawled, and robots.txt and the sitemaps are read as well, so pages nothing links to any more still get a row.
Identical paths pair up first. Every remaining old page is then scored against every new page — slug similarity weighted 0.5, title 0.3, h1 0.2 (how matching works). From 85 % a match is accepted, from 60 % it is flagged needs review, below that it stays unmatched. The table opens with the least certain rows on top; you fix those, redirect whole folders with one wildcard rule, and download the file in the spelling of the importer you picked.
8 pages · 2 exact · 3 fuzzy · 1 need review · 1 unmatched · 2 verified
| ✓ | Match | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| /kampagne/sommer-2023Sommeraktion 2023 — 20 % auf alle Zangen | unmatched | 940 | 31% | 200 | ||
| /produkte/seitenschneiderSeitenschneider 160 mm | review | 612 | 72% | 200 | ||
| /blog/relaunch-checklisteDie Relaunch-Checkliste | fuzzy | 421 | 88% | 200 | ||
| /blog/ladezeitLadezeit verbessern | fuzzy | 143 | 91% | 200 | ||
| /blog/301-vs-302301 oder 302? | fuzzy | 305 | 92% | 200 | ||
| /ueber-unsÜber uns | manual | 188 | 100% | 200 | ||
| /produkte/kombizangeKombizange 180 mm | exact | 274 | 100% | 200 | ||
| /kontaktKontakt | exact | 96 | 100% | 200 |
the results table: old paths on the left, matched new paths on the right, each row badged exact, fuzzy, needs review, manual or unmatched, sorted worst confidence first.
Where Screaming Frog is the better choice
- pages whose slug and title both changed. Silentfrog compares urls, titles and headlines, not body text. A page rewritten under a new name and a new url scores low and lands in review or unmatched; content-based matching can still pair it.
- client-side rendered sites. Screaming Frog renders javascript in its paid version. Silentfrog reads server-rendered html only.
- checking the redirects after go-live. Upload the old urls in list mode and export the redirect chains. Silentfrog builds the map; it does not test the live site afterwards.
- everything that is not redirects. If you already pay for a licence and live in it daily, the map is one more job in a tool you know.
Where Silentfrog is the better choice
- the map is the job. No near-duplicate threshold to tune, no spreadsheet step: the matching, the review and the export are one screen.
- the file your platform imports. Webflow’s
fromUrl,toUrl, Shopify’sRedirect from,Redirect to, the WordPress plugins’ formats, Squarespace url mappings, .htaccess or nginx — with directory rules as wildcards where the importer supports them. - no licence for one relaunch. The first 50 pages are free without signup; a paid plan covers one relaunch rather than a year.
- traffic first. Import a Search Console export and sort the table by clicks, so the pages that matter are checked first.
The limits to know: the hosted version crawls up to 2000 pages per site from Frankfurt; the desktop app crawls from your own machine, up to 100000 pages, and reaches staging sites behind an ip allowlist.
Using both on one relaunch
A split that plays to each tool’s strength:
- before launch: build the map in Silentfrog, review the flagged rows, import the file into the new site.
- for the unmatched rows that are really rewritten pages: look them up by content — in Screaming Frog if you have it, by hand if there are only a few.
- after launch: crawl the old url list in Screaming Frog's list mode and confirm every url answers 301 and then 200 in one hop.
EXAMPLE
a 400-page agency site moves from WordPress to Webflow. Silentfrog accepts 310 rows, flags 60 for review and leaves 30 unmatched; 12 of those are case studies that were rewritten under new names, found by content and added by hand. After go-live a list crawl of the 400 old urls turns up two redirect chains from an older migration.
In short
- Screaming Frog has no dedicated redirect mapper; near duplicates and embeddings are its workarounds, both paid.
- Silentfrog only builds redirect maps: crawl, match on slug, title and h1, review, export per platform.
- Content-based matching finds pages that were renamed completely; Silentfrog's matching does not.
- Screaming Frog is the tool for checking live redirects after go-live; Silentfrog does not do that.
- For a relaunch, the two cover different halves of the same job.