Website Auditor vs Screaming Frog Review: General features

Both Screaming Frog and Website Auditor, being primarily a SEO spider, are good to crawl a website and get the complete picture of its web pages, URL addresses, redirect chains, missing tags and meta descriptions, and much more. They are both great to do quick and easy SEO audits for site migrations, pre-launch and after-launch checks. SEO spider helps ensure that your on-site SEO changes don't break anything, or find issues that affect crawl budget.

Both SEO spiders boast the ability to crawl websites quite quickly, but if your projects are huge, this may take time. For that reason, there are several modifiers for the crawlers that make them handier to use. Quite often you may want to crawl only part of your website – for example, only the URLs you've recently modified. In Screaming Frog, you can set the crawl mode to List and manually define the URLs to crawl in an uploaded list. Similarly, in WebSite Auditor you can limit the scan depth, the crawl speed, set to execute Javascript code found on pages, etc.

In both the tools you can pick the user agent, to crawl as desktop or mobile bots, or select to crawl password-protected sites. Screaming Frog SEO spider can verify bots through log file analysis.

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The tools are different in the way they present the results of your website audit for analysis. Screaming Frog has a pretty simple user interface and so is easy to use. Screaming Frog organizes the crawled data with tabs, rows and columns in spreadsheets. You can set a filter and go through the details to quickly spot the issues.

The WebSite Auditor keeps its SEO audit data logically clustered into subtopics. The tool has a more explanatory interface, giving additional information related to the SEO errors found on-site.

While appearance is a matter of taste, with Screaming Frog you've got to be aware of what source demands special attention. WebSite Auditor not only helps to identify SEO issues, but also recommends how to fix them, something that Screaming Frog users really miss.

Website Auditor vs Screaming Frog Review: Technical site audit

Website Auditor, the same as Screaming Frog, is a great tool to identify and fix technical SEO issues. Technical SEO audits will help you discover all site-wide issues that spoil your on-site SEO: find broken links or missing tags, review the backlink profile, measure mobile-friendliness and implement localization.

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Both the tools include a useful visualization functionality to see internal linking of pages and the structure of the website. The visualization tree from Website Auditor is actionable: you can add links and new pages and rebuild the project to see how changes affect the total picture.

Website Auditor vs Screaming Frog Review: On-page optimization

Both the tools allow auditing mobile-friendliness site-wide by means of mobile bot crawls. For holding SEO audits of individual pages, Screaming Frog leads to Google's test for mobile friendliness and Page Speed Insights, while Website Auditor gives access to the technology in-app.

Screaming Frog is not able to optimize content: it only scrapes the necessary information for a further analysis and optimization with additional tools. An interesting editing feature is its special tab to optimize and review the snippet in SERPs. In the licensed version, Screaming Frog reviews your document spelling and grammar.

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While WebSite Auditor shares many similar features with Screaming Frog, it is more than just a SEO spider. Website Auditor has a Page Audit submodule looking at SEO issues on specific pages. The tool has an in-built content editing app that allows on-page optimization on the fly. There is also the TF-IDF module which recommends what keywords you should be using more or less. After all the changes made, check the SEO optimization score recalculated.

Besides, there is the Keyword Mapping module that will help you map the keywords to their landing pages and keep all optimization efforts in order.

Website Auditor vs Screaming Frog Review: SEO reports to automate your business workflow

If you dig spreadsheets, then both WebSite Auditor and Screaming Frog will serve you excellent CSV files with the necessary information.

However, if you are more into visually rich and vocal reports for your SEO audits (and customizable ones!), then it is better to go with WebSite Auditor. WebSite Auditor allows its users to extract practically any chunk of data as a CSV file, but it also generates marvelous reports that will impress your company clients and teammates.

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One of the most exciting things is that the report function allows users to customize what a future report will look like and which data it will show. And even to preset color and font settings!
And finally, it is possible to save a report to your computer, share it with your digital marketing team via a shareable link, email to clients, or upload to a website.

Screaming Frog allows its users to export reports only in CSV format and Excel. And though they will surely contain comprehensive data, it will be a challenge to impress the clients with it.

Pricing plans

When you want to check your own website with several hundred URLs, free versions will be absolutely enough for all your needs.

If you run an online business, especially if it's an SEO company or a digital agency, you will need to have reports: for clients, for the boss, or for your team of copywriters and webmasters. Creating beautiful reports that will speak to your clients without any additional explanations from your side may become a real pain in the neck. Imagine a level of relief when your auditing tool is able to do automatized tasks, create workable reports and send them without bothering you.

The bottom line

It is obvious that WebSite Auditor is not just a web crawler with a sophisticated design, it is so much more than that. It is able to both do technical SEO audits and cater to site's optimization. It is more client-friendly when it comes to company reports.

At the same time, Screaming Frog, being a specifically auditing tool, is very fast and efficient in what it does. It has an old-school design which is a thing of its creators — they know that people love the tool as it is and they do not hurry to kill its authenticity.

Thus, this tool review compares in what way Website Auditor and Screaming Frog SEO spider are different at large, and how much they're helpful to handle your on-site SEO. They both have some unique functions that can be more appealing when choosing a SEO audit tool. Anyway, everybody makes their own choice, the comparison table is just the facts. We hope it is as useful as we intended to present it. Happy SEO!