LaunchAudit vs Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog is the crawler serious SEO professionals actually use, and has been for over a decade. It is desktop software that will crawl hundreds of thousands of URLs and let you interrogate the result however you like. It is not trying to be what we are, and we are not trying to replace it.
What Screaming Frog is good at
Stated first, and stated properly. If this section were not here, nothing below it would be worth reading.
- Crawl depth and scale nothing browser-based can match.
- Extremely configurable — custom extraction, regex filters, log file analysis.
- Integrates with Search Console, Analytics and PageSpeed for combined reporting.
- The free tier covers 500 URLs, which is more than most small sites need.
Where they differ
| Aspect | Screaming Frog | LaunchAudit |
|---|---|---|
| Form | Desktop software you install, configure and run. | A URL box. Nothing to install. |
| Output | Spreadsheets you filter and interpret yourself. | A ranked list of problems with the fix attached. |
| Security | Not its purpose. It will find broken links, not leaked keys. | Security is the highest-weighted category. |
| Expertise assumed | Substantial. The tool is powerful because it assumes you know what to ask. | None. |
Use Screaming Frog if…
If you do SEO professionally, or your site has thousands of pages, Screaming Frog is the better tool and it is not close. Buy the licence.
Use LaunchAudit if…
If you own one site, do not do SEO for a living, and want to know what is wrong with it in a minute rather than after an afternoon of filtering columns.
Settle it in a minute
Both are free to try. Run ours on your site and see whether it finds something the other one did not — that is a more useful answer than any comparison table, including this one.