Ahrefs vs Screaming Frog

Ahrefs

If you want to monitor your backlinks in almost real time, Ahrefs is the tool you need. They update their index faster than any other service I have seen, so if you are actively building link through content marketing other tactics, it will be nice to see what links show up naturally from your efforts. If you are looking for the best solution for cleanse a backlink profile, there are better tools out there specializing in those efforts

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Verified User

Supervisor in Marketing

Marketing and Advertising Company, 51-200 employees

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Screaming Frog

It does almost everything I need it to do. But I've heard and can imagine a scenario where a more enterprise-level crawler is necessary for pages with hundred of thousands or even millions of pages. This goes back to my previous comment about it seeming to take a lot of CPU power.

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Ari Roth

Senior Account Manager

Five Blocks Inc.Public Relations and Communications, 11-50 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Ahrefs

8.4

Screaming Frog

6.8

Keyword analysis

9.4

6.4

Backlink management

9.5

6.7

SERP ranking tracking

9.1

6.0

Page grader

8.0

6.1

Competitive analysis

9.2

7.0

Site audit / diagnostics

8.7

9.3

Site recommendations

7.7

7.6

Task management

5.6

5.0

Ahrefs

8.0

Screaming Frog

9.2

Local SEO

8.2

9.6

Social SEO

6.5

8.7

Mobile SEO

8.3

9.2

Global SEO

9.2

9.5

Ahrefs

8.6

Screaming Frog

8.1

Multi-domain support

9.1

8.7

Integration with web analytics tools

8.1

7.5

Pros

The index of links updates very often
The export features allow easy data cross analysis with other data sources
The price is well worth the return of service and usefulness

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Verified User

Supervisor in Marketing

Marketing and Advertising Company, 51-200 employees

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Crawling client sites of up to thousands of pages. Gives you almost every tool that you need to do a proper SEO audit.
Custom extractions using CSSpath, Xpath, or Regex. I'm not even a techy, but their support section here is a huge help with the provided examples.
Customer service and support - Dan is ALWAYS very prompt to respond with helpful answers on Twitter if needed.

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Ari Roth

Senior Account Manager

Five Blocks Inc.Public Relations and Communications, 11-50 employees

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Cons

Price. A little too pricey for small start ups.
Download row keyword limits with different plans. Other services I have used allow unlimited keyword downloads.
Felt like there were so many features and tools, that I never took advantage of the whole platform. More training may help.

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Jordan Comstock

Digital Marketing Specialist

busybusyMarketing and Advertising, 51-200 employees

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Updates. When it wants you to update, you get a pop up, then when you finally agree, it takes you to the website and you have to download it all over again.. Just update!

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Verified User

Strategist in Marketing

Marketing and Advertising Company, 11-50 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

Ahrefs8.0

Based on 4 answers

Ahrefs recently became more expensive. While they offer a large web index of backlinks, some of the modules of analysis available in similar tools make them a better value in many respects. Ahrefs continues to update their interface, but the accuracy of link counts and new/lost data modules calls into question the validity of the provided information.

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Verified User

Strategist in Marketing

Marketing and Advertising Company, 51-200 employees

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Screaming Frog10.0

Based on 2 answers

It has a free version and a paid version - if you find the free version has what you need, it's easy to use that until you need to do some more custom reviews of websites

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Amanda Tessier

SEO Specialist

AltisourceInternet, 11-50 employees

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Usability

Ahrefs7.0

Based on 1 answer

Ahrefs is very easy to use - you can jump right in and understand most of the assets. Overall, the dashboard snapshots give a very good picture of inbound link activity. For deeper analysis of historical trends, the system can become cumbersome, making it hard to do full work without exporting and reformatting the data.

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Verified User

Strategist in Marketing

Marketing and Advertising Company, 51-200 employees

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Screaming Frog8.0

Based on 1 answer

It needs a more intuitive GUI. It just seems like it is built for a technical SEO specialist rather than a general user.

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James Egan

Data and Insight Consultant

SurfingturtleComputer Software, 5001-10,000 employees

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Alternatives Considered

I like these other softwares too. If you work in an agency you will likely have uses for many different platforms. I do like the way that ahrefs indexes and tracks links more than anything else I have used though. I think it is very effective with competitive research as well

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Jordan Comstock

Digital Marketing Specialist

busybusyMarketing and Advertising, 51-200 employees

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I've used other products that I can't remember the name of at the moment that had similar capabilities, but not as robust. As I mentioned before, this app claims to do a few things, and it does them extremely well.

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Verified User

C-Level Executive in Marketing

Marketing and Advertising Company, 1-10 employees

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Return on Investment

Ahrefs allowed us to build smarter SEM strategies and estimate how we ranked against competitors for web traffic
Ahrefs' impact on revenue is difficult to measure because it is one tool in a larger suite. Alone, it does not drive leads but supports the efforts of a team to grow traffic.

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Amanda Tessier

Senior Associate, Digital Marketing

AltisourceFinancial Services, 5001-10,000 employees

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