Apify vs. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Apify excels at mass data tracking, like monitoring e-commerce pricing or scraping dynamic websites cost-effectively. Its pre-built automations are great for plugging data into automation stacks. It is less appropriate for simple, one-time tasks where a basic browser extension is faster, or for pure integration work where you just move data between standard apps without scraping the web.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is well suited to auditing brand new websites, when you need a quick, holistic view of the websites technical issues. Its great for providing a top line view of a websites architecture, perhaps for a new business approach where you need to assess the scale of work to maintain a website. Its also a useful tool in situations where you might need to see whether a large scale change in the website has taken place, you can see word counts, pages and their https response codes. Screaming Frog may be less useful if you need an idea of the customer experience on a website, it doesn't really provide information that helps assess how fast a website loads, what issues might come up when trying to convert or faults with the payment process. Screaming Frog is largely a technical SEO focused tool, it also can't assess the quality of a websites, layout or the quality of the content used on the website. As mentioned, its niche, but very useful within that niche.

• I love how intuitive the interface is. Even without deep coding knowledge, I can set up workflows quickly. The ready‑made actors are extremely helpful and cover most of my use cases.
• Apify makes it incredibly easy to automate repetitive web tasks. The platform is stable, the actors run smoothly, and the logs give me full visibility into every step.
• Apify offers impressive flexibility — from custom actors to API integrations and scheduling options. It scales well even with large workloads, and the performance has been consistent.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• I think monetization part needs some improvement. Sometimes it stops working.
• Second issue is that when you run actor locally on your device using Apify run command, it runs fine and does not show errors. However, when you run on Apify platform, it starts showing error that this python based library is not supported etc. I think, error logging needs to be improved.
• Issue support is very slow. If you create an issue it takes a lot of time that somebody reply.
• Automated testing also needs to be improved. Testers run simple tests and if extra keys are used or something else, test is failed.

Incentivized

• Requires Java. This isn't a huge deal as many computers already have it installed, but it's yet another 3rd party component.
• The free version has a crawl limit of 500 pages per site. This is fine for smaller sites, but if you're running a big e-commerce site then you'll need to pay for Pro version.
• The user interface isn't very pretty. This is an analytics tool so it doesn't really have to be, but it might be helpful for improving the overall user experience.

Incentivized

It's the best because you can just load in a limited amount of money and limit your financial exposure to using a tool like this. so renewing isn't a big consideration... i know that i'm going to need the tool in the future and i'll load it with money accordingly when im ready.

The tool has become integrated into our teams daily workings and I have yet to find a tool other than scremaing frog to replicate all of our use cases for it. It's a great tool and we're sticking with it

Incentivized

Apify is incredibly user friendly and has a very simple and direct dashboard that includes tool tips and onboarding for extra help. Plus support is always available when needed to assist with anything you cannot figure out or need help with.

The main problem of Screaming Frog SEO Spider is it being an offline software which limits itself to a single pc and that creates problem when multi user agents want to get involved or even work on it, it’s a difficult task to collaborate on it and do research for keywords at one place

Incentivized

We never needed to contact support directly because the platform was always clear and easy to use. The documentation is thorough, there are plenty of how-to guides, and YouTube.

Screaming Frog is a relatively primitive system, and doesn't need to be supported by devs or other software. Screaming Frog does interface directly with some programs that are most needed (Google Analytics, Search Console, Page Speed Insights), so that's convenient. It isn't widely supported by other programs, but it also doesn't need to be.

Incentivized

1. Strategy for Anti-Blocking & Proxies 2. Cost Optimization (Compute Units) 3. Data Management & Storage

Incentivized

If the software was a little easier to use for beginners, there really wouldn't be an issue

Incentivized

If I would not have come across Apify I would have built my own scrapers and extractors but this would have been very time consuming and intense in maintenance so the main advantage was that it was working very quickly, it had all the scrapers I needed and it just kept working without any issues

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is probably the best non-client facing SEO audit tool in terms of technical SEO. There are other tools on the market that do a more complete job of keyword tracking, competitive analysis, and backlink profiles...however, for analyzing the technical SEO health of any website, Screaming Frog is the best

Incentivized

• Some tools have saved us more than 20 hours of work per week.
• In some cases, it has allowed us to earn more than $5,000 per client. The results speak for themselves.
• Para algunas empresas, la compra de bases de datos puede resultar muy costosa, y gracias a Apify, hemos podido crearlas por menos de 300 dólares.

• Increased employee efficiency - We spend many less hours tracking down and reporting simple meta tags.
• Better Client Servicing - We are able to ensure we have a total look at a client's site before we recommend anything.
• True Pricing Structure - We are able to more accurately predict how much help a client may need based on factors such as size of site, number of redirects, proper use of meta tags, etc.

Incentivized