Likelihood to Recommend It is common practice for developers to search for REST endpoints on other websites in order to retrieve data from other websites in a structured format such as JSON. However, not all websites have built distinct REST APIs; in this situation, Apify is quite beneficial. The majority of the time, the data that an organization collects is what is considered to be of the utmost importance. In comparison to the other systems that are currently accessible, Apify makes it simple to supply clean data.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Fast response time, easy to talk to on human and technical level. Scalable solution capable of adding additional feature requirements. Well documented API, we are able to do some changes by ourselves. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Managing a big number of people and tasks. Larger scale monitoring system. Allow users to search and replace datasets by enhancing APIs. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Usability Easy for me to use because I have using the product for a long time and understand the ins and outs of it. If I was a newbie, I would be completely lost. It does take some prior knowledge to operate this software and understanding of what a crawl means
Read full review Support Rating I was very happy with the support I received from Apify. They are always ready to answer all your questions and help solve problems you have.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating If the software was a little easier to use for beginners, there really wouldn't be an issue
Read full review Alternatives Considered Although the purposes and aims of all three products vary widely, I have found Apify to be the most effective option for web scraping for academic purposes. As someone with only a few months' worths of experience with web scraping, I have found Apify's detailed blog posts and very friendly customer support invaluable in my research.
Read full review 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
Read full review Return on Investment Data gathering process is fully automized with high relevance output. Data are up-to-date with minimum delay. We use extra time for better decision making process instead of report preparation. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots