Rankinity is well-suited for agencies that provide SEO services for some clients. It's a great stepping stone tool while an agency scales it's services and builds a book of SEO clients since you pay per keyword check. The frequency of checks can be set for each client (project) so if services are performed monthly, you can set checks to happen at the beginning of the month
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.
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.
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
We've seen one major platform update (user interface overhaul). This has made the system much easier to use. There are some features that could still be improved like historical rankings but overall the system is good and aligns with the expectation for what you pay for it. Not a whole lot to complain about on the usability side of things
The Screaming Frog crawler can do a very exhaustive SEO page audit. It is able to detect errors like 4xx, 5xx, 3xx, etc on page. It is also able to check basic SEO hygiene on the page like missing page title, lengthy page title, etc. It can also check advanced SEO stuff like missing canonical or hreflang.
No chat support, only email support. Whenever I've used their support system, I have received responses in 1-2 business days and the solution addressed my needs/concerns. I've really only had a couple of instances where I've needed to reach out to their support team since the system is pretty straight forward and easy to use.
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.
Rankinity is simpler solution that's different than the all-in-one type solutions we've also used. A lot of it comes down to process and how service offerings are built for clients. We use Rankinity for clients where we're tracking a lot of keywords in a lot of different geographic areas because it's a more cost-effective solutions. But for larger clients, we typically rely on all-in-one solutions that offer more tools for SEO.
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
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.
