SEOLinkMap vs Screaming Frog Comparison

Screaming Frog is £199 a year per person, $279 in dollars. SEOLinkMap is $10 a month for ten projects with your whole team included. One runs on your machine and crawls as deep as your hardware allows, the other runs on ours and needs nothing installed.

Screaming Frog crawls deeper than we do. Give it an SSD and 16GB of RAM and it will take on millions of URLs, and the licence covers unlimited crawling for twelve months at a fixed price.

SEOLinkMap draws your site as a map you can interrogate, gives every project its own MCP server, and charges for crawling by the page instead of by the seat.

Licence Costs Compared

Screaming Frog charges £199 per licence per year, dropping to £189 each at five licences, £179 at ten and £169 at twenty. In dollars that is $279, $265, $249 and $235. Crawling is unlimited for the year once you hold one.

SEOLinkMap is $10 a month for ten projects and $50 for fifty. Crawling bills separately on credits that never expire, and a $10 pack covers 2,000 pages.

The two models cross at volume. A million pages costs $1,000 in SEOLinkMap credits and nothing extra on a Screaming Frog licence, while 10,000 pages a month costs $50 here and the full annual fee there.

Free Tier Limits

Screaming Frog's free download crawls 500 URLs and reports broken links, page titles, meta data, hreflang, exact duplicates and XML sitemaps. Crawl configuration, saving and opening crawls, scheduling, JavaScript rendering, custom extraction and the Analytics and Search Console integrations come with the licence.

SEOLinkMap's free tier counts projects rather than URLs. Three projects, the LinkMap and one free crawl a month, with usage credits starting on the paid tiers.

That difference decides which one you can evaluate properly. A 500-URL cap tests a small site end to end; three projects tests a workflow across several sites.

Installation And Hardware

The Windows installer is just under a gigabyte, and Java comes bundled, so there is nothing else to download. Version 24.3 runs on 64-bit Windows 10 and 11, macOS 11 or later, Ubuntu and Fedora.

Memory is set inside the app under File > Settings > Memory Allocation. The default 2GB handles roughly 100,000 to a million URLs, 4GB takes it to about two million, and Screaming Frog recommends a 1TB SSD with 16GB of RAM for regular large crawls.

SEOLinkMap runs in a browser and crawls on our servers. A long crawl of a large site does not occupy the laptop you are working on, and there is no install to keep current on a second machine.

Team Access Models

Every SEOLinkMap plan includes unlimited team members at no extra cost. The junior who logs in twice a month costs exactly what the strategist living in it costs.

Screaming Frog licences are per person and can be used on more than one machine by that person. Five people need five licences, which is £945 a year at the bulk rate.

Sharing works differently in each. Screaming Frog exports crawl files and spreadsheets for a colleague to open, while SEOLinkMap reports share as live links that show current numbers whenever the client opens them.

Crawling Depth And Scale

Screaming Frog has crawl controls SEOLinkMap does not offer at this time. Custom extraction with XPath, CSS Path and regex, custom JavaScript, segmentation, crawl comparison and near-duplicate detection all ship in the SEO Spider, and log file pairing lives in their separate Log File Analyser. The configuration surface is wide enough that technical SEOs build entire workflows on it.

Scale is a hardware question on that side. Database storage on an SSD with 10GB allocated puts around five million URLs in reach.

SEOLinkMap crawls server-side with JavaScript rendering available, so React, Vue and Angular pages get read the way a visitor sees them. Credits never expire, so recrawling next quarter costs what it cost this quarter.

AI Assistant Access

Screaming Frog shipped an official MCP server in version 24 in May 2026. Claude and LM Studio can drive the SEO Spider on your machine, start crawls, export data and run Node scripts against the results, and it needs a licence and the app installed.

SEOLinkMap gives each project its own hosted MCP server. Your assistant reads that project's live crawl, rankings and backlinks over a URL and an API key, with nothing running locally.

The split is where the data sits. Theirs reaches a crawl on one person's disk, ours reaches a project the whole team can query from anywhere, which is what the private MCP guide walks through.

Visualization Methods

The LinkMap draws your entire site as one interactive picture, then heat-maps any metric across it. Equity hoarders and thin clusters show up as shapes before you read a single number.

Click any node to drop into that page's data without losing the map around it.

Screaming Frog ships force-directed crawl diagrams, directory tree graphs and, since version 22, semantic content clusters built from embeddings. They render from whichever crawl is open on that machine.

Integrations And Reporting

SEOLinkMap connects Search Console, Analytics 4, PageSpeed Insights and IndexNow, then correlates them and reports what moves with rankings on your site specifically rather than what usually works.

Reports build in a drag-and-drop builder and share as live links. Backlink prospecting runs $10 a keyword, competitor research $30 or $50 a keyword by tier, and optimization strategies $20 per target page.

Screaming Frog connects Search Console, Analytics, PageSpeed Insights and third-party link metrics, adds OpenAI, Gemini and Ollama for content work, and exports to CSV, Excel and a Looker Studio crawl report.

Best Use Cases

Choose SEOLinkMap if a team needs the same data, if you would rather install nothing, or if you own a website and SEO is not your day job. Ten projects, unlimited seats and a private MCP server come to $10 a month, and the recommendations show the measured relationship behind them rather than a rule of thumb.

Get free SEO recommendations from SEOLinkMap now.

Choose Screaming Frog when you are the technical SEO who wants every configuration knob, when custom extraction and log file work are part of the job, or when you crawl millions of URLs often enough that a flat annual licence beats per-page billing. It has a devoted professional following for good reason.

Start on the free tier and map three projects before you decide anything.