Ahrefs vs. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

It gives the best report to us which helps us to find the opportunity to build backlinks. Another main feature that makes Ahrefs a safe and sound approach to SEO is that it provides information about duplicate content, URLs, redirects along with other errors that can be dangerous to the website.

Incentivized

Screaming Frog tracks the crawl level, internal links, outbound links, title tags, and meta descriptions of the pages it crawls. It also adds HTTP status codes, title tag length, meta description length, H1, H2 tags and lengths, and canonical tags. Many of these elements are also broken into their own tabs at the top so that you can easily focus in on problem areas. You can right-click on any URL for many more options. The program is definitely valuable to anyone who is looking to gauge factors regarding SEO. However, if you are not a web designer/admin, you're going to lack an understanding of the information it provides.

Incentivized

• Their backlink database is still one of the most up to date we've seen when compared to similar tools.
• The user interface is very intuitive and easy to learn.
• They provide you with a lot of great information and the ability to set a date range can really help you narrow things down.

Incentivized

• Collects all indexed HTML pages of the site. This helps for when we are redirecting old URLs to the URLs of a clients new site.
• Finds all page titles that are too long or too short and allows us to address them more quickly than waiting for a program such as Moz. It's more immediate.
• If we have duplicate meta data on pages, this program allows us to find them, sort them, export them and take care of them in a timely manner. In our business (as for many) time is money.

Incentivized

• Ahrefs Site Explorer provides an overview of domain health and the issues that can be fixed, and sometimes the suggested "critical issues" can be an astronomical number and not accurate.
• For certain features on Ahrefs Site Explorer, there can a more elaborate description/guide on how to utilize the feature.

Incentivized

• Customizing the crawler - It takes a little bit of playing around with the settings to understand what each of them controls and what options need to be checked or unchecked to get the right amount of information.
• Cannot Crawl a large site - Screaming Frog runs out of memory when asked to crawl a large site, even after playing around with memory settings and allocating additional memory.

Incentivized

Their index is too vast to ignore when looking at a complete backlink profile. We find links in Ahrefs that do not appear in any other link detection tool. For this reason, it's a must for our agency to use for the foreseeable future. Plus, it's very affordable considering the data you get

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

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.

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

Ahrefs has always been responsive when there's been a technical issue with the site. There are usually very little problems, but if there are, they announce it on their social media accounts which keeps its customers informed. Email support is prompt and the customer service people are very helpful, knowledgable and friendly.

Incentivized

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

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

Incentivized

It's competitive with Semrush, Moz and other tools of that same ilk. It's great for serious SEO work - not at the Enterprise level - but at the small business, small agency level. I would not consider it competitive with BrightEdge, Conductor, SEOClarity, etc. - but it IS competitive and on par with the tools that are one level below those big enterprise tools.

Incentivized

The biggest difference between DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog is cost. Screaming Frog is significantly cheaper, and fits within a budget much easier. For most websites that aren't huge it crawls quicker to. DeepCrawl is the better tool for analysing larger websites and is easier to use in some ways, with a very friendly interface and some extras features that are useful. Ultimately price was the deciding factor though.

• Ahrefs has helped save hours of work because it functions as an all-in-one SEO tool. Before Ahrefs, I would have to switch toolsets multiple times, compile the reports, then organize data. Ahrefs as an all in one helped managed the chaos that having too many tools create.
• Backlink data is crucial to predicting content success. Ahrefs has provided us with better backlink data, allowing our predictions to be more accurate.
• Ahrefs has helped us cut away from having another rank tracker subscription. Their rank tracking tool is good enough to not warrant a dedicated rank tracker, helping us save on costs.

Incentivized

• It has allowed me to make impactful and intelligent recommendations to clients. This has in turned deepened the client relationships and led to steady ongoing ROI.
• It has also allowed me to diagnose interesting technical issues for non-client sites (like Forbes) which formed the basis for very cool company blog posts.
• The investment is very low - this tool does 99% of what I need for a fraction of what other industry crawlers costs. Kudos to the Screaming Frog team!

Incentivized