siteIQ vs Screaming Frog

The 500-URL question

Most people comparing these two arrived because of one number. Screaming Frog's free licence stops at 500 URLs. That is fine for a small business site and useless for a store with a few thousand product pages — and you only discover which you have after the crawl stalls.

siteIQ does not cap a standard audit that way. If your reason for looking at alternatives is purely that limit, this is the part that matters, and the rest of this page is detail.

Desktop app vs browser

Screaming Frog runs on your machine. That is a real advantage — it can crawl a staging site behind your VPN, respect your local hosts file, and keep crawling with no third party involved. It is also a real constraint: it needs a desktop you are allowed to install software on, it eats RAM on large crawls, and it crawls from your IP, which some hosts will rate-limit.

siteIQ runs server-side. You can start an audit from a phone on the train and read the report when you get in. For consultants working on client machines or locked-down corporate laptops, that difference decides it.

What Screaming Frog does that siteIQ does not

Custom extraction is the big one. If you need to pull a schema field, a price or a specific div out of every page with XPath, Screaming Frog is built for that and siteIQ is not. Log file analysis is the other — connecting what Googlebot actually crawled to what exists on the site is genuinely valuable at enterprise scale, and it is not something siteIQ attempts.

Its configurability generally goes deeper: crawl rules, user-agent switching, include and exclude patterns, scheduled crawls. If you have spent years in it, you will find siteIQ opinionated by comparison.

What siteIQ adds

Screaming Frog is an SEO crawler and does not pretend to be a security tool. siteIQ checks security headers, SSL certificate health and known CVEs in detected software, alongside WCAG accessibility checks. For an agency handing a client one document, having those in the same report saves stitching three tools together.

There is also the quick check. Screaming Frog is built to crawl a site; it is heavy for looking at one page. siteIQ gives you a single-URL result in seconds, which is what you actually want when a client emails asking why one page dropped.

Common questions

Is siteIQ a free alternative to Screaming Frog?

For a technical site audit, largely yes — and without the 500-URL cap that the free Screaming Frog licence imposes. Where it is not a replacement is custom extraction: if you rely on XPath or regex to pull specific elements out of every page, Screaming Frog does that and siteIQ does not.

Does Screaming Frog's 500-URL free limit matter?

It depends entirely on your site. A brochure site with 40 pages will never hit it. A WooCommerce store with 3,000 product URLs hits it on the first crawl, and you either buy a licence or crawl blind. siteIQ has no equivalent cap on a standard audit, which is usually the deciding factor for people searching for an alternative.

Can I use siteIQ without installing anything?

Yes — that is the main structural difference. Screaming Frog is a desktop application that uses your machine's CPU, RAM and IP address to crawl. siteIQ runs server-side and returns results to the browser, so it works the same on a locked-down work laptop, a Chromebook or a phone.

Which is better for a large enterprise site?

Screaming Frog, if you have the licence and the desktop to run it. At tens of thousands of URLs its configurability and log-file analysis are genuinely hard to match. siteIQ targets the far more common case: someone who needs a solid audit of a small-to-mid site in the next ten minutes.

Does siteIQ render JavaScript when crawling?

Yes. Pages built with React, Next.js, Vue or similar are rendered before being analysed, so client-side content is seen rather than skipped. Screaming Frog also supports this, though you have to enable rendering in its configuration first.