Screaming Frog vs. Lumar: Which Is the Best Site Crawl Tool?

Posted on October 29, 2024 in Blog

Few tools are as valuable to SEO marketers as a reliable website crawler tool. Whether you’re looking for opportunities to improve performance for your organization’s domain or managing multiple properties, crawling your site offers a wealth of actionable information to shape forward strategy and prioritize technical SEO improvements.

We’ve put in a lot of time crawling sites over the years, and we’ve used various tools. Find out why we think we’ve found the best site crawler tool on the market and whether it’s a worthy investment for your organization.

What Is a Site Crawler?

Also known as a web spider or site audit crawler, a site crawler mimics the bots search engines use to find, index, and rank URLs across the internet. It’s a program that browses a single domain or subdomain to collect information on the technical elements of the domain, including:

Metadata
Sitemaps
Site structure
Page response times
URL status
And a whole lot more

This information is incredibly valuable for marketers looking to improve a domain’s performance by addressing technical issues such as 404 response codes, redirect chains, and other issues that negatively impact the user experience and send poor signals to search engines.

Conducting a site crawl test every few weeks or undertaking a more in-depth technical site audit every year is a proven way to identify and resolve issues before they accumulate.

There Are a Lot of Site Crawler Tools Out There

Marketers are spoiled. There are dozens of SEO site crawlers out there, many of which offer free or trial-period options. Free is always great, but note that these options typically limit the number of URLs crawled or prevent you from downloading the data, which certainly restricts their utility.

A few examples of website crawlers are:

Crawlee
Scrapy
Node Crawler
Webmagic

Many of these tools double as web scrapers (which remove a wide range of site content, including photos) and, while they gather the same data, don’t provide much additional context. Unless you know exactly what you’re looking for and how to organize the data to make it useful, you will end up with a whole lot of Excel files and no roadmap to use any of them.

The Best of the Best: Screaming Frog vs. Lumar

For marketers looking to get a lot done, dedicated SEO site crawl tools like Screaming Frog and Lumar (formerly known as Deepcrawl) are the way to go. Both are specifically designed to conduct in-depth crawls and organize findings quickly, streamlining the discovery of issues while indicating which should be prioritized. But in our view, one of these tools is much more versatile (and affordable) for managing technical SEO for a wide range of domains.

What Is Screaming Frog?

To give it its full name, Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop application purpose-built for site audits, data extraction, and sitemap auditing. It’s considered one of the best crawlers on the market and is the go-to choice for many professional marketers, including Oneupweb.

Screaming Frog’s key feature is how well it organizes data to shape future strategy. Instead of generating massive lists of URLs, it groups findings based on common technical issues, including:

Internal client errors (all 400 status codes)
Security issues, such as non-HTTPS URLs
Long, short, and missing metadata (page titles and meta descriptions)
Missing alt text and alt attributes

Screaming Frog Pricing

Screaming Frog offers free and paid versions, and the free version is quite useful for smaller websites. It crawls up to 500 URLs, reviews metadata, finds broken links, and generates XML sitemaps. For younger, tidy websites, that’s more than enough to get you started!

The paid version offers more detailed and technical analysis, including custom crawl settings, integrations with Google Analytics 4 and other programs, and, most important, no URL limitations. The paid version costs $259 annually for up to four licenses, each restricted to a single computer.

What Is Lumar?

Lumar is a cloud-based SEO website crawler designed to conduct audits, monitor technical SEO health, and identify ways to improve domain performance. Much like Screaming Frog, it can handle quick audits, but it’s specifically designed to address the needs of large websites. Lumar is considered the best SEO site crawler option for domains with hundreds of thousands of URLs that require constant monitoring and reporting, notably ecommerce sites with complex site structures and product and category pages that change frequently.

Lumar Pricing

It’s expensive. There’s no free version or readily available trial option, and customers start by requesting pricing and a demo. Third-party sources say Lumar’s annual subscription is around $32,000. Comparable Lumar alternatives like Botify are even more expensive at roughly $60,000 per year at the enterprise-level subscription.

Lumar is certainly an excellent tool, but the number of domains that require constant monitoring of 5 million URLs is relatively limited – and it’s way more than most businesses ever need, in any case. Screaming Frog will crawl a site for an audit just as well, and most brands only need in-depth audits every six months or so.

How to Choose a Site Crawler

Most of these tools work incredibly well, so choosing the best site crawl tool depends on budget, crawl frequency, and experience.

Budget – How much can you invest in a tool? Does the investment justify expected results?
Frequency – How often will you use the tool? If you plan to run a single audit, a one-month Screaming Frog license may be 10-20% of the cost of a professional audit.
Experience – Armed with the tool, does your team have the technical experience and understanding to identify important issues and present appropriate fixes? How much time will it take to learn how to use the tool, and what is the opportunity cost of undertaking the audit internally?

To be clear, there are certainly internal teams that can conduct thorough, detailed audits and prescribe effective resolutions – but most can’t. If you or your team have higher priorities, focus there and let an experienced SEO agency conduct your audit. We happen to be really, really good at it.

Tools Are Just the Start of SEO Success

Site crawler tools like Screaming Frog are crucial to improving SEO performance, but when you work with us, it’s just one of many useful tools in your toolbox. We’ve got a whole hardware store of SEO, design, and development tools, plus experienced marketers who provide exceptional results.

Let’s get to work; reach out online or call (231) 922-9977 today. (Tomorrow works great, too.)