Screaming Frog vs Moz Crawl tool

Before we get into this article I just want to thank Moz for allowing me onto the Beta for this new tool they have realised (ok it’s not a new tool, but more of a major upgrade and it does feel new). I had a great time chatting with one of their senior developers on the project and was on the call over an hour with him.

The review itself.

I have reviewed Screaming Frog before and I don’t want to repeat myself too much.

Screaming Frog

There is a free version of Screaming Frog, but at $149 per year, the paid version is worth the investment. It has gone up since the original article and I only found out a few weeks back when I went to renew.

Pro’s

• No limit on the number of pages it can crawl. The only limitations are from the machine it’s running on.
• The ability to check for broken external links.

Con’s

• No schedule crawling.
• Runs on your own server/machine.

Moz Crawl Feature

Like Deepcrawl, this is a web based application with a monthly fee (lowest is $99 a month) but it seems the majority of the industry pays for Moz, it’s not an additional expense.

Pro’s

• Compares reports to previous crawls
  • Graphs previous errors
  • Total pages crawled
  • Change in number of errors
  • Filter by the most important errors and fix these first
• Web based application so not machine dependent
• Errors are linked to relevant resources on how to fix them for experts people in the industry. That said if you are using one of the other tools in the industry you can also find these great resources for free.
• You can see what type of errors you have by hovering over the graphs, so you can quickly estimate who needs to fix what

Con’s

• You can’t control when the Crawl happens (I know it’s something I mentioned during my call with the team, so let’s hope Moz are working on it)
• Limited Crawl budget depending on your plan

 

I do like the fact it’s not machine based, but the downside is if you just want to crawl a URL you can only crawl 3000 pages of a site and whilst for many sites this is ok, most of our clients have more than 3000 pages so not that helpful. That said if you have a campaign for each client that limit is much higher – but when we are researching potential clients or have hit our campaign limit it’s a bit frustrating to only be able to crawl 3,000 pages, which sounds a lot but isn’t for ecommerce or long established websites.

With having less control compared to DeepCrawl when I am crawling a website, this tool can’t replace Screaming Frog – it’s a great additional tool, but if you want an answer quickly then Screaming Frog is a must.

Moz and DeepCrawl aren’t the only two crawling tools out there. Luckily for you, we have got access to two more and these will be reviewed soon. The first one of these is OnCrawl – for the full OnCrawl review check out the article.