EngineeringScore

Free Screaming Frog alternative

If the job is crawling a site, use Screaming Frog: we do not crawl at all. EngineeringScore takes the one URL you paste in and reads that page's headers, cookies, page weight, SEO basics and accessibility in a single pass. Different tools, not a cheaper one.

What we don't replace

  • Crawling your site. Screaming Frog walks the URLs it discovers from a starting point; we read the single page you name and follow none of its links, so a problem on a page you did not name is a problem we never saw.
  • Finding broken links and mapping redirect chains and loops across a site. Screaming Frog's product page describes both, and its pricing page lists finding broken links, errors and redirects first among the features included in its free version.
  • Anything that only exists across many pages: duplicate content between URLs, hreflang audits, and visualisations of how a site is linked together. The Screaming Frog pricing page lists exact duplicate pages, hreflang auditing and site visualisations in its free version too.
  • Generating XML sitemaps, or exporting a spreadsheet of every URL on a site for a developer to work through. We produce one report about one page.
  • Scheduled recurring crawls and comparing one crawl against the next, both of which the Screaming Frog pricing page lists among the features a licence unlocks.
  • Anything that needs a configured crawl: exclusion rules, custom extraction with XPath or regex, or forms-based authentication to reach pages behind a login. We read one page as an anonymous visitor, signed out.

What we replace

  • A deep technical read of one page: response headers, HTTPS and redirect behaviour, cookies and their attributes, page weight and asset breakdown, SEO basics, and an accessibility pass, in one report that explains each finding rather than listing it.
  • A one-off check of a single URL with nothing to install. The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop application, available for Windows, Mac and Ubuntu Linux, and its user guide gives a minimum specification of a 64-bit OS with at least 4gb of RAM available.
  • An accessibility audit on the page you scanned. Accessibility auditing is one of the features the Screaming Frog pricing page marks as unavailable in its free version.
  • Reading the page the way a browser renders it. We load the URL in headless Chromium and run the checks against the rendered DOM and the network requests it actually made, so cookies set by script and assets pulled in at runtime are measured rather than inferred from source. JavaScript rendering is one of the features the Screaming Frog user guide lists as provided by a licence.

Where Screaming Frog is stronger

  • Screaming Frog does the site-wide job properly, and it is a different job from ours. Its product page says the SEO Spider audits a site for over 300 SEO issues, warnings and opportunities.
  • Screaming Frog's free version crawls up to 500 URLs at a time, which is a small site's entire URL set in a single pass. We read one page per scan, however small the site is.
  • Screaming Frog scales to sites we cannot describe at all: its user guide covers crawling millions of URLs using database storage, and recommends an SSD and 16gb of RAM or higher for crawls over 1 million URLs.
  • On a header we both look at, Screaming Frog is stricter than we are. Its Security tab flags any Referrer-Policy that is not one of no-referrer-when-downgrade, strict-origin-when-cross-origin, no-referrer or strict-origin; we flag only unsafe-url and pass every other recognised value without ranking them.
  • Screaming Frog pairs a crawl with data we never fetch, through its Google Analytics, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights integrations. Those are licence features on its pricing page, but nothing in a single anonymous page load can substitute for them.

Where we're stronger

  • Runs in a browser tab, nothing to install and no signup. You paste one URL, the scan itself runs on our servers in headless Chromium, and the report comes back in about a minute.

  • Every finding says what it means and the steps to fix it, and links on to a written guide for that specific check wherever a dedicated one exists, rather than being a column in a spreadsheet you have to already know how to read.

  • A check we could not settle reports needing review rather than a verdict, and nothing in that state is counted in the score in either direction. It spans five categories rather than being one special case. If the scanned URL cannot be resolved to a host, the cookie checks say so instead of returning a clean sheet. On a site not served over HTTPS, the checks that only mean something over TLS, HSTS and mixed content among them, are set aside rather than passed. Accessibility rules that axe could not settle on its own, text over a gradient being the usual case, are listed as needing manual review rather than counted as passes or failures. And the HTTP to HTTPS redirect check reports not determined, rather than reporting that you have no redirect, whenever our probe of port 80 comes back with something that is not an answer: a timeout, a refused connection, or a block or error response. That is per check, not a rule the whole scanner follows: a Referrer-Policy carrying a value we do not recognise passes on the header being present, because inventing a failure for a value this scanner cannot classify would be the same mistake pointing the other way.

  • Two of the headers that only protect a visitor if their value is right are judged on that value rather than on the header name. HSTS is judged on its max-age against a floor of 15,552,000 seconds, so on a site served over HTTPS a header sent with max-age=0 fails rather than counting as HSTS enabled. Referrer-Policy is parsed the way a browser parses it, taking the last recognised token in a comma-separated fallback list, and fails when that resolves to unsafe-url. Content-Security-Policy is judged on which header name carried it: a report-only policy is reported as report-only, not as protection you already have, though we do not grade how strict its directives are. The other protective headers are presence tests, and our free tool pages say so check by check: X-Content-Type-Options passes on any non-empty value without ever being compared to nosniff, and clickjacking protection passes on an X-Frame-Options header carrying any non-empty value.

  • We publish the edges. Each of our free tool pages has a section stating what that scan cannot see, because a scanner that implies it saw everything is the one worth distrusting.

Sources

Every claim about Screaming Frog on this page was read on from Screaming Frog's own public pages. Their product changes and this page does not change with it, so treat the date as the claim's expiry, not its publication.

Ready to see where you stand?

Scan your site and get your Engineering Score with a prioritized roadmap in under a minute, no signup required.

Scan your site