Choosing the appropriate tools is the key to success in the continually changing world of SEO. Two well-known actors in the SEO tools market are SE Ranking vs Screaming Frog. Both of them are created to improve the performance of any websites and their search engines, but they refer to various parts of search engine optimization and provide different functionality. This detailed comparison explores their features, advantages, and disadvantages, along with how best to use them to guide an SEO expert in making the right decision.
What is SE Ranking
SE Ranking is an all-in-one cloud-based professional SEO software tailored to professionals and agencies. It provides a set of tools that includes keyword monitoring, website audit, backlink analysis, competitor intelligence, and so on. Also, it has a user-friendly interface, and it is scalable, which is an advantage when considering businesses of any size.
What is a Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a desktop utility website crawler platform that is most helpful in technical SEO audits. It is excellent in spotting sources of problems such as broken links, duplication of content, and metadata-related problems, giving intricate details on the structure of a site. Although it does not have all the extended SEO features offered by SE Ranking, its technical analysis level is also good.
Quick Verdict: SE ranking vs Screaming Frog
SE Ranking is a multi-functional, cloud-based provision of SEO that is ideal for monitoring keywords, competitor analysis, and SEO campaign management under a single roof. Screaming Frog, however, is a strong desktop crawler, which is aimed at technical audits and issues related to crawling, error links, and metadata. SE Ranking is an excellent option to fit the requirements of marketers and agencies’ extensive functionality, whereas Screaming Frog is a great choice to fit the work process of a specialist who conducts extensive site diagnostics. A combination of both comes up with comprehensive results.
Pros and Cons: SE Ranking vs Screaming Frog
SE Ranking Pros and Cons
Pros
- Integrates rank tracking, site audit, backlink monitoring, competitor analysis, and keyword research in a single platform.
- No installation is required; it can be accessed anywhere. An ideal tool to use when your teams are remote.
- Well-designed dashboard, user-friendly navigation, and reports are easily decipherable even to inexperienced persons.
- Clear keywords ranking monitoring among locations and gadgets.
- Complete analysis of keywords, traffic, and backlinks of a competing domain.
- Reports that can be customised for agencies that deal with clients.
- Individuals, freelancers, and agencies are provided with flexibility in terms of tiered pricing.
Cons
- Does not crawl in as much detail as Screaming Frog in crawling technical SEO problems.
- Large websites give the impression that Screaming Frog is quicker and comprehensive than the cloud-based crawler.
- Basic plans are subject to limited usage (e.g, several keywords or projects).
- It is not suitable in a real-time, local crawling environment since it is a cloud-based solution.
Screaming Frog Pros and Cons
Pros
- The most effective site crawler to detect crawl errors, broken links, redirects, duplicate content, metadata problems, and so on.
- Super-swift crawling along with the ability to analyze what you want in detail.
- JavaScript crawling support is crucial and enables auditing of SPAs and JavaScript-heavy sites.
- Powerful data extraction with XPaths, CSS, and regular expressions.
- It is linked with Google Search Console, Analytics, and PageSpeed Insights to be able to do more thorough audits.
- You simply pay once a year to license an account and make no monthly repayment.
Cons
- Being targeted at the audience of SEO professionals, the interface and the terminology may be too harsh for novice users.
- Desktop-only application implies the absence of access via browsers or cloud storage outside the third-party tools.
- No keyword-tracking, backlinking, or content-planning software.
- Does not have slick client-facing reporting tools unless you export to Excel or pull in other systems.
- It is flexible, but you do need to manually configure and interpret a number of features (it is not as plug-and-play as SE Ranking).
Pricing
SE Ranking
- Essential Plan: Minimum of 65$/month, appropriate in case of individuals and small businesses
- Pro Plan: It costs 119 dollars per month and is aimed at an expanding agency.
- Business Plan: Designed to suit enterprises with a fee of 259 dollars a month.
Visit SE Ranking to Learn More.
Screaming Frog SEO Spider
- Free Version: Has the fundamental E-commerce optimization features and can crawl links of 500 or fewer.
- Paid Version: priced at 259 with all the crawling and advanced features.
Website audit: SE Ranking vs Screaming Frog
SE Ranking offers cloud-based webpage audits that incorporate more than 120 technical and on-page SEO factors, such as Core Web Vitals, crawlability, indexation, and mobile friendliness. It gives output in a summable visual design with ordered lists of issues and recommendations that suit the SEO teams and clients.
Screaming Frog is, however, highly comprehensive and precise. It does fast desktop crawling, finds broken links, chains of redirects, as well as duplicate content, etc. It is extremely useful since users can set up audit rules and extract custom data. SE Ranking vs Semrush are two big competitors in the market.
Conclusion: SE Ranking has an easier-to-use interface; Screaming Frog has a more detailed audit.
Ease of Use
Most of the users highly commend SE Ranking due to its neat, smart, and user-friendly interface. It is user-friendly even to someone who has never used it, and gives its users a clear way of navigation, visual dashboards, and step-by-step instructions on tasks such as keyword tracking, site audits, and competitor analysis. It is cloud-based, and this makes it easy to collaborate as projects can be accessed using any kind of device. Reports are also simplified such that you can get customised, white-label reports that are ready to be given to clients.
When compared, Screaming Frog is an on-desktop tool and a robust tool that is designed to be used by advanced users. It looks like a spreadsheet and can be confusing to a first-time user. Although it is excellent in providing granularity of control over technical SEO audits, there is a steeper learning curve. Users should learn the notions, such as the HTTP status codes, canonical tags, and crawl depth. But to SEO folks who are used to technical SEO, nothing can surpass its flexibility and depth.
Conclusion: SE Ranking is simpler to use by a gentler user; Screaming Frog is more suited to technicians.
Customization
SE Ranking has a powerful customizable feature, particularly in its reporting and project configuration. The clients can customise dashboards, filter data views, create white-labeled custom custom-branded aggregate reports, which are a perfect fit for an agency with many clients. One can personalize a campaign by predetermining regional, search engines, and device keywords to track. It is also possible to adjust the settings of site audit, backlink monitoring, and auto alerts to the individual workflows on the platform.
Though not as visually customizable, Screaming Frog offers strong technical customizations. It is possible to schedule a crawl precisely, use custom filters, and extract desired data points based on XPath, CSS selectors, or regular expressions. Also, it supports custom user-agent strings, testing robots.txt, and segmentation. Though it does not have drag-and-drop dashboards or reports, ready to present to clients, it is exceptionally flexible when it comes to data extraction and audit settings.
Judgment: SE Ranking is the best in the user interface and report customization; Screaming Frog is the best in technical crawl and customization of data extraction.
Customer Support
SE Ranking also has flexible and organized customer service. Its users are offered to seek help through live chat, email, and through an extensive knowledge base. Customer care is offered during normal business hours, and most of the concerns raised are answered promptly and effectively. Onboarding services, as well as video tutorials and webinars for new users, can also be found in SE Ranking. On a higher plan, they offer priority support, even up to training sessions, and it is a good option to take in case one has an agency or a team that requires consultancy and quick resolution of problems.
Instead, Screaming Frog only offers support mainly by email and a large help documentation database. Though the team is very well-versed in their knowledge, especially in technical SEO, support can be quite slow to respond. No live chat, they only offer support during UK working days. Nevertheless, their documentation is quite extensive and regularly up-to-date, and it usually satisfies advanced users.
Conclusion: SE Ranking will be easier and more practical in terms of support; Screaming Frog is good and more useful to self-sufficient, technical-minded users.
Final Verdict: SE Ranking vs Screaming Frog
SE Ranking is the all-in-one, mobile-friend, cloud-based SEO platform that suits best marketers, agencies, and businesses. It has keyword tracking functions along with competitor analysis, site audit, and reporting, a user-friendly interface which is ideal for running campaigns, and for communicating with clients.
Screaming Frog, in its turn, is a potent desktop solution that is dedicated to technical SEO. It has unparalleled breadth in site crawling, custom data mining, and problem identification, and it is most appropriate to use among experienced SEO experts.
SE Ranking is the ultimate choice when it comes to strategic, general SEO; Screaming Frog has no rival when doing deep technical audits. Most combine them.
