Free alternatives to Screaming Frog for sitemap work

What Screaming Frog is good at

Screaming Frog is the industry default for a reason. It crawls sites deeply. It follows links. It handles JavaScript rendering. It exports dozens of reports. Agencies love it.

I use it. I own a paid license.

The free version has a hard cap of 500 URLs. That is fine for tiny sites. It breaks instantly on anything real.

If you do not want to pay $279 a year for one audit, here are the tools I actually use for different parts of the job.

For sitemap-specific work

SiteLens (mine). Paste a URL. Get the whole sitemap tree, no URL cap, no install, no signup. Handles nested sitemap indexes. Validates XML. Flags stale URLs. Checks broken links up to 200 per run. Exports CSV and JSON. Runs in the browser.

I built it because Screaming Frog is overkill when all I want is a clean view of someone's sitemap. It is the first thing I reach for on a new audit.

Open it here.

xml-sitemaps.com. Free online validator. Checks basic XML syntax. No tree view, no deep analysis, but fine for a quick validate. The paid version generates sitemaps, which is a different use case.

Google Search Console. Free forever if you own the site. Shows sitemap submission status, URL counts, and which URLs Google has actually indexed. You cannot scan a competitor's site with this.

For full site crawling

This is where Screaming Frog shines and most free tools fall short.

Netpeak Spider free tier. Desktop crawler. Limited features on free, but reasonable for small sites. Paid tier is cheaper than Screaming Frog ($7 to $15 a month). Worth trying if you want a desktop tool.

SEO PowerSuite. Free tier exists but is crippled. Paid tier is $299 a year, same ballpark as Screaming Frog, with different strengths. Good if you also need rank tracking.

Python advertools. Dev path. If you can write a few lines of Python, this library gives you a full crawler with pandas output. Free, unlimited. Takes a morning to set up. Not for non-developers.

For broken link checking

SiteLens Broken Links tab. Up to 200 URLs per run. Enough for most sitemaps. Parallel HEAD requests. Lime badges for ok, red for errors, orange for redirects. Free.

Dr. Link Check. Free tier limits you to 1,500 URLs per month. Web app. Clean UI. Good for ongoing monitoring on a specific site.

Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin. If you own a WP site, install this. It runs in the background. Free.

For technical SEO audits

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Free if you verify ownership of a site. Gives you site audit with crawl. Fewer checks than paid Ahrefs but still useful. You cannot audit sites you do not own.

Google Lighthouse. Built into Chrome DevTools. Free. Runs per-page audits for SEO, performance, accessibility. Not a crawler, but catches per-page issues.

Semrush free tier. You get a few audits per month. Fast to trigger but the free tier is more of a demo than a tool.

What I actually do

For a typical client audit, this is my stack:

1. SiteLens to map the sitemap and find stale URLs, validation errors, broken links. 20 minutes.
2. Google Search Console if the client has given me access. See what is indexed versus what is in the sitemap.
3. Screaming Frog paid, for the full crawl with JS rendering. This is where I spend the money.
4. Lighthouse on the top 5 templates (homepage, product, blog post, category, landing). Per-page performance and SEO flags.
5. Ahrefs Site Audit if the client has Ahrefs. Backlink context and competitor gap analysis.

For quick competitor research where I cannot use any paid tool (because I do not own the site and do not have auth), SiteLens plus Google search plus a few Chrome extensions covers 80 percent of it.

Quick comparison

Tool	Free limit	Sitemap focus	Full crawl	Price
SiteLens	Unlimited URLs, 200 per link check	Yes	No	Free
Screaming Frog Free	500 URLs	Partial	Yes	Free
Screaming Frog Paid	Unlimited	Partial	Yes	$279/yr
Netpeak Spider	Limited	No	Yes	$7/mo+
xml-sitemaps.com	Unlimited validate	Yes	No	Free
Google Search Console	Unlimited	Basic	No (post-crawl)	Free
Ahrefs Webmaster	Owned sites	Partial	Yes	Free
advertools (Python)	Unlimited	Yes	Yes	Free

The honest take

Screaming Frog is still the right tool for full site audits if you have the budget. Nothing else handles JS rendering and custom extraction as well.

For sitemap-specific work (which is most of what I do first on any audit), a browser tool is faster and does not require opening a desktop app and waiting for it to load.

That is what SiteLens solves. It is not trying to be a Screaming Frog replacement. It is the thing I use before I decide whether to open Screaming Frog at all.

Try both. They do different things.