Audra as a Screaming Frog alternative

Screaming Frog is the more capable crawler, and you should choose it if you need crawl scale or custom extraction. Audra is narrower on purpose: it crawls up to 100 pages by default, runs Google Lighthouse, axe-core, broken-link checks, 14 HTML SEO checks and 8 answer-engine (AEO) checks on each one, then merges everything into a single scored report you can hand to a client. The pricing models differ more than the features do — Screaming Frog licences last one year and must be renewed; Audra is $19 once.

Last updated 2026-07-28

What is the real difference between Audra and Screaming Frog?

Screaming Frog shows you everything it can extract and expects you to know which columns matter; Audra decides for you and outputs one ranked report. That is the whole difference in a sentence, and it cuts both ways.

Both tools run entirely on your own machine — this is not a privacy differentiator between them. Screaming Frog crawls from your IP and writes crawl data to local disk, exactly as Audra does. Anyone claiming a local-data advantage over Screaming Frog is selling you something.

The genuine split is scope and philosophy. Screaming Frog is a general-purpose crawler with hundreds of configuration surfaces: custom extraction, JavaScript rendering configuration, API integrations, scheduled crawls, command-line operation. Audra has one workflow — enter a URL, get a report — over a fixed check list, with no configuration beyond crawl size, device and path filters.

How do they compare on price, platform and privacy?

Screaming Frog is an annual subscription with a permanently free 500-URL tier; Audra is a one-time $19 purchase with a free 7-day trial and no free tier. Both keep every byte of crawl data on your own machine.

Competitor pricing below was checked against each vendor's own pricing page in July 2026. Pricing changes; confirm the current figure with the vendor before deciding on it.

What exactly does Audra check on every page?

Audra runs five layers on each crawled page and merges them into one de-duplicated, severity-ranked list. Here is the actual list with the actual thresholds, rather than a category summary.

The 14 HTML SEO checks are deterministic and parse the rendered markup: title tag (flagged outside 50–60 characters, missing is an error), meta description (flagged outside 120–158 characters), canonical (must be present and absolute), robots meta (a stray noindex is an error, nofollow a warning), viewport meta (missing is an error), the html lang attribute, exactly one H1 (zero is an error, more than one a warning), heading order (flags any skipped level, such as h2 straight to h4), image alt text (ignoring images marked role="presentation" or aria-hidden), Open Graph (og:title, og:description, og:image and og:url all required), Twitter card, structured data (counts JSON-LD blocks and flags any that fail to parse), hreflang (validates every annotation against a language-tag pattern), and word count (under 200 words is flagged as thin).

The 8 AEO checks are the layer no general-purpose crawler has. They cover whether robots.txt blocks the retrieval bots that actually produce citations — ChatGPT-User, OAI-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, weighted at 30% of the AEO score because being blocked makes every other signal moot; whether training-only crawlers are blocked, which is reported but never counted as a failure because blocking them is a legitimate policy choice; whether /llms.txt exists and is valid per llmstxt.org; whether JSON-LD entities carry their required properties (an Article needs author, datePublished and dateModified); whether question-shaped content is marked up as FAQPage; whether the opening paragraph answers the page's own headline instead of warming up for 60 words; whether a machine-readable freshness date exists and is under 21 days old; and whether the page carries at least 3 internal links, or 40% of your site median, whichever is higher.

On top of that, Google Lighthouse 13.x runs at a 412×823 mobile viewport and a 1366×900 desktop viewport; axe-core 4.12 runs its full ruleset with violations weighted by impact (critical 15, serious 10, moderate 4); and every internal link is followed, with broken links flagged as errors and redirect chains longer than one hop flagged as warnings. External links are off by default, so an audit never sends requests to third-party domains unless you ask it to.

The composite Audra Score weights Performance 30%, SEO 30%, Accessibility 25% and Best Practices 15%, using the standard Lighthouse colour bands — 90 and above green, 50 to 89 orange, below 50 red. If a category has no data it is dropped and the remaining weights re-normalise, so the headline number is never quietly diluted by a missing input. If you want the underlying numbers explained first, start with what counts as a good Lighthouse score.

Where does Screaming Frog genuinely win?

On crawl scale, configurability and anything that requires extracting arbitrary data — Screaming Frog is simply the more powerful tool, and there are jobs Audra cannot do at all.

• Crawl scale. Screaming Frog handles millions of URLs, bounded only by your hardware. Audra defaults to 100 pages and tops out at 1,000 per report. On a large ecommerce catalogue that is not a close call.
• Custom extraction. XPath, CSS selector and regex extraction pulls any arbitrary field off every page in a crawl — prices, publish dates, schema fragments, author names. Audra has no equivalent and no plans for one.
• Log file analysis. Seeing what Googlebot actually requested is a different class of insight from what a crawler infers. Note this is a separate paid product from the same vendor, not part of the SEO Spider licence.
• Linux and Intel Macs. Audra covers Apple Silicon Macs and 64-bit Windows, but not Linux or older Intel Macs — if your team is on either, this comparison ends here.
• Scheduling, the command line and API integrations. Screaming Frog runs headless in a pipeline and pulls in Search Console, Analytics and PageSpeed data. Audra is an on-demand desktop app with no scheduling and no API.
• The free tier is genuinely useful. 500 URLs, permanently free, with most features intact. For a small site that may be all you ever need — and it costs nothing.

When is Audra the better choice?

When the deliverable is a report rather than a dataset, and when renewing a licence every year is hard to justify for how often you actually audit.

• You want performance, SEO, accessibility, broken links and AI-visibility findings in one document instead of four tools and a spreadsheet merge.
• You hand audits to clients or stakeholders and need an HTML or PDF they will actually read, with a single headline number a non-technical reader understands.
• You care whether ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude can retrieve and cite your pages. No general-purpose crawler checks retrieval-bot access, llms.txt validity or answer-first structure.
• You need accessibility findings in the same pass. Audra runs the full axe-core ruleset per page; Screaming Frog does not include accessibility testing.
• You audit staging or password-protected builds, which both tools handle locally — but which no cloud auditor can reach at all.

Can you use both together?

Yes, and for a lot of agencies that is the sensible answer. Use Audra for the recurring "how healthy is this site, and what do I show the client" pass, and Screaming Frog when a job needs crawl depth, custom extraction, or a site far past a few hundred pages.

They cost different things for different reasons, and neither replaces the other. If you only ever do one of those two jobs, buy only the tool that does it. If you are weighing Audra against something narrower, the Lighthouse comparison covers running Lighthouse across a whole site, and the Sitebulb comparison covers the other desktop auditor in this category.