Is Sitewell a replacement for Screaming Frog?

No. Screaming Frog is a crawler; Sitewell runs specific checks. If you need a full site crawl with internal link analysis, rendering and custom extraction, install Screaming Frog. If you need to check a list of URLs, a redirect chain, a certificate or the links on a page, Sitewell does that in a browser with nothing to install.

What can Sitewell do that a desktop crawler cannot?

Run without you. Scheduled monitors re-check status codes, redirect paths, certificate expiry, broken links and page performance on a server, and email when something changes. A desktop crawler only runs while your machine is on and the application is open.

Do I need a licence or an account?

No account for any of the one-off tools, and no licence at all. An account is needed only for scheduled monitoring, and the free plan includes one monitor.

Can Sitewell crawl a whole site?

Not in the crawler sense: it does not discover pages by following links. The sitemap checker tests every URL a sitemap declares, and the site audit checks one URL across reachability, redirects, SSL, headers, meta and crawlability, which covers a fair amount of the same ground on a small site.

Alternative to Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog alternative

Screaming Frog is a desktop crawler, and a very good one. It walks a site link by link and builds a picture of the whole thing: internal linking, duplicate titles, hreflang pairs, orphan pages, rendered JavaScript, custom extraction. Sitewell does not do that and this page is not going to claim it does.

What Sitewell replaces is narrower. It is the set of specific checks that people open a crawler for even when they do not need a crawl: does this list of URLs still resolve, where does this redirect actually land, how many days are left on the certificate, which links on this page are dead. Those run in a browser tab, free, with nothing installed and no licence to keep track of.

Side by side

Aspect	Screaming Frog	Sitewell
Where it runs	A desktop application you install on Windows, macOS or Linux	In a browser; nothing to install
Free tier	Up to 500 URLs per crawl, with a paid annual licence beyond that	Every one-off tool free with no account; 1,000 URLs per bulk status run
Full site crawl	Yes; that is the product	No; specific checks, not link-by-link discovery
What it analyses	Internal links, duplicates, hreflang, rendering, log files, custom extraction	Status codes, redirects, SSL, broken links, robots, meta, headers, DNS, vitals
Reaching private or gated sites	Runs on your machine, so it can reach staging and authenticated pages	Fetches from a public server; anything not publicly reachable is invisible
Runs while your laptop is shut	No; the crawl runs on your machine	Yes; scheduled monitors run server-side and email you

Where they win

When Screaming Frog is the better choice

For an actual crawl, install Screaming Frog. Anything that requires walking a site link by link belongs to it: finding orphan pages, measuring internal link depth, catching duplicate titles across thousands of URLs, checking hreflang pairs, rendering JavaScript to see what a crawler sees, joining a crawl to log file data. Sitewell does not attempt any of it, and a browser tool that claimed to would be lying.

It also reaches places a hosted checker cannot. Running on your own machine, it can crawl a staging site on a private network, work behind a VPN, use credentials you supply, and run at a rate you control because the server is yours. Sitewell fetches from a public server with a fixed user agent, so a site that is not publicly reachable does not exist as far as it is concerned.

Size decides the third case. A site with tens of thousands of URLs needs a crawler with real memory and database storage behind it. That is an engineering problem a browser tab is not built to solve.

What Sitewell does differently

The case is narrower and worth stating plainly: for the specific checks, there is no install, no licence and no configuration. Somebody asks whether a set of URLs still resolves, whether the certificate is about to expire, whether the redirect after last month's migration landed where it was supposed to. Three questions, three answers, each a paste and a few seconds, on any machine, including a borrowed one or one where you cannot install software.

The second difference is that Sitewell keeps checking. A crawl is a photograph of a site on the afternoon it ran. A monitor re-runs a check on a schedule and tells you when the answer changes: when a certificate is close to expiry, when a page in the sitemap starts returning 404, when a redirect chain grows a hop. No desktop crawler does that with the laptop closed.

Most people who do this work seriously end up with both. Crawl properly when a crawl is the job, and use a hosted checker for the daily questions and for the standing watch between crawls.

Frequently asked questions

Is Sitewell a replacement for Screaming Frog?: No. Screaming Frog is a crawler; Sitewell runs specific checks. If you need a full site crawl with internal link analysis, rendering and custom extraction, install Screaming Frog. If you need to check a list of URLs, a redirect chain, a certificate or the links on a page, Sitewell does that in a browser with nothing to install.
What can Sitewell do that a desktop crawler cannot?: Run without you. Scheduled monitors re-check status codes, redirect paths, certificate expiry, broken links and page performance on a server, and email when something changes. A desktop crawler only runs while your machine is on and the application is open.
Do I need a licence or an account?: No account for any of the one-off tools, and no licence at all. An account is needed only for scheduled monitoring, and the free plan includes one monitor.
Can Sitewell crawl a whole site?: Not in the crawler sense: it does not discover pages by following links. The sitemap checker tests every URL a sitemap declares, and the site audit checks one URL across reachability, redirects, SSL, headers, meta and crawlability, which covers a fair amount of the same ground on a small site.