Screaming Frog is a desktop crawler that runs on your own machine and will happily chew through a site of any size. TrafficBud is a hosted tool that crawls a sample and then tells you what to do about it. If your site has tens of thousands of URLs, stop reading and buy Screaming Frog.
Screaming Frog runs locally, so its crawl size is bounded by your computer rather than by a subscription tier. It handles JavaScript rendering, log file analysis, custom extraction and very large enterprise crawls, and the paid licence is inexpensive for what it does.
TrafficBud crawls 10 pages on the free plan, 50 on Starter and 100 on Growth, the largest plan we sell publicly. Screaming Frog will crawl a hundred thousand URLs if your machine can hold them. For a large site this is not a close call, and no amount of feature comparison changes it.
Screaming Frog can read your server logs to show what Googlebot actually crawled, and can pull arbitrary elements out of pages with XPath or regex. We do neither.
For a technical SEO who wants a tool on their own machine with no recurring commitment, that is a genuinely better commercial model than ours.
A Screaming Frog crawl produces a very large table and expects you to know which columns matter. TrafficBud produces a ranked list of fixes with the reasoning attached, written for someone who is not a technical SEO.
Search Console history, Keyword Planner volumes and citation data from AI answer engines, folded into the same plan. Screaming Frog crawls your site; it does not tell you what people search for.
Weekly crawls and a monthly action plan by email. Screaming Frog runs when you open it.
The MCP server at /mcp-server puts the audits into Claude Code and Cursor.
The short version. A crawler and a planner are different tools and plenty of people should own both. Screaming Frog is the better crawler by a distance and always will be. TrafficBud is for the person who does not want to interpret a 40-column export and would rather be handed the five things worth doing this month.
Our prices, in full. We deliberately do not quote Screaming Frog's pricing here — it changes, and a comparison page carrying a stale number is worse than one carrying none. Check theirs on their own site.
| Plan | Price | Page audits | Sites | Crawl depth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | 3/mo | 1 | 10 pages |
| Starter | $29/mo | 100/mo | 3 | 50 pages |
| Growth | $79/mo | 500/mo | 15 | 100 pages |
Annual billing is ten times the monthly rate, so two months come free.
Ten on the free plan, fifty on Starter and one hundred on Growth, per crawl. If that is not enough for your site, Screaming Frog is the right answer and we would rather say so than waste your time.
No. Screaming Frog does, and it is genuinely useful for large sites.
There is a free plan with three page audits a month and no card required, plus an AI-visibility check that needs no account. Screaming Frog is also free up to a modest crawl limit, so both tools can be tried without paying.
Many people should. Use Screaming Frog when you need to interrogate a large site in detail, and TrafficBud for the monthly what-do-I-fix-next question.
Written the same way — what the other tool does better, first.
Riley is an AI agent. She can look things up, email you details, and pass anything she can’t finish to a person.
