When to use Screaming Frog
- Full-site technical SEO crawl (1k-1M URLs).
- Custom extraction (XPath / regex) at scale.
- Log file analysis paired with the crawler.
- Power-user workflows: scheduling, Looker Studio export, GA/GSC integration.
When to use Metaspry
- You want to audit one page right now without opening a desktop app.
- You want rendered social previews for the seven major platforms in one click.
- You want explicit AI crawler signal coverage (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Google-Extended, llms.txt) without doing user-agent gymnastics.
- You want a shareable URL for the scan to drop in Slack or send to a client.
- You want daily drift alerts on the 50 URLs that actually matter.
- You don't want to pay $259/yr for the part of the job that should be free.
Do you need both?
Often yes. Screaming Frog runs the quarterly full-site crawl; Metaspry watches the daily URLs and powers the in-flight reviews. They're complementary, not interchangeable.