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SiteRune vs Screaming Frog
· Configuration notes, not a newsroom.
Screaming Frog is a desktop crawler that can eat a whole site. SiteRune is a hosted brief of a polite handful of URLs plus ship files. Not a substitute.
SFDepth vs a punch list
Frog will list every 404, every duplicate title, every hreflang miss across 50,000 URLs if you let it. That is the right tool for a migration. SiteRune caps the walk on purpose: nav, sitemap hints, llms.txt URLs. We are not a site-wide indexer and we will not pretend we downloaded the catalog.
What Frog will not write
A CMS-specific playbook with a mu-plugin, headers() snippet, or llms.txt draft. Frog exports CSVs. SiteRune attaches files an engineer can paste, then diffs the next scan. Use Frog to find the 8,000 thin tag pages. Use SiteRune for the configuration chapter and AEO.
Capability table
| Capability | SiteRune | Screaming Frog |
|---|---|---|
| Installation required | No | yes (desktop) |
| Crawl depth | Handful of interiors (plan cap) | Whole site if you let it |
| Technical SEO inventory | Yes | Yes |
| Duplicate titles / status codes at scale | Walked URLs only | Yes |
| Security headers | Yes | partial (custom extraction) |
| CMS fingerprint + playbook | Yes | No |
| AI crawler / llms.txt chapter | Yes | No |
| Config file generation | Yes | CSV / exports |
| Free tier | Guest + Launch | Free mode capped; paid licence |
Frog is the right tool for a 50k-URL migration. SiteRune is a hosted punch list plus ship files.
FAQ
Does SiteRune replace screaming frog?
No. Use the comparison table. SiteRune is a hosted configuration brief with CMS dialect and ship files. It does not replace rank tracking, backlink graphs, lab Core Web Vitals, or a desktop site-wide crawl.
What does a SiteRune scan actually fetch?
HTML and headers from this vantage point, robots.txt, sitemap, llms.txt, security.txt, and a polite walk of same-origin interiors. No headless Chrome. No exploits.
Run it on a live URL
Same scan engine. Guest scans stay free.