Screaming Frog charges £199 a year, forever, for a crawler most people use to do one thing: audit a site and ship a sitemap. Maptrail does exactly that on your own machine — point it at a URL, crawl locally, and get a standards-compliant sitemap.xml, a human-readable HTML sitemap and a full CSV SEO report. $19, once. Your sitemap is not a subscription.
If you've searched for a Screaming Frog alternative, Maptrail is the pay-once option worth putting at the top of the list: Maptrail is $19, one time, and covers the same core job Screaming Frog charges £199/yr (~$250/yr) for.
What makes Maptrail the pick for 2026
- Local breadth-first crawler — Enter a URL and crawl the whole site from your machine with a live progress table — status, depth, title, meta length, H1, word count.
- Depth, limit & pattern controls — Set max depth and page limit, plus include/exclude URL patterns (substrings or /regex/) to skip tag and sort pages.
- Standards-compliant sitemap.xml — lastmod pulled from real Last-Modified headers, priority scaled by crawl depth.
- Automatic 50k index chunking — Sites over 50,000 URLs split into numbered sitemaps plus a sitemap-index.xml, exactly per the sitemaps.org spec.
- Full CSV SEO report — Every crawled page with status, title, meta, H1, word count, canonical and noindex — including the 404s the sitemap correctly leaves out, so you can fix them.
Maptrail vs Screaming Frog, at a glance
| Maptrail | Screaming Frog | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once | £199/yr (~$250/yr) |
| Cost after 3 years | $19 | ~$750 |
| Sitemap.xml + 50k chunking | Yes | Yes |
| HTML sitemap | Yes | No |
| CSV crawl/SEO report | Yes | Yes |
| Free-tier URL cap | None — no tiers | 500 URLs |
| Account / license server | No | Yearly license key |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
Pays for itself in under a month of a Screaming Frog license — and every year after is pure savings.
Common questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — Maptrail is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/sitemap-generator-mvp. The $19 buys the signed Windows installer, 1-click setup and updates; building from source is free.
Does it do everything Screaming Frog does?
No, and we'd rather say so. Screaming Frog also does log-file analysis, JS rendering and integrations. If you need all that, buy it. If you need clean sitemaps and a crawl report, Maptrail does that for $19 once.
Does my crawl data get uploaded?
Never. Maptrail makes network requests only to the site you tell it to crawl — no telemetry, no update pings, no account. History lives in a local SQLite file.
The bottom line
Maptrail won't out-feature Screaming Frog on every axis — no subscription tool with a bigger team and a bigger roadmap loses on everything. But for the core job, $19 once against £199/yr (~$250/yr) forever is a trade most people should at least look at. Maptrail is part of OneTimeSuite, a catalog of pay-once apps that replace subscription SaaS.
Try Maptrail — $19, once
Local website crawler and sitemap generator — XML, HTML and a full CSV SEO report, offline.