Maptrail and Screaming Frog solve the same problem from opposite directions: one is source-available software you can own outright for $19, the other is a subscription at £199/yr (~$250/yr) run entirely on someone else's servers.
Head to head
| 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 |
What Maptrail does well
- 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.
What Screaming Frog still does better
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.
Which one should you pick
If your workflow depends on Screaming Frog's specific integrations or you'd rather not run anything yourself, stay put — that's a legitimate call. If you're comfortable owning the tool and want to stop paying £199/yr (~$250/yr) for a job your own hardware can do, Maptrail pays for itself and then some: pays for itself in under a month of a Screaming Frog license — and every year after is pure savings.
Try Maptrail — $19, once
Local website crawler and sitemap generator — XML, HTML and a full CSV SEO report, offline.