Quick answer
Yes — Maptrail is a one-time-purchase alternative to Screaming Frog. It costs $19 once, while Screaming Frog runs £199/yr (~$250/yr) — about $250 per year, every year. Local website crawler and sitemap generator — XML, HTML and a full CSV SEO report, offline. It is for people who want the job done on their own hardware without a renewal date — not for teams that live inside Screaming Frog's ecosystem.
The verdict
Switch to Maptrail if you are an individual or small team paying Screaming Frog £199/yr (~$250/yr) for work your own machine can do. Pays for itself in under a month of a Screaming Frog license — and every year after is pure savings.
Stay with Screaming Frog if your workflow depends on its integrations, you need enterprise features (SSO, admin controls, SLAs), or your team is large enough that per-seat collaboration tooling is worth the bill. Maptrail does not try to replicate those.
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 |
| 5-year cost | $19 | $1,250 |
Where Screaming Frog still wins
- Ecosystem and integrations. Established tools accumulate years of third-party integrations, templates and add-ons. If your workflow is wired into Screaming Frog's ecosystem, switching means rebuilding that plumbing — a real cost.
- Team and enterprise features. Shared workspaces, granular permissions, SSO, audit logs and a vendor to call when something breaks — that is what the higher subscription tiers actually buy, and a pay-once app does not come with it.
- Familiarity and hiring. Screaming Frog is the name people already know. Onboarding a team onto a tool nobody has used before takes time the subscription never charges for.
Where Maptrail wins
- Price, permanently. $19 once versus $250/yr for as long as you use it. There is no renewal, no seat count and no tier gate.
- 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.
The math
Pays for itself in under a month of a Screaming Frog license — and every year after is pure savings.
- After 1 year: Maptrail has cost you $19 total — Screaming Frog has cost $250.
- After 3 years: Maptrail is still $19 — the subscription is at $750.
- After 5 years: Maptrail is still $19 — the subscription is at $1,250.
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.
What platforms does it run on?
The packaged installer is for Windows. The MIT source runs anywhere Electron does if you build it yourself.
Try Maptrail — $19, one time
Or get Maptrail plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.