Deepcrawl is called Lumar now. The rebrand is announced on lumar.io itself, so a comparison against Deepcrawl is a comparison against Lumar, and search results for the old name keep resolving to the new site. Everything below uses the current name.
The two tools sit at opposite ends of the same category. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop application installed and licensed per person. Lumar is a cloud platform sold to organizations. Both crawl websites and report technical problems. Almost everything else about them differs, including who signs off on the purchase.
The short version
| Screaming Frog SEO Spider | Lumar | |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery | Desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux | Cloud platform, four apps |
| Products | One crawler, plus a separate Log File Analyser | Analyze, Monitor, Protect, Impact |
| Free tier | Free version capped at 500 URLs per crawl | Not published |
| Price | £199 per licence per year, per user | Not published, contact form |
| Checks | Over 300 SEO issues | 250+ reports in Analyze, 350+ automated QA tests in Protect |
| Accessibility | AXE engine, WCAG 2.0 A through 2.2 AA, enabled in config | WCAG 2.2, levels A to AAA |
| CI/CD | Command line and scheduled crawls | Protect integrates with the pipeline and can block a build |
| Buying it | Card, today | Quote, procurement |
Prices and feature claims read from each vendor's own site on 10 September 2026.
Screaming Frog
The SEO Spider ships as a desktop application, with builds for Windows, macOS on both Apple Silicon and Intel, and Linux. You install it, point it at a domain, and a crawl fills a table you can filter, sort and export. The free version caps a crawl at 500 URLs. A licence costs £199 per user per year, dropping to £189 at five licences, £179 at ten and £169 at twenty or more. Licences are per user, so two people need two of them.
Coverage is broad: over 300 SEO issues, broken links, metadata, duplicate content, XML sitemap generation and site architecture visualisation. JavaScript sites crawl through an integrated Chromium rendering service, so Angular, React and Vue apps render rather than returning empty shells. Custom extraction pulls any field out of the HTML with XPath, CSS selectors or regex. Crawl comparison diffs one crawl against another. Integrations cover the Google Analytics, Search Console and PageSpeed Insights APIs, plus link metrics from Majestic, Ahrefs and Moz. Recent versions run custom AI prompts against pages mid-crawl, with OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama and Anthropic as the model options.
Log file analysis is a separate purchase. Screaming Frog ships it as its own application, the Log File Analyser, downloaded and licensed apart from the SEO Spider. Lumar keeps its equivalent inside the platform.
The interaction model is what people pay for. Someone who knows the filters can answer a question about a crawl faster here than anywhere else in the category. The constraint is where the work runs. Scheduling and command-line launch parameters do automate a crawl, but on a machine you license, patch and keep available, and the artefact at the end is an export rather than a verdict a build step can read.
Lumar
Lumar splits the same job across four apps. Analyze is the crawler, with 250+ built-in reports and custom extraction, built for enterprise-scale sites. Monitor tracks metrics across multiple domains with dashboards and alerts. Protect handles the pipeline case, with 350+ built-in automated QA tests covering SEO, site speed and accessibility, integration with a CI/CD pipeline, the option to stop a build that misses a health threshold you set, and template testing on a schedule as often as hourly. Impact reports the value of optimization work back to stakeholders.
Accessibility sits closer than the positioning suggests. Both tools cover it. Screaming Frog runs the open-source AXE engine, grouping violations from WCAG 2.0 A up to 2.2 AA, switched on under Config, Spider, Extraction. Lumar's coverage reaches WCAG 2.2 across levels A to AAA and sits in the product rather than behind a setting. The wider gap is elsewhere: Lumar publishes GEO and AEO metrics for AI search visibility, a category that postdates both tools' original design.
Lumar also exposes an API for building on its data, which matters for the case the platform is sold into: reporting that has to land in a warehouse or a BI tool rather than stay in a vendor dashboard.
Pricing is a contact form with no tiers and no published numbers, alongside a note about flexible pricing and packaging. That is standard for the segment, and it identifies the buyer. This is a purchase with a budget line and a procurement process behind it.
The published check counts do not compare. Screaming Frog counts SEO issues it can flag on a page. Lumar counts reports in Analyze and automated tests in Protect, which are different units in two different products. Reading 300 against 250 as a coverage gap is reading a number that was never the same measurement.
Which one fits
Screaming Frog suits investigative work owned by one person: auditing a client site, working out why a section fell out of the index, extracting a field from ten thousand product pages. The price is known, the licence is yours today, and the filtering depth rewards familiarity with the tool.
Lumar suits crawls that have to run without anyone starting them, across more sites than a laptop holds, for a team that shares the results. Build-blocking in Protect and multi-domain monitoring are capabilities Screaming Frog does not offer, and past a certain scale the crawl itself outgrows a desktop machine.
Teams between those two positions usually buy Screaming Frog and feel the gap on automation, or price Lumar and decide the scale does not justify it.
What happens after the report
Both tools assume a person reads the output. Screaming Frog produces a table. Lumar produces a dashboard, and in Protect's case a build gate someone configured. In both cases a person then reads the findings, decides what matters, opens the codebase and edits it. That translation step is the slow one, and it is the step a coding agent can take over, given output written for one.
squirrelscan covers that narrower job. It is a command-line binary, squirrel, that crawls a site and scores it against 260+ audit rules across SEO, performance, security, accessibility, content and agent experience. Local audits are free.
curl -fsSL https://install.squirrelscan.com | bash
squirrel audit https://example.com --format llmBeing a binary rather than an application has two consequences. It runs in CI as itself, and --fail-on 'score<90' exits non-zero when a threshold trips, so a build step reads the result directly. It also runs inside a coding agent. Point Claude Code, Cursor or Codex at the repo with the squirrelscan skill or MCP server installed, and the agent audits the site, reads the findings, edits the templates and re-runs the audit to confirm the fix landed.
It does not replace Lumar for an enterprise. A CLI has no multi-domain dashboard, no stakeholder reporting app, no procurement-friendly contract and no account team, and an organization that needs those needs a platform. It does not replace Screaming Frog for open-ended manual investigation either, because there is no table to filter. It covers the step where a person would otherwise retype findings into a code editor.
The Screaming Frog alternatives roundup covers the rest of the desktop crawler field including the free ones, and Sitebulb alternatives covers the closest competitor to Screaming Frog on the desktop. For the agent workflow, fixing audit issues with an AI agent walks through it on a real site.