Moz vs Screaming Frog
A source-aware comparison of pricing, documented capabilities and workflow fit.
Short answer
- Price: not directly comparable — Moz is pricing not verified, Screaming Frog is free tier available.
- How to start: Moz is pricing not verified, Screaming Frog is free tier available.
- Where they differ: only Moz has public api and sso (saml).
These lines are generated from the pricing we track, not from a paid placement. How we score tools.
What Moz is
Moz provides SEO tooling: rank tracking, site audits, keyword research and its own link index and domain authority metric. Domain Authority remains its most-cited output, useful as a rough comparative signal rather than a target to chase. Its link index and keyword data are smaller than the leading crawlers, which is the trade for a gentler interface and price.
What Screaming Frog is
Screaming Frog is a desktop crawler that walks your site like a search engine and reports technical problems. Running on your own machine means no crawl quota and full control over speed, headers and rendering, which matters on large or access-restricted sites. In exchange, crawl size is limited by your RAM and there is no scheduled monitoring unless you set it up yourself.
Side by side
| Moz | Screaming Frog | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Marketing | Marketing |
| How to start | Not verifiednot a monthly price | Free tiernot a monthly price |
| Public API | Yes | No |
| Mobile app | No | No |
| Open source / self-hostable | No | No |
| SSO (SAML) | Yes | No |
| Visit | Moz ↗ | Screaming Frog ↗ |
What Moz is built to do
- Link index and Domain Authority
- Reports referring domains and a comparative authority score.
- Keyword research
- Estimates volume and difficulty for target queries.
- Site crawl
- Audits pages for technical and on-page issues on a schedule.
What Screaming Frog is built to do
- Desktop site crawler
- Crawls a site locally and reports status codes, redirects, titles and canonicals.
- JavaScript rendering
- Renders pages with a headless browser to crawl client-side content.
- API integrations
- Pulls Search Console, Analytics and PageSpeed data onto crawled URLs.
Choose Moz if
- Small teams doing SEO without a dedicated specialist.
Choose Screaming Frog if
- Anyone responsible for technical SEO on a site of real size.
Evidence and freshness
Where a claim on this page comes from a vendor page, it is linked here.
Moz: pros & cons
- Domain Authority is widely referenced
- Approachable interface for non-specialists
- Good learning material
- Link index smaller than Ahrefs or Semrush
- Rank tracking limits on lower plans
- Some data updates slowly
Screaming Frog: pros & cons
- Finds technical issues nothing else catches
- One-off annual licence, no per-seat cloud fees
- Crawls as deep as your machine allows
- Desktop only, no collaboration
- Output needs SEO knowledge to interpret
- Large sites need a powerful machine
Our verdict on Moz
Fine as a first SEO tool. Serious link analysis needs a bigger index.
Our verdict on Screaming Frog
Still the standard technical crawler. It reports; interpreting is your job.