SE Ranking vs Screaming Frog
These two get compared a lot and they are not the same kind of product. SE Ranking is a monthly subscription to a cloud platform whose site audit is metered by pages per month. Screaming Frog is a licence for a crawler that runs on your own machine with no page meter at all. Which one is wrong for you depends less on features than on that difference, so this starts there.
The shapes, not the feature lists
| SE Ranking | Screaming Frog | Docket | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How you pay | Monthly subscription | Annual licence | Once |
| Published price | $129–$279/mo ($103.20–$223.20/mo billed annually) | $279/yr USD | $349 once |
| Where the crawl runs | Their cloud | Your machine | Your Mac |
| Audit volume | Metered — the Core plan states “250k pages per month in audit” | Unmetered; free tier stops at 500 URLs | Unmetered |
| Try before buying | “Start free 14-day trial”, “No credit card required” | Free tier, 500 URLs, permanently | No trial — refund instead |
Checked against the vendor's own pricing page: Ahrefs Site Audit checked 2026-08-10 (source); Google Lighthouse checked 2026-08-10 (source); Otterly.AI checked 2026-08-10 (source); Profound checked 2026-08-10 (source); SE Ranking checked 2026-09-08 (source); SEOptimer checked 2026-08-10 (source); Screaming Frog checked 2026-09-08 (source); Scrutiny checked 2026-08-15 (source); Semrush Site Audit checked 2026-08-10 (source); Sitebulb checked 2026-09-08 (source); Sitechecker checked 2026-08-10 (source); Ubersuggest checked 2026-08-10 (source). Prices change; check before you buy, and tell us if one here is wrong.
What SE Ranking is actually selling
Not a crawler. The audit is one module inside a rank-tracking and keyword platform, and the Core plan's own bullet list makes the proportions clear: ten projects and one manager seat, two thousand keywords and a hundred prompts tracked daily, five domains in GEO research, 250k pages a month in audit, and 25K API credits with MCP access. If you want daily rank tracking across locations and devices, that is the product, and neither of the other two here does it at all.
The page meter is the thing to check before you buy. 250k pages a month is generous for one site and starts to matter when you are auditing many, or re-auditing the same large site often — and it is a ceiling that exists because the crawl happens on their hardware.
What Screaming Frog is actually selling
The opposite trade. It audits “over 300 SEO issues”, it runs on your machine, and nothing counts your pages — their own line is that you can “Download & crawl 500 URLs for free, or buy a licence for £199 Per Year to remove the limit & access advanced features”. The free tier is genuinely useful and genuinely limited: their Free vs Paid table puts Scheduling, Crawl Configuration, Save & Open Crawls, JavaScript Rendering, Crawl Comparison and Near Duplicate Content on the paid side only, so the free version cannot save a crawl or render JavaScript.
What you get back is data. Screaming Frog is the better tool if you know what you are looking for — custom extraction, very large crawls, a specific hypothesis to test. It does not rank what to fix first, and it does not try to.
Where Docket sits, and where it does not
Docket is the third shape: bought once, run locally, unmetered, and the output is a ranked plan rather than a table. Every finding carries how bad it is, how long the fix takes and the change to make. That is the whole pitch, and it is worth being clear about what it costs you.
Docket does not track rankings. No keyword positions, no daily rank checks, no competitor position history. If that is why you were looking at SE Ranking, Docket does not replace it and this page is not trying to talk you out of it.
Docket does not out-crawl Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog handles far larger sites, renders JavaScript across a whole crawl in its integrated Chromium, and supports custom XPath extraction. Docket renders a sample by default. On a large single-page application, Screaming Frog is the right tool.
Docket is macOS only. Both of the others run on Windows.
So which one
- You need daily rank tracking and keyword research — SE Ranking, and the audit comes along with it.
- You crawl very large sites, or you want raw data to interrogate yourself — Screaming Frog.
- You want to know what is wrong with your site and what to do about it, on a Mac, without a subscription or a page meter — that is what Docket is for.
Common questions
Is SE Ranking's site audit unlimited?
No. Its Core plan states “250k pages per month in audit”, so the audit is metered by pages per month. Screaming Frog's paid licence has no page meter, because the crawl runs on your own machine rather than theirs.
Can I use Screaming Frog for free?
Yes, up to 500 URLs. Their Free vs Paid table puts Scheduling, Crawl Configuration, Save & Open Crawls, JavaScript Rendering, Crawl Comparison and Near Duplicate Content on the paid side, so the free version cannot save a crawl or render JavaScript.
Which one tracks keyword rankings?
SE Ranking. Screaming Frog does not, and neither does Docket — if daily rank tracking is what you need, that is the one of the three that does it.