ShipcheckShipcheck vs Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a powerful desktop crawler that technical SEOs use to audit thousands of URLs. Shipcheck lives in your browser and checks the page you are working on, so you catch launch issues while you build instead of after a crawl.
| Feature | Shipcheck | Screaming Frog |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free for meta tags and share previews; Pro is $20 once, lifetime | Free up to 500 URLs; paid annual license for more |
| Where it runs | Chrome side panel on any tab, including localhost and logged-in pages | Desktop app (Windows, macOS, Linux) |
| Crawl size | 50-page crawl and 25-page accessibility and AI scanPro | Large sites with the paid license (limited by your computer's memory) |
| Meta tags | Yes, free | Yes, in depth |
| Canonicals and broken links | YesPro | Yes, in depth |
| SERP and social share previews | Yes, visual and free | SERP snippet tool; social tags as crawl data |
| WCAG 2.2 accessibility | Full axe-core scan with fixes and page outlinesPro | axe-based accessibility audit with the paid licence |
| AI search visibility (AI crawlers, llms.txt, JS-only content) | Yes, summarized per crawlerPro | Possible with custom user-agent and rendering settings |
| Core Web Vitals | On the live tab, with the slow element namedPro | Via the PageSpeed Insights API integration |
| Pre-launch checklist (headers, legal pages, analytics, 404) | YesPro | Partial (custom extraction and search) |
| AI fix prompts for Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT | YesPro | No |
| White-label client report | Yes, PDFPro | Exports to spreadsheets and Looker Studio |
Shipcheck features marked Pro need the $20 lifetime license. The free extension shows issue counts for several of them as a preview.
When to pick Screaming Frog
- You audit large sites with thousands of URLs and need deep crawl data.
- You need custom extraction or scheduled crawls (and log analysis via their Log File Analyser).
When to pick Shipcheck
- You build or launch sites and want issues caught on the page you are working on.
- You need accessibility, AI search, and launch checks along with SEO.
- You want a client-ready report and AI fix prompts without learning a crawler.
Using both
Many agencies use both: Screaming Frog for big technical audits and Shipcheck for day-to-day page QA, client handoffs, and pre-launch checks.
Comparison based on publicly available information as of October 2026. Check the Screaming Frog website for its latest features and pricing.
Free tools to try now
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