DeepCrawl (Lumar) vs Screaming Frog
By Seth Black · Published
DeepCrawl, now called Lumar, is an enterprise cloud crawler sold by quote; Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop crawler that costs $279 a year per user. Screaming Frog is the better choice for almost any single auditor or agency working site by site, and Lumar is the better choice when a large organization needs crawls, monitoring and pre-release tests shared across teams. The price gap is the deciding factor for most people, and Lumar won’t tell you its side of it until you fill in a form.
Vendor facts below were checked on 31 October 2026 on the pages linked.
What is the difference between Lumar and Screaming Frog?
Where they run. Screaming Frog is an application on your computer: you start a crawl, it uses your machine’s memory and disk, and the data lives on your machine. Lumar runs in its own cloud: you configure a project in a browser, its servers crawl, and your whole team reads the same reports.
Everything else follows from that. Screaming Frog’s crawl size depends on your hardware. Lumar’s depends on your contract. Screaming Frog is one license per person. Lumar is built for many people looking at one set of data.
How do Lumar and Screaming Frog compare on price and features?
| Lumar (formerly DeepCrawl) | Screaming Frog SEO Spider | |
|---|---|---|
| Runs where | Cloud | Desktop (Windows, Mac, Ubuntu Linux) |
| Price | Quote only | $279 per user per year |
| Volume pricing | Not published | $265 (5 to 9), $249 (10 to 19), $235 (20+) per license |
| Free option | No | Free version, 500 URLs |
| Crawl limit | Not published | “Unlimited”, dependent on memory and storage |
| JavaScript rendering | Yes | Yes, with a license |
| Scheduling | Monitor module | Yes, with a license |
| Command line | Not applicable (cloud) | Yes |
| CI/CD testing | Yes, Protect | Not built in |
| API | Yes | Integrations with Search Console, Analytics, PageSpeed Insights |
Sources: Screaming Frog pricing, Screaming Frog user guide, Lumar pricing, Lumar homepage, Lumar rendering guide. Checked on 31 October 2026.
Screaming Frog’s user guide says a license “removes the 500 URL crawl limit” and adds saving and opening crawls, scheduling, JavaScript rendering and custom extraction. Licenses are per user and last one year. The pricing page lists the same feature names in both columns, so read the user guide for what’s actually gated.
How much does Lumar cost compared with Screaming Frog?
Screaming Frog for one person for three years is $837. For a team of five it’s $265 per seat per year, or $3,975 over three years.
Lumar doesn’t publish pricing. Its page asks you to “fill out the form to get your price quote now” and describes “flexible pricing and packaging” across its Analyze, Monitor, Protect and Impact modules. I won’t guess at a figure. What I will say is that enterprise cloud crawlers are sold on annual contracts sized by URL volume and modules, and nobody buys one to save money over a desktop license. You buy it for what a desktop tool can’t do.
Where does Lumar win?
- Shared data. Everyone sees the same crawl in a browser. Nobody emails a
.seospiderfile around or asks which laptop has last week’s crawl. - Protect. Lumar’s QA product plugs into your CI/CD pipeline and checks a release before it goes live. On a big site with frequent deploys, catching an accidental
noindexbefore release is worth a lot. - Very large sites without hardware. A crawl of several million URLs needs a serious machine with Screaming Frog. With Lumar it’s someone else’s machine.
- Monitoring and accessibility. Continuous metric monitoring and WCAG 2.2 testing come from the same vendor.
Where does Screaming Frog win?
- Price, published. $279 a year, and you know it before you talk to anyone.
- Free tier. 500 URLs free covers small sites and lets you learn the tool.
- Speed of iteration. Change a setting and recrawl immediately. No queue, no project setup.
- Depth of configuration. Custom extraction, custom search, and a long list of integrations. There are years of community guides for it.
- Data stays with you. Useful for clients who don’t want their site data on a third-party platform.
Which should you pick?
| You are | Pick |
|---|---|
| A freelance or in-house SEO auditing one site at a time | Screaming Frog |
| An agency with a few auditors | Screaming Frog, one license each |
| An enterprise team with millions of URLs and frequent releases | Lumar |
| A team that needs SEO checks in the deploy pipeline | Lumar Protect, or a CLI crawler in CI |
There’s a third option if the yearly renewal is what bothers you about Screaming Frog. bseoa is a desktop crawler with a GUI and a command line for Windows, macOS and Linux, renders JavaScript with headless Chrome, and has no page limit. It’s $279 once rather than per year, with a 14-day trial that has every feature. It has no scheduler, no log analysis and no Search Console integration, so if those are on your list, Screaming Frog or Lumar fits better. Its CLI can run in a CI job, which covers part of what Protect does for teams that can script it.
Further reading
The full matrices are on bseoa vs Lumar and bseoa vs Screaming Frog. Prices for every crawler are on SEO crawler pricing. For more on the enterprise side, see a DeepCrawl alternative for technical SEOs; for crawls that come back short, why your site audit tool is missing half your pages.
-Sethers