Screaming Frog vs. Content Chimera

Aside from Microsoft Office applications, Screaming Frog is probably the most-installed app on the content strategist’s desktop. This is for good reason: it is inexpensive, fast, powerful, and generates a spreadsheet of content that you can analyze.

Note

The crawler is just one component of Content Chimera, and you can import from Screaming Frog if you wish.

Comparing the full feature set of Screaming Frog and Content Chimera for content analysis

Advantages of Screaming Frog:

  • Inexpensive

  • You probably already know the tool

If you use Screaming Frog for content analysis then you probably do subsquent “plumbing” analysis in Excel.

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Although if you have clients you may be able to charge them for the time to slog through Excel sheets in order to do the actual analysis, this does mean that you cannot quickly repeat this process (for instance if you need to iterate) and it is more error prone.

Advantages of Content Chimera:

  • Automatically enhance the “rows” of content in the inventory with additional information useful for analysis (such as folders and file groups) and also deduplicate URLs.

  • Provide the ability to add arbitrary information, such as arbitrary analytics and also sophisticated scraping of custom information.

  • Interactive charting in order to explore and communicate about the content.

  • Define and run rules to make decisions about content.

  • Conduct analysis at the site, group of sites, or client level.

  • Store content analysis in one place rather than locked on specific machines.

Content Chimera handles much of that data plumbing so you can be concentrating on communicating patterns and making decisions.

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Comparing Screaming Frog and Content Chimera solely on crawling

Note

If all you want to do is generate a list of URLs, then there isn’t a huge advantage to using Content Chimera. That said, we encourage you to up your content analysis game!

Advantages of Screaming Frog as a crawler:

  • Very configurable

  • Fast

  • SEO information (although this can be imported into Content Chimera)

Advantages of Content Chimera as a crawler:

  • Visual to see the trajectory of a crawl, especially useful for large crawls

  • “Circuit breakers” to automatically stop following unproductive URLs, especially useful for very large sites

  • Automatically save crawl configurations so when click “Crawl” for a site it uses the same configuration

  • Crawl while on the go via mobile devices