I’m currently evaluating options for a deep technical SEO audit on a large content site (around 55k pages). The goal is to identify indexation issues, crawl budget waste, and major on-page problems, but the budget is fairly tight for a one-time project.
I’ve been looking at the usual suspects: Ahrefs Site Audit, Screaming Frog, and SEMrush. For a site of this size, the scale seems to push the limits of some desktop tools and gets expensive quickly with cloud platforms.
* **Crawl Limits:** Screaming Frog’s licensed version can handle it, but crawling 50k+ pages will be a massive resource drain on a local machine. Cloud platforms like Ahrefs have higher crawl limits, but how does the depth and configurability compare for a truly technical audit?
* **Data Freshness & Retention:** If the crawl takes days, how stale does the data get by the time you analyze it? Do these platforms store the crawl data long enough for thorough analysis?
* **Budget Trades:** Is it better to use a limited cloud crawl and supplement with a custom Python crawler (like using Scrapy) for specific issue types? Or does that create more integration work than it’s worth?
My main comparison points are cost for this one-off, the ability to detect complex technical issues (like JS rendering problems or chain redirects), and export functionality for sharing with dev teams. Has anyone done a similar large-scale audit on a budget? What was your toolstack and workflow?