Semrush Alternatives: 12 Competitors Ranked by Buyer Demand

By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Brand24 and Senuto. How the scoring works.

Published 9 November 2026Prefer this source on Google

Twelve Semrush alternatives follow, ordered first by how deeply this site has covered each tool and then by measured "Semrush vs" search demand. The twelve pair searches add up to 2,010 a month in the United States (Google Ads volume via DataForSEO, September 2026), and Ahrefs alone takes the lion's share, 880 of them.

This page is for a team holding a Semrush renewal quote, or a first-time buyer looking for SEO tools similar to Semrush that cost less per month.

Prices and index sizes were checked on the vendors' own pages on 8 November 2026. Contract figures come from Vendr's marketplace, labelled as such, because a list price and a negotiated price for SEO software can sit $10,000 apart.

The best Semrush alternative depends on which of its six jobs you use. SEO professionals who live in backlink analysis land on a different tool from a content marketing team that writes 30 briefs a month, and both differ from an agency whose SEO strategy rests on monthly client reports.

Semrush: what it bundles

Semrush sells six functions under one login: keyword research, competitor and traffic analysis, backlink analysis, site audits, rank tracking, and AI visibility with content tools. That bundle comes from its own pricing page, where the $139 SEO plan lists keyword research, competitor analysis, Position Tracking and Site Audit, and the $199 Starter plan adds AI search prompt tracking.

Semrush's keyword research tool, Keyword Magic, expands one seed into hundreds of thousands of keyword suggestions, and Keyword Gap compares up to five domains for keyword gap analysis. Backlink Gap does the same for backlink research and link building prospects.

Site Audit runs over 140 checks for technical SEO issues and rolls them into a 0 to 100 Site Health score, which is how Semrush prioritises fixes by impact. Position Tracking handles rank tracking daily across Google and Bing, and projects connect to Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Semrush's keyword difficulty score is personalised to your domain, so the same term can read 61% for one site and 29% for another. Its data rests on 28.8 billion keywords, 43 trillion backlinks and 142 geographic databases, per its own knowledge base.

Adobe closed its $1.9 billion acquisition on 28 April 2026, the Advanced plan that listed at $549 a month in September now shows "Custom" with a demo button, and the median Semrush contract on Vendr sits at $11,999 a year across 63 purchases. The full plan history is in our Semrush pricing breakdown.

Three alternatives to Semrush that run their own search-data index, from $29 to $199 a month

Of the SEO tools on this page, Ahrefs, Similarweb and SpyFu each collect their own data and sell it on a published entry plan, so a buyer can test the SEO research numbers before talking to sales. Together they take 1,380 of the 2,010 monthly pair searches.

Each one replaces a different slice of Semrush. Ahrefs covers the SEO data side almost line for line, Similarweb covers competitive analysis of traffic and audiences, and SpyFu covers paid search history. Pick by the report you open most: backlinks, traffic or paid competitor analysis.

01Ahrefs

Real screenshot

Ahrefs referring domains report.

Drawn from sourced figures

Tracked keywords and refresh cadence

Semrush SEO, $139500 daily

Ahrefs Lite, $129750 weekly

Ahrefs Standard, $2492,000 weekly

Ahrefs Advanced, $4495,000 weekly

Sources: ahrefs.com/pricing, semrush.com/prices.

Ahrefs wins on backlink data and loses on rank-tracking cadence. Its big-data page lists 35 trillion external backlink history records across 287 million domains after vetting, and a crawler that visits 5 million pages a minute and refreshes 300 million every 24 hours.

The trade sits in rank tracking. Ahrefs refreshes keyword ranking positions weekly on every plan, from Lite at $129 a month up to Enterprise, while Semrush tracks 500 keywords daily on its $139 SEO plan. To cut to the chase, a team that reacts to a Monday ranking drop on Monday can't, and that's the deciding test for most switchers.

Vendr's median Ahrefs contract is $21,980 a year across 58 deals, 1.8 times Semrush's $11,999, and SpendHound's average for smaller companies is $3,851 across 147 customers.

The Ahrefs pricing report prices each tier.

Ahrefs sells backlink and content analysis in one login, and content is the newer half. For content marketing, Content Explorer arrives with Standard at $249 a month, the Content Kit add-on for content optimization starts at $99, and Brand Radar, which researches a brand across 512 million-plus organic AI prompts, starts at $199 a month.

A Semrush user who leaned on AI search tracking in the Starter plan pays for it separately here.

A TrustRadius reviewer, Imtiaz Khan, wrote in March 2023 that "One feature that Ahref is better than the other products is the backlink report" (TrustRadius). Link building teams call Ahrefs the gold standard for backlink analysis.

Full Ahrefs vs Semrush breakdown →

02Similarweb

Real screenshot

Similarweb marketing channels report.

Drawn from sourced figures

What buyers pay a year, Vendr

Semrush median$11,999

Similarweb low$14,340

Similarweb median$37,826

Similarweb high$94,500

Vendr: 63 Semrush and 158 Similarweb purchases.

Similarweb answers a different question from Semrush's competitor analysis: how many people visit a site and where they come from. It measures over 1 billion websites and 8 million apps, splitting each one's traffic across direct, email, referral, social, organic, paid and display, and it now reports ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity referrals as their own channel.

For market research and traffic estimation it's the stronger tool, because none of the crawler-based suites measures visits from device panels. Its keyword research runs on roughly 5 billion search terms across Google, Amazon and YouTube, against the 28.8 billion-keyword Semrush keyword database.

The SEO half is thinner. Backlink analysis is absent at entry level, the $199 Starter plan has no rank tracker, and reports cap at 1,000 keyword results. Our Similarweb review found small-site estimates deviate from Google Analytics data and lag by weeks, so a site with 5,000 monthly visits reads less reliably than one with 5 million.

Price is where buyers get cold feet. Vendr's median Similarweb contract is $37,826 a year across 158 purchases, 3.2 times Semrush's median, with deals from $14,340 to $94,500. The Similarweb pricing report itemises the add-on modules behind that spread.

Full Similarweb vs Semrush breakdown →

03SpyFu

Real screenshot

SpyFu PPC competitors view.

Drawn from sourced figures

A year at list price

SpyFu Basic$348

SpyFu Pro + AI$1,068

Semrush SEO, annual$1,408

Annual billing. Sources: SpyFu pricing report, semrush.com/prices.

SpyFu is the cheapest route into competitor research on this list. Basic costs $29 a month billed annually, $348 a year, or $39 month to month, which is 3% of Semrush's Vendr median.

What that buys is an archive: SpyFu launched in April 2005 as GoogSpy, and its Pro + AI plan at $89 a month annually opens more than ten years of a rival's Google Ads copy and keywords. Semrush's paid search data runs shallower on ad history.

The gaps are just as concrete. SpyFu ships no site-audit tool for technical SEO, its backlink index is a claimed 1 trillion links against Ahrefs' 35 trillion records, and it indexes ads nationally, so a plumber bidding in one city barely registers, which rules it out for local SEO. G2 reviewers also report search volume figures that don't match their own ad spend.

SpyFu's own domain states two keyword database sizes, 13.1 billion on the homepage and 73 billion on its blog. Our SpyFu review logs both, and the SpyFu pricing report covers the old $33 and $79 rate card still ranking in search results.

SpyFu fits a solo PPC manager or a small agency running paid search and SEO campaigns for clients who mostly want to know what a rival bids on. Rank tracking covers 5,000 keywords a week on Basic and 50,000 on Team/Agency, enough for most competitor analysis and keyword ranking checks. Buying it for technical SEO audits is barking up the wrong tree, so that job goes to a second tool.

A Reddit user in r/PPC, u/climberofrock, put the accuracy question bluntly: "Put your own URL in there and check out what numbers it gives you and compare that to what you're actually spending" (Reddit). It's a test for accurate data worth running on any of the twelve.

Where SpyFu ranks →

Four specialists built around one job: reporting, visibility, links or content

Raven Tools, Sistrix, Majestic and Positive Surfer are SEO tools that go deep on one or two of Semrush's six functions and skip the rest. Their entry prices run from $39 to EUR 119 a month. Each pairs well with a general suite or a set of content marketing tools, and two of them, Raven and Sistrix, resell Majestic's link data inside their own products.

04Raven Tools

Raven Tools is a reporting product that happens to track rankings. Every tier, including Small Biz at $39 a month prepaid annually, includes unlimited automated reports, and 25-plus data-source integrations pull Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads and CallRail into the same client PDF. For digital marketing agencies that spend Friday afternoons assembling reports on SEO campaigns, Raven hits the nail on the head.

The keyword and backlink data is borrowed. Backlink analysis runs on Majestic's index through Backlink Explorer, 20 to 100 reports a month by tier, keyword research comes without a keyword difficulty score, and the Site Auditor checks 17 on-page issue types against Semrush's 140-plus.

Rank checks run from 1,500 to 30,000 a month across five search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and Baidu. Our Raven Tools review scores it 85 for agencies and 55 for depth.

At $468 a year for Small Biz, Raven costs 4% of Semrush's median contract. Small Biz starts after a 7-day free trial. Grow, at $139 a month annually, is the first tier with a full white label; the two cheaper tiers brand reports on a Raven subdomain.

Raven fits a link building or local SEO agency that already pays for a research tool and needs a client-facing layer on top of its SEO workflows. Its rank tracker reports keyword ranking movement across 1,500 to 30,000 checks a month, and stored link lists hold 25,000 to 150,000 links per account. That turns it into a light link building tool for monitoring placements after outreach.

Full Raven Tools vs Semrush breakdown →

05Sistrix

As an alternative to Semrush, Sistrix measures one thing better than anyone here: how visible a domain is in Google over a long stretch of time. Its Visibility Index samples 1 million keywords per country, covers 52 countries with 13 updated daily, and its German data runs back to 25 February 2008. A team selling into Germany, Austria or Switzerland gets 18 years of ranking history Semrush can't match in that market.

Sistrix bills in euros. Start costs EUR 119 a month plus taxes, about $1,596 a year, with one user and three months of historical data; Plus at EUR 239 adds five years and three seats. Those rates followed a 2024 increase that lifted Start from EUR 99 and Premium from EUR 599.

Its keyword research database holds 450 million keywords across every country, against Semrush's 28.8 billion, and US backlink analysis rates as basic in our Sistrix review.

Monthly plans cancel any time with no notice period, and the free trial runs 14 days per the pricing FAQ.

The newer modules point at AI search. AI Check queries six AI systems and was free during beta, and Prompt Research catalogues 62 million user questions in 1.4 million topics. For a European agency running technical audits and reporting visibility on search engines first and AI answers second, Sistrix measures Germany best.

One Capterra reviewer from the travel sector wrote in September 2022 that for a small site "there are no special plans that match the needs of a 1-2users enviroment" (Capterra).

Where Sistrix ranks →

06Majestic

Majestic is a link index with a website attached. It sells no rank tracking, site audits or keyword research database beyond a 0-100 volume score, which makes it the narrowest tool here. What it does sell is history: the $99.99 Pro plan opens a Historic Index that starts on 6 June 2006, with 4.5 trillion unique URLs crawled. Ahrefs keeps unlimited history for Enterprise, which it prices by sales quote.

The fine print is the date. Majestic's Historic Index is effectively set in stone: it covers backlinks to 26 March 2024 and was last updated on 3 May 2024, and a gap opens between that and the 120-day Fresh Index window. Our Majestic vs Ahrefs comparison maps it.

Comparison posts ranking for this query repeat Majestic's claim to the most complete backlink database, and the 21.7 trillion unique URLs found in its Historic Index is the figure behind it. Topical Trust Flow, which sorts links into more than 800 categories, is the metric link building teams buy it for.

Lite costs $49.99 a month or $499.99 a year with one user, 4% of Semrush's median. A 7-day money-back guarantee covers a customer's first Lite or Pro plan.

Majestic is a link building tool built for backlink analysis, and that's the whole pitch. Link building teams use Trust Flow and Citation Flow to vet prospects, the Bulk Backlink Checker to screen lists of domains, and Link Context to see where on a page a link sits.

Pair it with a rank tracker and a technical SEO crawler for technical audits, and it covers the backlink data Semrush sells inside a larger bundle.

Trustpilot scores Majestic 1.9 from 16 reviews, and the complaints are about its crawler. One reviewer, Thunder Thunder, wrote in August 2025: "Way too aggressive for small sites. Majestic needs to slow it down or make opting out easier" (Trustpilot).

07Positive Surfer

Real screenshot

Surfer AI Tracker overview.

Drawn from sourced figures

AI engines or models tracked

Positive Surfer5 engines

SE Ranking Core4 engines

Moz Pro Standard3 models

Serpstat Team3 assistants

Vendor pricing pages, 8 November 2026.

As an alternative to Semrush, Positive Surfer replaces the content half and none of the link half. Its Content Editor scores a draft 0 to 100 against 500-plus on-page signals read from the top-ranking search results, live while you write; a study of one million SERP entries put the correlation between that score and Google position at 0.28 (Spearman).

Real-time content optimization is the product. Its Topical Map scores coverage for each of your keyword clusters and marks every keyword Covered or Write.

Its AI Tracker follows prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and Google AI Mode, and reports a visibility score, mention rate and average position per prompt. Its content audit connects to Google Search Console and ranks published URLs by upside. Keyword research clusters terms by SERP similarity and attaches volume, difficulty and search intent, so a content marketing team plans keyword clusters and writes against them in the same tool.

Backlinks, crawl errors, page speed and other technical SEO checks sit outside Surfer entirely. Discovery costs $49 a month billed yearly, $588 a year for one seat, and Pro runs $182 a month with five seats and 200 tracked pages. Positive Group acquired Surfer on 21 October 2025.

Surfer scores 4.2 on Trustpilot from 222 reviews. The sharpest complaint, from Wolf.Stadt in September 2026: "We cancelled our account and our accounts were charged anyway" (Trustpilot).

Try it yourself

Visit Positive Surfer

Discovery runs $49 a month billed yearly for one seat; the AI Tracker and Content Editor sit in the same workspace.

Visit Surfer →

May earn a commission if you sign up through this link, at no extra cost to you. Full affiliate disclosure.

Full Positive Surfer vs Semrush breakdown →

Five all-in-one SEO platforms that also track AI answers

BrightEdge, SE Ranking, Moz Pro, Serpstat and Ubersuggest are SEO tools that cover keyword research, rank tracking, site audits and some form of AI search tracking under one subscription. They're the closest like-for-like alternative to Semrush, and their prices span the widest range on the page: from a $29 Ubersuggest plan to a $50,000 BrightEdge median.

08BrightEdge

BrightEdge is the enterprise Semrush alternative, and its price says so. It publishes no rate card; its pricing page asks buyers to call 800-578-8023. Vendr's median BrightEdge contract is $50,000 a year across 46 purchases, from $42,492 to $68,936, which is 4.2 times Semrush's median.

SpendHound's enterprise average reads higher still at $152,758 across 26 customers.

Data Cube X runs competitive analysis down to the page, the AI Hyper Cube reports which brands ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews mention or cite and with what sentiment, and Autopilot applies on-site changes. Its research engine holds over 4 billion data points with 10 years of keyword history, per our search intelligence platforms ranking.

Where BrightEdge earns its fee is scale. An enterprise content marketing team with thousands of pages, several brands and a reporting line to a CMO gets executive dashboards and automated on-page changes that Semrush's self-serve plans don't sell. For a site with 200 pages, it's a long shot to pay off.

A marketing manager at a 10,001-plus employee company wrote on TrustRadius in December 2024: "BrightEdge is great for large companies and large SEO teams since it's pricey but worth it if you have a large team or organization using it" (TrustRadius).

Where BrightEdge ranks →

09SE Ranking

SE Ranking is the closest budget Semrush alternative for its feature list, covering the whole nine yards at a lower price. Its Core plan costs $129 a month, $103.20 billed annually, and tracks 2,000 keywords daily across 10 projects; Semrush's $139 SEO plan tracks 500.

The Core plan from SE Ranking includes unlimited keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink analysis against an index of 2.9 trillion backlinks and 428 million domains, technical SEO site audits of 250,000 pages a month, and tracking across AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity and ChatGPT.

The entry plan carries the backlink monitoring and analysis features too, and 25 content articles a month for content optimization. Report Builder in SE Ranking allows 10 reports on Core and 30 on Growth, and the $69-a-month Agency Pack adds white-label reporting and 30 client seats. A year of Core costs $1,238, about a tenth of Semrush's median.

Limits show up in history and freshness. Core keeps six months of historical data in SE Ranking, and SE Ranking says 58% of its backlinks are re-checked every 90 days. Ahrefs and Semrush refresh faster.

For AI search visibility, the SE Visible add-on starts at $71 a month with 75 to 1,000 tracked prompts, on top of the AI Overviews and ChatGPT tracking Core already includes.

Comparison pages published by SE Ranking describe its interface as clean and consistent, and it's the SEO software here most likely to match Semrush report for report at a lower monthly price. For a team that wants daily rank tracking under $130 a month, it's the best Semrush alternative on this page.

Sneha G., a community manager reviewing on G2 in May 2026, wrote: "Keyword and ranking data feel surprisingly close to tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, but without the heavy monthly cost" (G2).

Where SE Ranking ranks →

10Moz Pro

As a Semrush alternative, Moz Pro sells Domain Authority, a metric so widely quoted that many buyers know it before they know Moz. The Starter plan costs $49 a month for a single website; Standard at $99, or $79 billed yearly, carries Moz's core SEO features plus AI features across three sites, 300 tracked keyword rankings and 400,000 crawled pages a month.

Moz's keyword research tool, Keyword Explorer, draws on 25 billion keyword suggestions with search volume for each, close to Semrush's 28.8 billion keywords.

Its AI search visibility tracking is newer and generous at the entry level. Standard tracks 150 prompts across GPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode, with AI Overviews data by keyword; Medium at $179 carries the free trial, doubles that to 300 prompts, adds scheduled and branded reports, and allows 75 competitive research queries.

Vendr's median Moz contract is $16,800 a year, from $6,600 to $33,600, 1.4 times Semrush's median, so the $49 headline is a drop in the bucket next to what larger teams sign.

Domain authority tracking is the reason many agencies and SEO professionals keep a Moz seat next to a larger suite. Moz publishes Domain Authority, Page Authority and Brand Authority, and link building teams screen prospects on DA, so a team that sells or audits links gets the number from its source. Keyword research covers 5,000 to 15,000 keyword queries a month on Medium and Large, with keyword suggestions grouped by topic.

11Serpstat

Serpstat is the cost-effective Semrush alternative for keyword tracking and auditing. Its keyword research data covers 7.46 billion keywords across 230 regional databases, and its backlink analysis draws on 1.1 trillion backlinks and 1.51 billion domains.

The Individual plan costs $50 a month billed annually, $600 a year, with five projects, 100 searches a day, 10,000 position checks and 30,000 pages to audit. That's 5% of Semrush's median.

The Team plan at $100 a month annually is where Serpstat competes with Semrush's mid tiers: unlimited projects, three users, API access, an MCP integration for ChatGPT and Claude, and 1,500 AI Visibility checks a month across ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini. White-label reports wait for the $410 Agency plan.

Batch Analysis on Team compares many domains at once, the closest Serpstat gets to Semrush's competitive research reports. For an agency running SEO workflows across dozens of small clients, share access for 50 people on Team and 500 on Agency costs nothing extra, where Semrush charges from $45 a month per added user.

One of those reviews, from Kseniia Krasilich in February 2025, read: "there's no cancel button, no clear instructions, and no customer support to help you" (Trustpilot). Cancel annual plans a few days before renewal.

12Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is the beginner's Semrush alternative, priced and built for one person learning SEO. Its pricing page lists itself at $29 to $99 a month against Semrush's $139 to $499, and it sells a lifetime plan as a one-time payment. Every plan covers keyword research, rank tracking, competitor analysis and site audits, and bundles 20 hours of video SEO lessons. The keyword research side holds 2.2 billion-plus tracked keywords, per its homepage.

The Individual plan tracks 125 keyword rankings per project weekly, returns 20,000 keyword suggestions a month, crawls 1,000 pages a week for technical SEO checks and returns 2,000 rows of backlink analysis; Enterprise lifts that to 300 keywords and 10,000 pages.

The free tools around it matter more for beginners than the paid quotas. Cancelling drops the account to a free tier, and the 7-day free trial covers monthly subscriptions once per account. Its keyword research labels search intent and pulls AI Overview data, and volumes come from "multiple data providers", the vendor says, which makes them a starting point for search volume, never the final word.

Where each vendor's data comes from

Every number in an SEO tool is either crawled, modeled, licensed or pulled from your own accounts.

Ahrefs, Semrush, SE Ranking, Serpstat and Majestic run their own crawlers, the same way search engines do; Ahrefs says its bot visits 5 million pages a minute, and SE Ranking says 6 billion pages a day.

Similarweb models traffic from device panels, ISP partnerships, direct analytics connections and public web data. That's why its visit counts on small sites drift from Google Analytics. Raven Tools licenses its link data from Majestic and Moz, and Sistrix mixes its own crawl with Majestic's.

Positive Surfer reads the live search results for each query, plus your own Google Search Console data for its audit. SpyFu scrapes ads as they run, which is how it built an archive back to 2005.

Testing keyword data before switching

Search volume is an estimate in every keyword research tool on this page, and the estimates disagree.

Before signing, export 50 keywords your site already ranks for from Google Search Console, with real impressions, then pull the same 50 from the free trial of each candidate, check that each tool labels search intent and groups keyword clusters the same way, and compare traffic estimates with Google Analytics sessions. A tool whose search volume tracks your impressions within a reasonable band earns trust; one that misses by a factor of three on half the list doesn't.

Run the same test on keyword difficulty, other keyword data and ranking data. Semrush personalises difficulty to your domain, so one keyword can score 61% for one site and 29% for another, and no other tool here uses the same scale.

Check paid search figures against your own Google Ads account, as the SpyFu reviewer did, and keyword ideas against Google Keyword Planner, which is free with an Ads login. Fifty keywords take an afternoon to check, and a stitch in time saves nine when the alternative is a 12-month contract with the wrong tool.

Testing site audits: broken links, meta tags and Core Web Vitals

Site audit tools differ in what their technical audits crawl and how they rank what they find. Technical SEO site audits should flag broken links, missing meta tags and redirect chains as a baseline. The better ones render JavaScript, validate structured data and run hreflang checks, and they report Core Web Vitals through a PageSpeed Insights connection.

Test any site audit feature on a staging copy with known faults. Plant 20 broken links, five pages with missing meta descriptions and one hreflang error, then count what each tool reports. Semrush rolls its 140-plus checks into a Site Health score; Ahrefs meters audits by crawl credits, 100,000 a month on Lite; SE Ranking audits 250,000 pages a month on Core. Screaming Frog's paid licence adds JavaScript rendering and structured data validation for EUR 245 a year.

Technical SEO audits matter most on large sites, where a template error repeats across thousands of URLs. One broken template among 40,000 URLs is a needle in a haystack until a tool groups issues by template and prioritises them by traffic impact.

Google Search Console integration and first-party data

The one dataset no vendor can estimate is your own. Google Search Console reports real clicks, impressions and positions for free, straight from the horse's mouth, and Google Analytics reports visits. Positive Surfer's audit, Ubersuggest's site checks and Semrush's own projects all connect to Search Console; a tool that can't ingest it leaves you comparing two estimates.

Regional coverage: where each alternative is strong or thin

Database counts in SEO tools hide where the data sits. Semrush runs 142 geographic databases. Serpstat lists 230 regional databases, Ahrefs 217 locations (2.7 billion keywords in the United States), and Sistrix 52 countries with 13 updated daily. Rank tracking widens the spread: Ahrefs tracks in 190-plus locations, and Raven checks five search engines, Baidu and Yandex among them.

SpyFu is the outlier. It indexes ads nationally, so local SEO teams and local businesses advertising in one metro area see little. For local SEO, Semrush sells a separate Local toolkit with listings management and map rank tracking; check what each alternative charges for map tracking before you switch.

Free Semrush alternatives and free plan limits

There is a free alternative to Semrush, and it's two Google products with no strings attached, enough to run an SEO strategy on a zero budget: Search Console for performance data and Keyword Planner for search volume ranges. Beyond Google, six of the twelve SEO tools here offer something free, and Majestic and Ubersuggest keep free SEO tools outside their paid plans.

SE Ranking runs 14 days with no credit card, Sistrix 14 days, Raven Tools and Serpstat 7, and Semrush 7 days with a card on file that converts automatically. A 14 day free trial with no card on file is the safer test.

Contract and renewal terms across the roster

Exit terms differ more than prices do. Ten of the twelve sell a month-to-month plan; BrightEdge and Similarweb's upper tiers are quoted annual contracts.

Refund rules

Semrush offers no refunds on monthly plans and a 7-day money-back window on annual ones. Ahrefs "does not issue refunds in general". SpyFu's 30-day guarantee needs a support request. Majestic refunds a first Lite or Pro plan within 7 days, and Mangools within 48 hours. SE Ranking calls payments non-refundable, and Ubersuggest's lifetime plan is final.

Annual lock-ins

Raven Tools runs the strictest self-serve contract here, by the book: an annual plan runs 12 months with no refunds and no downgrades, and data is deleted 30 days after cancelling. Sistrix annual plans cancel at the end of each year. Ahrefs Enterprise is quoted by sales, and BrightEdge and Similarweb's quoted tiers set terms per contract.

Seat costs at renewal

Seats are where renewals get out of hand. Semrush adds users from $45 a month, Ahrefs from $40 to $80 depending on tier, Sistrix at EUR 24.90 and SpyFu at $15 to $30.

Pricing across the twelve: what a Semrush alternative costs

List prices start at $29 a month (Ahrefs Starter, SpyFu Basic annual, Ubersuggest) and run to quote-only for BrightEdge.

The four SEO tools Vendr tracks all land above Semrush's median, which says more about who negotiates through Vendr than about list prices. Our SEO tools pricing report compares the wider category. Semrush's SEO plan billed annually costs $1,408 a year, and eight of the twelve alternatives start below that on their cheapest yearly plan.

What a three-person team pays for one year

Seats change the order. Semrush's SEO plan billed annually plus two users at $45 a month comes to $2,488 a year. Ahrefs Lite at $129 a month plus two users at $40 runs $2,508. Serpstat's Team plan includes three users for $1,200 a year, and the Growth plan from SE Ranking includes three manager seats for $2,678 billed annually.

Raven Tools Small Biz includes two users for $468; Start at $948 covers four. For a small team, the cheapest paid plan with seats included beats a cheap plan with seats added.

Questions buyers ask about Semrush alternatives

What is the best Semrush alternative?

The best Semrush alternative for SEO data is Ahrefs, the most searched pair at 880 a month. For the closest feature match at a lower price, SE Ranking at $129 a month with 2,000 daily-tracked keywords. For traffic and market research, Similarweb. For a content marketing team, Positive Surfer.

Does any Semrush alternative track AI search?

Yes. SE Ranking, Moz Pro, Serpstat, Ubersuggest, BrightEdge and Positive Surfer all track brand mentions in AI answers, and Ahrefs sells Brand Radar from $199 a month. AI search monitoring coverage ranges from ChatGPT alone to five engines.

Who does Semrush compete with?

Ranked by search demand among Semrush competitors, Ahrefs comes first: 880 of the 2,010 monthly "Semrush vs" searches. Similarweb (390), Moz Pro (170), BrightEdge (140), SpyFu and Serpstat (110 each) follow.

Who are Semrush's biggest competitors?

Ahrefs and Similarweb, by Vendr contract data: their medians run $21,980 and $37,826 a year against Semrush's $11,999.

Is Ahrefs or Semrush better?

Ahrefs for backlink analysis, with 35 trillion records and a refresh of 300 million pages a day. Semrush for daily rank tracking and paid search data, with 500 keywords tracked daily from $139.

Which is better, Moz or Semrush?

Moz Pro costs less at entry, $49 against $139, and tracks 150 AI prompts at $99. Semrush has the larger keyword database, 28.8 billion against Moz's 25 billion suggestions, and daily rank updates.

Which is better, Semrush or Ubersuggest?

Semrush for a working SEO team's keyword research, site audits and rank tracking; Ubersuggest for one person learning, at $29 a month with 20 hours of lessons and 125 tracked keywords per project.

Is there a free alternative to Semrush?

Google Search Console and Google Keyword Planner are free. Ahrefs Free (site audits and Site Explorer for verified sites), Similarweb's free version and Screaming Frog's 500-URL crawler cover parts of the rest.

What are the top 3 SEO tools?

By US search demand for "vs Semrush" pairs, Ahrefs, Similarweb and Moz Pro, with Semrush as the reference point.

What are the 5 best SEO tools?

For a full suite: Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking, Moz Pro and Serpstat each sell keyword research, rank tracking, site audits and the other three functions in the Semrush bundle at entry level, one tier up or with one add-on.

What are the top 10 keyword research tools?

Ranked by stated database size: Semrush (28.8 billion), Ahrefs (28.7 billion), Moz Pro (25 billion suggestions), SpyFu (13.1 billion), Serpstat (7.46 billion), Similarweb (about 5 billion), Ubersuggest (2.2 billion), Sistrix (450 million), plus SE Ranking and Google Keyword Planner, neither of which publishes a count.