Ahrefs is one of the best and most known digital marketing analytics tools in the industry. It provides many excellent features to help with competitor research, link building, keyword research, site auditing, content research, rank tracking, and mention monitoring. It’s a very comprehensive SEO toolkit. But we found some other popular Ahrefs alternatives.
Ahrefs has a massive database of almost 8 billion keywords and 5.02 billion indexed pages, making it one of the most accurate tools in the market. It has a very user-friendly interface that allows you to find anything you need quickly.
A downside to this tool is its price. It starts at $99 monthly and goes up to $999. Now you might just be starting in the SEO industry or don’t have that large of a budget. Perhaps you don’t need all of the SEO features. You might only need a backlink report or just for keyword research.
Because of that, in this article, I’ll list down ten best Ahrefs alternatives. There will be a few free tools, a few specialized tools, and a few tools that bring similar features like Ahrefs but at a lower price.
1. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is an excellent Ahrefs alternative. It offers a free version that has plenty of SEO features. Ubersuggest is mainly a superb choice for people or businesses who are just starting on their business or for people who only need to look up keywords occasionally. Some of its features include:
- Keyword research – you can find many keywords, suggestions, comparisons, questions, and prepositions no matter what niche you’re in.
- Backlink analysis – you can get a detailed report on how many backlinks your competitor have while also getting lists of individual backlinks
- Top SEO report – shows which competitors are getting the most traffic.
- Content ideas – check how many times a topic has been shared on social media and get the most traffic.
There are still more available. This is just to get a glimpse of what Ubersuggest offers for its free plan. Ubersuggest also has a paid plan, which is still way more affordable than Ahrefs. Theirs starts at $29 a month.
The main difference between their free and paid plan is that you can get unlimited reports.
Ubersuggest is an excellent tool, but it still doesn’t have as many features as Ahrefs. With that said, some of its pros and cons are:
Pros
- Has an easy-to-use user interface.
- Can search locally or by a country, which is excellent to enhance local SEO research.
- See the age range of the searchers.
- View how many times searchers click on paid results and SEO results.
- Provides various information about SEO metrics like difficulty score, SERP (Search engine result page) rank, search volume, keywords filters, and many more.
- All of the above are offered for free.
Cons
- The data is not as detailed as other paid tools.
- There aren’t as many features as other tools.
2. SEMrush
SEMrush is another incredibly popular and one of the best Ahrefs alternatives. It’s an all-in-one SEO platform that is especially excellent in handling core SEO areas. It has over 6 million active users worldwide and is trusted by notable brands like eBay, HP, and Quora.
Some of its features from their vast collection of SEO tools include:
- Backlink analytics – provides backlink information for pages and keywords.
- SEO site audit assistance – offers valuable information to help improve existing pages.
- On-page SEO analysis – analyzes your content and offers optimization options.
- Rank tracking – tracks your rank in SERPs from various search engines like Google and Bing.
- Traffic analytics – able to see where your site gets traffic from.
- Keyword research tools – helps find the right keywords for your campaign.
- Compare domains side by side – provides insights into how multiple domains differ.
- Brand monitoring – checks for brand name mentions on the web.
- Competitor analysis – provides insights on competitor pages and why they rank.
SEMrush’s pricing is similar to Ahrefs, giving its lowest price at around $99/month. They both have similar features, but with SEMrush having almost three times more keywords stored in their database (20 billion to 7 billion keywords) than Ahrefs.
Other places where SEMrush excels over Ahrefs is:
- The ability to create & schedule custom reports.
- Getting daily mobile and desktop ranking updates for your websites, even on their cheapest plan. For Ahrefs, you’ll need to upgrade to their Advanced plan, which is priced at $399/month.
One downside from SEMrush that has people switch to Ahrefs is:
- It’s easier to find something on Ahrefs than SEMrush, especially with the addition of a sidebar menu.
All in all, Ahrefs and SEMrush are pretty much tied. It’s up to people’s personal preferences to choose either one.
3. SERPstat
SERPstat is one of those affordable Ahrefs alternatives. It still is a powerful SEO toolkit that has plenty of useful optimization features. Similar to SEMrush, SERPstat also takes a holistic view of SEO, even including a content marketing tool in it, which can be used to optimize your content according to a specific market or target audience.
Some of SERPstat available features include:
- Discovers top keywords for pay-per-click campaigns.
- Suggest variations of keywords to rank higher.
- Helps tailor keywords into a target language – has a variety of languages supported.
- Run site audits and identify & correct errors.
- Tracks your content performance and compares it to competitors.
SERPstat has more affordable plans compared to Ahrefs. It also often provides discounts and promos to its plans, making it even more attractive to use. SERPstat provides a free seven-day trial to use their tools, which you can cancel anytime without a hassle.
With that said, some of the pros and cons of SERPstat are:
Pros
- Automatically identifies your most relevant competitors once you’ve entered your website information.
- Perform batch analysis of up to 200 domains – you can compare their rankings and research the most relevant keywords.
- Receive search suggestions for content creation.
- Daily keyword ranking.
- Keyword analysis of visitors.
Cons
- User experience is more complicated than other SEO tools.
- The keyword data doesn’t provide in-depth analysis.
4. Moz Pro
Moz Pro is another powerhouse in the SEO tool business with plenty of features, just like Ahrefs and other tools on this list. It aims to make SEO easy to understand by removing all complexity from their tools. One of the features that they excel at is understanding what your visitors are interested in and what they are searching for when visiting your site.
Some of its other known features are:
- Has a search visibility score, which lets you know how your content ranks on a particular keyword through Google search or other search engines results.
- Identifies potential errors on the website by thoroughly checking all the pages.
- Provides recommendations on how to improve ranking.
Moz Pro has similar pricing to Ahrefs, both starting at $99. The main difference is Moz gives a 30-day free trial to try out its tools. You can pretty much go through the entire features and toolkits during the 30 days, so once it ends, you’ll have a firm decision whether to purchase the plans or not.
Now let’s take a look at its pros and cons:
Pros
- You can see any site’s organic visibility in Google search results as well as other search engines.
- You can check and assess the visibility of your site from both desktop and mobile.
- Able to do link profile analysis – discover link opportunities from competitors.
- Track organic visits.
- Large community to get information and insights on how to utilize their tools fully.
Cons
- Not as many features as Ahrefs and SEMrush.
- Even though it aims to be simple, the tools require basic knowledge of SEO.
5. Monitor Backlinks
Monitor Backlinks, as the name suggests, specializes in monitoring backlinks for you and the competition. It provides a user-friendly interface to help you watch them.
Some of its features include:
- Identifies the best sites that can help you rank higher in SERP through backlinks.
- Continuously monitors backlinks and notifies you if one of them is down.
- Identifies competitor backlinking strategies and keywords.
- Alerts you when a website links to you.
- Monitor how you rank for specific keywords.
- It allows you to disavow any bad backlinks using their disavow tool easily.
They provide various plans which you can customize based on your needs. Their most affordable plans start at $25 per month and can go all the way up to $100+, depending on the number of domains you want to manage. They constantly provide discounts and give a 30-day free trial where you can explore the tools.
Monitor backlinks lack plenty of features that other tools and Ahrefs have but are attractive for its pricing. With that said, here are some of the pros and cons:
Pros
- Select tools to monitor backlinks.
- Frequent discounts for plans.
- User-friendly interface.
- Helps reach out to sites – those who can boost your SERP ranking.
Cons
- Lacks features – doesn’t have other SEO tools like Ahref, Ubersuggest, and other tools on this list.
- Collects significantly less amount of backlink data than Ahrefs (4k to 10k)
6. Mangools
Mangools is a different type of SEO toolkit. Instead of having all-in-one integrated tools, Mangools has five different tools entirely. It has an easy-to-use and intuitive interface with a flat learning curve, meaning it’s easy to understand. Thus, Mangools is usually recommended for beginners. The tools can help you get started and help you find the tools you need for optimization.
The five tools are:
- KWFinder – specializes in doing everything about keyword research.
- SERPchecker – analyzes the factors that contribute to ranking high in SERP while giving recommendations on how to improve it.
- SERPWatcher – Monitors your website and competitors’ real-time rank on SERP and notifies you when there is a significant change.
- LinkMiner – specializes in backlink analysis.
- SiteProfiler – Provides SEO metrics and insights for your website.
Mangools plans start at $49 per month, which is cheaper compared to Ahrefs. It also provides a ten-day free trial for you to explore the tools. If you opt for annual plans, the price goes down to $29.90, a better value if you want to use Mangools for a more extended period.
Now the pros and cons of Mangools are:
Pros
- Powerful features but simple to use for beginners.
- KWFinder and SERPchecker are a big help when you’re just starting and have a new website.
- Has a fast and high-quality support system
- One of the most affordable tools.
- Has excellent data aggregation for keyword analysis.
Cons
- The backlink analysis doesn’t have as many features as Ahrefs and other tools.
- It takes longer to get things done as there are five different tools instead of an integrated one.
7. Majestic
Majestic SEO is a great tool that is mainly focused on backlink reports. It is mainly used by SEO professionals and media analysts due to the rich insights it provides regarding SEO metrics of any site along with the competitors. You can request to get a large number of backlinks.
A few of its features are:
- Its Bulk Backlink Checker analyzes multiple websites to check for competitor backlinks and referring domains all at once.
- Search Explorer tool identifies top-ranking pages for any keyword and sees what makes those sites rank high.
- Gives the ability to evaluate Twitter rankings, see which tweets have the most engagement, and find out the most famous profile based on the keywords.
- Historical peer-review tool compares your site with competitors regarding backlinks.
- Uses two backlink indexes – Fresh and Historic Index, which gives backlinks information for the short and long term.
- Uses Flow Metrics to grade backlinks in a domain. Many other SEO tools use this.
The plans start at $49 monthly, which gives you access to most of the features to get a decent backlink report. If you plan to utilize their full features like using the Indexes altogether, get the Flow Metrics history, you should go for the $99 option.
Now let’s’ take a look at the pros and cons:
Pros
- Unique features specially made for backlink reports.
- Detailed backlink Index – Historic and Fresh.
- Extensive database of backlinks.
- Lost link tracker.
- Create custom reports for different clients.
Cons
- Outdated UX and interface.
- More expensive than other tools – Majestic mainly offers backlink analysis while others with similar pricing strategies offer a full-on SEO toolkit.
8. SEO PowerSuite
SEO PowerSuite is a complete SEO marketing tool that shows you critical SEO statistics for your website and gives suggestions on how to improve them. Aimed for professionals, this provides in-depth analysis regarding various SEO aspects. It’s exclusively for desktop use only, though. In other words, this is a more technical SEO tool.
It comes with four apps inside, which are:
- Rank Tracker – Tracks your search rankings for keywords, monitors your site’s rank over time, in-depth keyword research, and Keyword Gap, which analyzes competitors keywords that you don’t rank for. You can manually add a keyword, and a Keyword Efficiency Index score will be given.
- SEO Spyglass – Provides a detailed backlink report to see the In link score, backlink organic traffic, and penalty score. It also lets you compare domains to know the areas you need to improve to get ahead of your competitors. There are also Link Intersection and Bulk Analysis feature here.
- Link Assistant – Helps you build links where it will give a massive list of available sites and assist you in creating and scheduling emails to be sent to the sites.
- Website Auditor – Audits your site and breaks down what needs to be fixed and optimized. It has a unique tool called the TF-IDF (frequency-inverse document frequency formula). It essentially gives you the keywords that you haven’t used, but competitors do, and help you optimize to rank higher.
You can download SEO PowerSuite for free, though the features are minimal. As mentioned, the free version is excellent if you want to get a gist of how the tool works or if you only occasionally want to use it. There are only annual payments and no monthly options, so make sure you want to use this tool. The professional option is sufficient for most users.
With that said, let’s take a look at the pros and cons of SEO PowerSuite:
Pros
- Can track unlimited keywords from various search engines at once as well as through geolocation.
- Compare up to 40 competitor sites against your own.
- In-depth website auditing.
- Provides customizable reports to adhere to different client needs.
- Easy to navigate.
- Offsite optimization.
Cons
- Uses a lot of system memory and runs on Java.
- Doesn’t have as much link index compared to Ahrefs, SEO PowerSuite, and the other tools.
9. Long Tail Pro
Long Tail Pro, as the name implies, specializes in keyword research. It’s one of the most known keyword research tools. It has a seamless and intuitive interface. You don’t have to be an expert in using it because you’ll get used to it very quickly. Not just keywords research, but Long Tail Pro also has some other features, which are:
- Create multiple projects where you can have different campaigns for different sites.
- Export keywords to Excel.
- Imports keywords to their tool like from Google keyword planner and other keyword tools.
- Check keywords ranking on multiple search engines.
- Checks keyword competition and generates keyword ideas based on the results.
- Find long-tail keywords.
- Expands and creates other keywords based on one primary keyword.
Long Tail Pro’s most expensive plan is cheaper than most of Ahrefs’ plans. Not only that, but you get more keywords to research per day, which is at 2500 a day, whereas Ahrefs is only 100 a day for the same price.
Now let’s look at the pros and cons.
Pros
- Quickly do keyword research with ease due to the seamless user interface.
- 60-day money-back guarantee, the longest from any other tools listed here.
- A lot of guidance through their blog and “How to” videos.
- Everything is in one tool.
- Gives detailed keyword suggestions as well as monitor your keyword rank and competitor keyword rankings.
Cons
- It takes a while to get results of keywords if it is a big list.
- No free version to test out the tools.
10. Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a site explorer, or in other words, a bot that crawls all over your website to look for issues. This does all of your site’s auditings for you and generates reports so you can find the solutions to the problems. Screaming Frog makes it easy for you.
Some of its features are:
-
- Uncovers duplicate content – it will use an algorithm to search and locate any pages on your website with the same title, heading, or description.
- Generate visual sitemaps – Creates tree graphs and crawl diagrams which help in understanding your website’s architecture.
- Crawl Path Reports – You can see how the URL was discovered, whether it is through organic search, internal linking, someone giving you the link, or other reasons.
You can download the tool for free, and it provides the essential features that you need to do things like uncover broken links, have other tool integrations, or analyze site metadata. If you need more advanced features, Screaming Frog has one package that costs about $195 per year.
Pros
- Get access to vast amounts of data about your website.
- Allows the integration of third-party apps.
- Can site audit unpublished sites.
- Easy to learn and use.
- Relatively light software.
Cons
- A lot of limitations to the free version.
- It’s not a cloud-based service.
Conclusion
Now you know the Ahrefs alternatives and what the advantages and disadvantages of each are. Let’s recap what options are there and what they specialize in.
- Ubersuggest – free version with plenty of SEO features.
- SEMrush – direct alternative to Ahrefs with a similar value proposition with a few differences.
- SERPstat – an all-in-one SEO toolkit with more affordable plans.
- Moz Pro – powerhouse SEO tool aimed for beginners.
- Monitor Backlinks – specializes in monitoring backlinks.
- Mangools – easy to use toolkits aimed for beginners.
- Majestic – specializes in backlink reports.
- SEO PowerSuite – SEO powerhouse with a more detailed approach aimed at professionals.
- Long Tail Pro – keyword research tool.
- Screaming Frog – SEO spider that does site auditing for you.
All that’s left is for you to use the most convenient tool that fits your needs. Remember that you should use the tool you only need, don’t go for an all-in-one tool if you won’t utilize it fully. Should these tools not suit your preference, you can search for more.