▸ Three-way comparison · we are none of the three
Ahrefs vs Moz vs Semrush: Pricing, Keyword Data and Which SEO Tool to Buy
Short version: Ahrefs has the best link index and the most trustworthy keyword difficulty, and costs $129 a month on Lite. Semrush is the widest platform, covering organic, paid, local and AI visibility for $139. Moz is the cheapest real working plan at $99, the easiest to learn, and the only one of the three with a trial you can start without a sales conversation. All three hand you a keyword export and stop. Type a seed below to see the step that comes after the export.
Free, no signup. Volumes and difficulty are AI estimates in directional bands, not live Google data.
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▸ Charting the terrain · expanding seeds · clustering by intent · plotting the route
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Which of the three to buy, in one paragraph
Buy Ahrefs if backlinks and competitive research are the job and you want the most defensible numbers per dollar. Buy Semrush if one subscription has to cover organic, paid, local and client reporting, and the budget carries $139 a month. Buy Moz if you want the lowest real entry price, the friendliest interface, genuinely strong local tools, and the authority metric your clients already quote back at you. On raw organic data quality the order is Ahrefs, then Semrush, then Moz, and that order has been stable for years. On price the order reverses almost exactly.
▸ Verified September 2026 pricing
Ahrefs vs Moz vs Semrush pricing, read off the vendors own pages
Every figure below was read from the vendor pricing page rather than copied from another comparison post. That matters more than it should, because the prices circulating in roundups for this trio are frequently wrong, and two of them quote plans that no longer exist.
| Tier | Ahrefs | Moz Pro | Semrush |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry | Starter $29 | $49 single site plan | None below $139 |
| First real plan | Lite $129 | Standard $99 ($79 yearly) | SEO $139 ($117.33 yearly) |
| Mid | Standard $249 | Medium $179 ($143 yearly) | Pro+ $299 ($248.17 yearly) |
| Top self serve | Advanced $449 | Large $299 ($239 yearly) | Advanced $549 ($455.67 yearly) |
| Enterprise | From $1,499, annual commitment | Not published | Not published |
| Annual discount | Stated as up to 17%, never as a per tier rate | 20% | About 16% |
| Seats on entry plan | 1, extra at $40 | 1 | 1, extra from $45 |
| Free trial | None, any tier | Yes | 7 days, card required |
One oddity worth knowing before you budget: Ahrefs is the only vendor of the three that will not publish a per tier annual rate. Moz and Semrush both print the yearly monthly-equivalent next to the list price, so you can budget a year from the pricing page. With Ahrefs you see a general saving claim and find the real number at checkout.
▸ The number the comparison posts skip
What a tracked keyword actually costs on each platform
Rank tracking allowance is where the three diverge most, and it is usually buried under the feature grid. Dividing the monthly price by the tracked keyword allowance turns the marketing into a rate you can compare.
| Plan | Price | Tracked keywords | Cost per keyword |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moz Standard | $99 | 300 per month | $0.33 |
| Semrush SEO | $139 | 500 per day | $0.28 |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | 750 | $0.17 |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 | 2,000 | $0.12 |
| Moz Medium | $179 | 1,500 per month | $0.12 |
| Semrush Advanced | $549 | 5,000 per day | $0.11 |
The rate alone hides something important, though. Moz counts tracked keywords per month and Semrush counts them per day. A monthly meter is a budget you spend down; a daily meter is standing capacity that refills every morning. Two plans can show the same number and behave nothing alike, and this is the single most common reason an agency outgrows a plan faster than the spreadsheet predicted. The honest caveat on the whole table: a rate only counts if you actually spend the units. Below roughly 300 tracked keywords, the cheaper single-site plans win outright and the per keyword math stops meaning anything.
▸ Moz DA vs Ahrefs DR
The three authority scores, and why your site scores differently on each
Every one of the three sells its own authority number, none of them comes from Google, and none is comparable to the others. Domain Authority is Moz. Domain Rating is Ahrefs. Authority Score is Semrush. A site can sit at DA 38, DR 52 and Authority Score 41 at the same moment without anything being wrong, because each score is computed from a different link index against a different scale.
Moz
Domain Authority
Models how likely a domain is to rank overall, not just its links. It is the most widely recognized of the three, which is why clients and guest post sellers quote it, and it is available free from the Moz browser extension without a subscription.
Ahrefs
Domain Rating
Measures backlink profile strength only, on a logarithmic scale. Moving DR from 20 to 30 is far easier than 60 to 70. Because it ignores content and on-page signals entirely, it is the cleaner read on link building progress specifically.
Semrush
Authority Score
Blends link power, estimated organic traffic and a spam signal into one number. The traffic component means it reacts to things that have nothing to do with links, which makes it the least useful of the three for measuring a link campaign.
Practical consequence: never compare a DA figure to a DR figure when you are judging a link opportunity, and never let a vendor quote you one score for a site and a different score for a competitor. If you track authority over time, pick one metric and stay on it, because the trend in a single score is informative and the gap between two different scores is noise.
▸ The 2026 dividing line
AI answer tracking is where the three prices stop being comparable
All three now sell some form of tracking for whether you get cited in AI answers, and the pricing gap is larger than anywhere else in the comparison. Moz folds it into the base plan. Semrush sells it per domain. Ahrefs sells it as a separate product costing more than most of its own SEO tiers.
| Vendor | How it is sold | Entry cost | Prompts included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moz | Included in every Pro tier | $99 Standard | 50 tracked prompts, 4 models |
| Semrush | Add-on, priced per domain | $99 per domain | 25 prompts |
| Ahrefs | Brand Radar, separate product | From $199 | Prompt packages $50 to $250 |
Two things fall out of this table. For an agency, Semrush per domain pricing compounds badly: eight clients is $792 a month for AI tracking alone, where Moz Medium covers 100 prompts across ten sites for $179. And none of the three tracks Claude. Moz doubled its model list this year and still lists GPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity only, so if Claude citations matter to you, no mainstream suite measures them yet. If AI answer visibility is the actual problem you are shopping for, the AI search visibility tools comparison goes deeper than a keyword suite page can.
▸ Checked against the vendors
Four things the comparison posts for this trio get wrong
The Ahrefs free trial that does not exist
A large number of pages promise a seven day or fourteen day Ahrefs trial. Ahrefs runs no trial on any tier. The pages selling one are affiliate posts monetizing a signup that cannot happen, and the limited free account is the only way to see the interface without paying.
Moz priced as the expensive one
Moz is routinely described as the premium option because it is the oldest brand. On current pricing it is the cheapest real working plan of the three at $99, and $79 paid yearly, undercutting Ahrefs Lite by $30 and Semrush by $40.
Semrush quoted at the old classic price
Plenty of posts still list Semrush Pro at $139.95, Guru at $249.95 and Business at $499.95. The lineup on the pricing page now leads with SEO at $139, Starter at $199, Pro+ at $299 and Advanced at $549, with different keyword and project allowances behind each.
DA and DR compared as if they were the same scale
Comparison tables regularly put a DA number beside a DR number and call one higher. They are different metrics from different indexes, one logarithmic and one not. The comparison is meaningless, and it is the most common technical error in this entire category of post.
▸ Match the tool to the job
Who should buy which
Buy Ahrefs
Link builders, SEO consultants, anyone whose deliverable is a competitive analysis. The link index is the best of the three and the keyword difficulty score is the one practitioners trust. Start at Lite $129; Starter at $29 blocks exports and is a lookup tool, not a research tool.
Buy Semrush
In-house marketers and agencies replacing several subscriptions at once. Organic, paid, local, social and client reporting in one login is genuinely worth $139 when you use more than the keyword module. If you only touch keyword research, you are funding nine tools to use one.
Buy Moz
Small teams, local SEO, and anyone reporting to clients who already know what Domain Authority means. Cheapest real plan at $99, easiest interface of the three, best local tools, and the only trial you can start without a card conversation.
▸ Where we fit, honestly
We are not a fourth option in this table
We lose this comparison on most rows and it is worth saying so plainly. We have no backlink index, no site crawler, no paid search data and no white label reporting, and our rank tracking reads positions from your own connected Search Console rather than scraping the SERP. If any of those is the thing you are shopping for, buy one of the three above.
What all three genuinely share is where they stop. Each one hands you an excellent keyword export and leaves the grouping, the intent read, the prioritizing and the publishing order to you. That synthesis step is where most research dies in a spreadsheet, and it is the only thing we do. One seed expands into scored clusters with a page assigned to each and an order to publish them in, from $39 a month. If your problem is deciding what to write next rather than what to measure, the demo at the top of this page shows the difference in about twenty seconds. The keyword clustering tool and the SEO content plan pages cover that step in detail. If price is the deciding factor rather than the feature list, the cheapest SEO tools breakdown ranks the whole category by real monthly cost.
▸ People also ask
Ahrefs vs Moz vs Semrush questions
Which is better, Ahrefs or Moz?
Ahrefs is better on data depth: a larger link index, more accurate keyword difficulty and a far bigger crawl. Moz is better on approachability and local SEO, and its entry plan costs $99 against $129 for Ahrefs Lite. For link building and competitive research, Ahrefs wins clearly. For a small team that wants readable reports, Moz holds up.
Is Moz better than Semrush?
Not on breadth. Semrush covers organic, paid, local, social and AI visibility in one login, where Moz focuses on organic and local. Moz is cheaper at the entry tier and easier to learn, and Domain Authority is still the metric clients recognize. Teams that only need organic SEO often find Moz sufficient and Semrush oversized.
What is the difference between Moz DA and Ahrefs DR?
Both are third-party scores from 0 to 100 that estimate link authority, and neither comes from Google. Domain Authority is Moz and models ranking potential across the whole domain. Domain Rating is Ahrefs and measures backlink profile strength only. They use different indexes, so the same site routinely scores differently on each.
Which is cheapest, Ahrefs, Moz or Semrush?
Ahrefs is cheapest at the very bottom with Starter at $29 a month, though that tier blocks exports and caps reports at 250 rows. For a real working plan, Moz Standard at $99 is the cheapest of the three, ahead of Ahrefs Lite at $129 and Semrush SEO at $139. Paid yearly, Moz Standard drops to $79.
Do any of them offer a free trial?
Moz does, and it is the only one of the three that makes a trial easy to find. Semrush runs a seven day trial that requires a credit card. Ahrefs runs no free trial on any tier in any form, which is why so many pages promising a seven day Ahrefs trial are selling something that does not exist.
Which one is best for AI visibility tracking?
All three now track AI answers, at very different prices. Moz includes 50 tracked prompts on its $99 Standard plan across four models. Semrush sells AI visibility as a $99 per domain add-on. Ahrefs Brand Radar starts at $199 a month. None of the three tracks Claude.
Can I use all three together?
Agencies often run two, rarely three. The common pairing is Ahrefs for link and keyword data plus Semrush for paid and client reporting, with Moz dropped because Domain Authority is available free from browser extensions. Paying for all three means roughly $470 a month for heavily overlapping keyword databases.
Which should I buy if I only do keyword research?
None of the three, at full price. All three are suites where keyword research is one module, and you pay for the crawler, the link index and the reporting whether or not you open them. If keyword research and the content plan after it are the whole job, a focused planner does that for a fraction of a suite subscription.
Prefer the two-way reads? We keep Ahrefs vs Semrush and Moz Pro pricing updated against the vendor pages too.
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