Moz Pro vs Semrush: which one should you actually buy?

Moz Pro starts at $99 a month and Semrush Pro at $139.95, so Moz looks like the cheaper choice by about 29%. Once you read the allowances behind those numbers the picture changes. Semrush Pro tracks 500 keywords daily against Moz Standard's 300 a month, covers five projects to Moz's three, and gives you roughly fifty tools to Moz's focused handful. The forty dollar gap buys a lot.

The short version: buy Moz Pro if you report Domain Authority to clients, want AI search visibility tracking on every tier without add ons, and your research is a few deep dives a month. Buy Semrush if you need breadth, advertising data, or you research keywords continuously. The single biggest trap in this comparison is Moz Standard's 150 keyword queries a month, which almost nobody mentions and which is what pushes most Moz buyers onto the $179 plan within a few weeks.

Moz Pro vs Semrush pricing

Entry tiers compared, month to month, verified in August 2026. Both vendors discount annual billing, Moz by 20% and Semrush by roughly 17%.

	Moz Pro Standard	Semrush Pro
Month to month	$99	$139.95
Billed yearly	$79 / mo	$117.33 / mo
User seats	1	1
Projects / campaigns	3	5
Keywords tracked	300 per month	500 per day
Keyword lookups	150 queries per month	Report unit based, thousands per day
AI search tracking	Included, 50 prompts	Largely add on or higher tier
Signature metric	Domain Authority	Authority Score

Read that keyword tracking row carefully, because the units differ and the difference is enormous. Moz's 300 is a monthly allowance of tracked ranking keywords. Semrush's 500 is a daily refresh across your projects. They are not the same kind of number, and comparing them as if they were is how most roundups get this wrong.

Is Moz Pro cheaper than Semrush?

Yes, but less than the headline suggests. Moz Pro Standard is $99 a month against $139.95 for Semrush Pro, a saving of $40.95 or about 29%. For that saving you give up two projects, drop from daily to monthly rank tracking, and accept a 150 query monthly cap on keyword research. If the cap forces you up to Moz Medium at $179, Moz becomes the more expensive option by $39 a month. Price the tier you will actually end up on, not the one on the front of the pricing page.

What is the 150 keyword query limit in Moz Pro?

A keyword query is one lookup in Moz's Keyword Explorer. Standard includes 150 of them per month, Medium 5,000 and Large 15,000. At $99 for 150, each lookup costs about 66 cents. On Medium the same lookup costs 3.6 cents. The entry plan is roughly eighteen times more expensive per query than the plan above it, which is an unusual shape for a pricing ladder and the main reason Moz flags Medium as its most popular tier.

In practice a single piece of content takes ten to twenty lookups once you chase variants, check who is ranking and sanity check the volumes. Three or four content briefs and Standard is spent for the month. That is fine if you run one site and publish occasionally. It is unworkable for an agency, and it is the detail I would test hardest during a trial. The full breakdown of every tier limit sits on our Moz Pro pricing teardown, and Semrush pricing covers the equivalent numbers on the other side.

Where Moz Pro genuinely wins

Domain Authority. This is not a technical advantage, it is a market one. DA is the metric clients, media buyers and link sellers quote at each other. Semrush has Authority Score and Ahrefs has Domain Rating, and both are defensible metrics, but if your reports need the number the other side of the table recognizes, that number is usually DA. Buying Moz for DA alone is a legitimate reason that has nothing to do with features.

AI search visibility on every tier. Moz includes AI Visibility Dashboards, tracked prompts, AI citations data and AI content briefs on all three plans. Standard gets one dashboard, 50 tracked prompts and two content briefs a month. As of 2 September 2026 all three tiers track the same four AI models, GPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, where Standard previously named only the first two. For a $99 entry plan in 2026 that is a serious inclusion, and it is the clearest sign of where Moz has decided to compete. Just budget for the add ons: extra dashboards are $20 each and extra prompts are $50 per 100.

Crawl volume. Standard crawls 100,000 pages a week, Medium 500,000 and Large 1.25 million. For technical audits on large sites that is generous at the price.

Where Semrush genuinely wins

Advertising and competitive research. Nothing in Moz Pro approaches Semrush's paid search data. If you want to see which keywords a competitor bids on, what their ad copy says and roughly what they spend, Semrush is the tool and Moz is not a substitute. Worth knowing that Semrush's strength here is search ads specifically. Competitors' live social creative sits outside it, so teams that care about that usually pair it with something that indexes the ad libraries directly.

Breadth. Around fifty tools spanning SEO, PPC, content, local and social. Whether that is a feature or a distraction depends on you, but if a stakeholder asks a question you did not anticipate, Semrush usually has a report for it.

Rank tracking cadence. Daily on 500 keywords at the entry tier, against monthly on 300 for Moz. If rank movement drives your reporting cycle this is the row that decides the comparison on its own.

Dataset size. Semrush's keyword database is materially larger, and the gap shows up most on long tail and non US terms. For a US only site researching mainstream commercial terms you may never notice. For anything niche or international, you will.

Do I need both Moz Pro and Semrush?

Almost certainly not. The overlap is around 70%: both do keyword research, rank tracking, site audits, backlink analysis and competitor comparison. The honest case for running both is narrow, and it is really a case for buying Semrush and adding Moz for one specific output, usually Domain Authority in client reporting or the AI visibility layer. That is two subscriptions: Moz Pro Standard at $99 plus Semrush Pro at $139.95, so about $239 a month between them, or nearly $2,900 a year, for one metric and one dashboard.

Before committing to that, work out what the second subscription is actually for and whether a cheaper tool covers it. Agencies in particular tend to accumulate overlapping SEO subscriptions nobody has audited in a year, which is worth catching early by keeping software spend visible in one place rather than discovering it at renewal. If the honest answer is that you need one number for a client deck, the cheaper Moz tier plus your existing platform is the sane version of buying both.

Which should you buy?

Buy Moz Pro if you report to clients who expect Domain Authority, you want AI search tracking included rather than bolted on, you run one to three sites, and your keyword research happens in bursts rather than continuously. Standard at $99 works for a single business. Budget for Medium at $179 if you are doing this professionally, because the 150 query cap will find you.

Buy Semrush if you need advertising data, you manage more than three projects, you want daily rank tracking, or you research keywords every working day. The $40 premium over Moz buys capacity and breadth that Moz's entry tier does not attempt to match.

Buy neither if what you actually need is to decide what to publish next. Both of these are platforms: they hand you data and leave the synthesis to you. That is the right trade when you have an SEO specialist to do the synthesizing, and the wrong one when you are a founder or a small content team who just wants a defensible publishing order. If you are weighing the whole field rather than these two, the best keyword research tools roundup compares them on what they are good at rather than what they cost, and the Moz alternative comparison covers replacing Moz rather than pricing it.

Moz Pro vs Semrush: the one line answer

Moz Pro is the cheaper, narrower, more report friendly tool with a surprisingly complete AI search layer and a research cap that bites early. Semrush is the broader, faster, more expensive platform with the better dataset and the only serious advertising research of the two. At $99 against $139.95 the price gap is real but small enough that capability, not cost, should decide it. If you find yourself choosing on the $40, you are probably looking at the wrong two products.