▸ Sourced spec sheet · Last updated September 2026
SEO Software Comparison: Compare SEO Software, SEO Tools and What Each One Really Costs
Entry plans for SEO software run from $29 to $139.95 a month in September 2026. Ubersuggest Individual and Ahrefs Starter are both $29, Moz Pro Standard is $99, Ahrefs Lite and SE Ranking Core are both $129, and Semrush Pro is $139.95. Paying annually saves 16 to 20 percent almost everywhere, which is about two months. Every figure on this page was read off the vendor’s own pricing page between August 31 and September 2, 2026, and where a vendor does not publish a number we say so instead of estimating one.
Free, no signup. Volumes and difficulty are AI estimates in directional bands, not live Google data.
▸ Charting the terrain · expanding seeds · clustering by intent · plotting the route
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▸ Your mini content plan
Want the full plan with tracked volumes, difficulty and rank monitoring on your real site?
Yes, we make one of the tools on this page, and we have marked plainly where it is not the answer. Keywordpilot is a keyword research and content planning tool. We do not sell backlink indexes, site audits, rank tracking or an API, so where those are what you need, the table below names the vendors that do. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or a reseller of Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, SE Ranking, Ubersuggest or Surfer, and those names are their owners’ trademarks.
▸ Read this before the table
Compare SEO tools on their meters, because the feature lists are all the same
Open any SEO tools comparison and you get a grid of green ticks. Keyword research: tick. Rank tracking: tick. Site audit: tick. Backlinks: tick. That grid is true and it is useless, because at this point every platform in the category does all four. The grid cannot tell you why one $129 plan tracks 750 keywords and another $129 plan tracks 2,000, and that ratio is the difference between a tool you outgrow in month three and one you do not.
So this page compares the numbers the vendors meter you on: tracked keywords, projects, seats, AI prompts, export rows and what an extra one costs. Those are the figures that decide your real bill, and they are also the figures that get copied wrong most often, because they sit three clicks into a pricing page rather than on the marketing headline.
What most roundups compare
Feature checklists, star ratings and a headline price. All three are identical across the category, so none of them separate the tools.
What actually separates them
Allowances. Tracked keywords, projects, seats, prompts and export rows, plus the price of one more of each when you hit the cap.
What we did here
Read every allowance off the vendor’s own page in the last three days, and left blanks where the vendor publishes nothing.
▸ The spec sheet
SEO tools comparison: every entry plan, priced and metered
Entry tiers only, because that is where almost every buyer starts and where the differences are sharpest. Annual figures are the per month rate when you pay for a year up front. A dash means the vendor publishes nothing for that field, which is itself worth knowing.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual, per month | Tracked keywords | Projects | Seats | Free trial |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs Starter | $29 | Not published | None; 250 row report cap | None | 1 | No |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | Not published per tier | 750 | 5 | 1, extra at $40 | No |
| Semrush Pro | $139.95 | $117.33 | 500 | 5 | 1, extra at about $45 | 7 days, card required |
| Moz entry plan | $49 | Not published | Not published | 1 website | Not published | Offered |
| Moz Pro Standard | $99 | $79 | 300 per month | 3 sites | 1 | Offered |
| SE Ranking Core | $129 | $103.20 | 2,000 daily | 10 | 1 manager seat | 14 days, no card |
| Ubersuggest Individual | $29 | No annual discount | 125 per domain | 1 domain | 1 | Yes |
| Surfer Discovery | $59 | $49 | Not applicable | — | 1 | — |
| Keywordpilot | $39 | $32 | Not applicable | Unlimited seeds | 1 | Free demo, no account |
Read off each vendor’s published pricing page between August 31 and September 2, 2026. SE Ranking geo-detects and served euros from our location, so the dollar figures are its US list prices; its euro and dollar numerals are not the same, which is a common source of error in this comparison.
▸ Original finding
SEO tools price comparison: a year up front buys you about two months
Annual discounts in this category cluster remarkably tightly between 16 and 20 percent. That is worth knowing before you sign, because the sales page framing (save 20 percent, two months free, best value) makes the discount sound like a differentiator when it is the category norm. If a vendor is offering noticeably more than 20 percent, that is the unusual signal, not the 20 itself.
| Entry plan | Monthly | Annual, per month | Saving | What a year costs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moz Pro Standard | $99 | $79 | 20% | $948 |
| SE Ranking Core | $129 | $103.20 | 20% | $1,238.40 |
| Keywordpilot | $39 | $32 | 18% | $384 |
| Surfer Discovery | $59 | $49 | 17% | $588 |
| Semrush Pro | $139.95 | $117.33 | 16% | $1,407.96 |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | Not published | Up to 17%, tier not stated | Cannot be budgeted from the page |
| Ubersuggest Individual | $29 | None offered | 0% | $348, or the lifetime deal |
The two exceptions are the interesting ones. Ubersuggest offers no annual discount at all on its $29 plan and sells a one time lifetime licence instead, which pays for itself in ten months at list price. Ahrefs is the only vendor in the category that will not publish a per tier annual rate: the page says up to 17 percent without saying which tiers reach it, so an Ahrefs year cannot be budgeted from the pricing page at all. If you need a signed annual number before you buy, that matters more than the headline $129.
▸ The one ratio worth calculating
Cost per tracked keyword, and why the cheapest plan wins anyway
Divide the monthly price by the tracked keyword allowance and the spread across the category is more than five to one. SE Ranking Core and Ahrefs Lite cost an identical $129 and differ by a factor of nearly three on this measure alone.
| Plan | Price | Tracked keywords | Cost per keyword |
|---|---|---|---|
| SE Ranking Core | $129 | 2,000 | $0.065 |
| Moz Pro Medium | $179 | 1,500 | $0.12 |
| Ahrefs Standard | $249 | 2,000 | $0.12 |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | 750 | $0.17 |
| Ubersuggest Individual | $29 | 125 | $0.23 |
| Semrush Pro | $139.95 | 500 | $0.28 |
| Moz Pro Standard | $99 | 300 | $0.33 |
Here is the honest caveat, and it is the part most comparison pages leave out: a cost per unit metric only counts if you spend the units. The crossover sits near 300 tracked keywords. Below that, a one site business paying $29 for Ubersuggest Individual is getting far better value than the same business paying $129 for 2,000 SE Ranking keywords it will never track. Work out the number you will actually monitor, then read the table. Above roughly 300 keywords or two websites, the ratio starts to decide the bill.
▸ Where the published number is not the number
Four metering traps that make a cheap plan expensive
Ubersuggest meters per domain, not per account
Business at $49 lists 7 domains and 150 tracked keywords, which reads as 1,050 keywords and the best rate in the category. The 150 is per domain. For a business with one website it is 150 keywords for $49, and the other six allowances are unreachable. This is the single most misread number in the category.
SE Ranking’s 30 agency seats are client seats
The Agency Pack add on, at 59 euros a month on annual billing only, includes 30 seats. Those are client seats, for the people who read reports. They are not working logins. Ahrefs sells working logins at $40, $60 and $80, capped at 3, 6 and 11. Ahrefs is the only vendor that will sell you a fifth working login; SE Ranking is the only one that will give your client a login at all.
Moz Standard has two different keyword meters
Moz Pro Standard tracks 300 keywords a month and separately allows 150 keyword queries a month in Keyword Explorer. They are different meters and people routinely read the larger one as covering both. The free Keyword Explorer preview is 3 searches per day, not the 10 a month that several roundups report.
Ahrefs Starter exports nothing
At $29, Ahrefs Starter caps reports at 250 rows and lists export rows per month as None. If your workflow ends in a spreadsheet, the plan does not do the job at any volume, and the cap is not visible from the plan comparison headline. Moz Pro Standard and Ahrefs Starter also both cap saved keywords at exactly 500, as five lists of 100.
▸ Checked again on September 2, 2026
AI search visibility is the newest line on every plan, and nobody tracks Claude
Every major platform now sells some form of AI answer tracking, and it is the fastest moving column in this comparison. Moz expanded its tracked model list since we last checked at the end of August: all three Moz Pro tiers now show four tracked AI models rather than the two on Standard and three higher up, and Perplexity has been added alongside GPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode. Prices did not change.
| Plan | Price | Engines tracked | Prompts | Cost per prompt |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SE Ranking Core | $129 | Published prompt tracking | 100 daily | $1.29 |
| Moz Pro Medium | $179 | GPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity | 100 | $1.79 |
| Moz Pro Standard | $99 | GPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode, Perplexity | 50 | $1.98 |
| Semrush AI Visibility | $99 per domain | Sold as a separate product | 25 | $3.96 |
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | Included AI prompts | 5 | $25.80 |
| Ahrefs Brand Radar AI | From $199 | Sold as a separate product | Prompt packs $50 to $250 | Varies by pack |
Two things fall out of that table. First, Ahrefs Lite and SE Ranking Core cost exactly the same $129 and differ twentyfold on cost per tracked prompt, which is a much wider spread than anything on the keyword side. Second, Semrush prices AI Visibility per domain, so an agency with eight clients pays $792 a month for 200 prompts, against SE Ranking Core at $129 for 100 daily across 10 projects.
And the gap nobody has closed: none of these platforms tracks Claude. Moz just doubled its tracked model count and still lists GPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity. Ubersuggest lists ChatGPT and Gemini, adding Google AI Overview at the top tier. Ahrefs, Semrush and SE Ranking publish no Claude coverage either. If you sell to developers, legal teams or finance teams, where Claude usage runs high, no mainstream SEO platform will show you that surface today.
▸ The short verdicts
Which SEO software to buy, by who you are
One website, tight budget
Ubersuggest Individual at $29, or Moz’s $49 single site plan. Per domain metering costs you nothing when you have one domain, and below 300 tracked keywords the cheap plans win outright on real value.
In-house SEO on one large site
Ahrefs Lite at $129 for the link index and the difficulty score, or Semrush Pro at $139.95 if you also run paid search. Both cap you at one seat, so price the extra logins before you commit.
Agency with several clients
SE Ranking Core at $129 for 10 projects and 2,000 daily tracked keywords, plus the Agency Pack if clients need their own logins. Nothing else in the category gives a client a login at all.
Reporting to a client or a board
Semrush for the built in reporting, or SE Ranking with white label in the Agency Pack. Ahrefs will give you data and leave the presentation to you.
Content team deciding what to write
This is the gap the platforms above leave open. They hand you a keyword export and stop. Surfer optimizes a draft you have already decided to write; the deciding step sits between the two.
Procurement needs a signed annual number
Semrush, Moz, SE Ranking and Surfer all publish a per tier annual rate you can put in a budget. Ahrefs does not, and that alone rules it out of some purchase processes.
▸ Do this before you put a card in
How to run your own SEO software comparison in four steps
01
Count what you will actually meter
Write down the number of websites, the number of keywords you will genuinely check every week, and how many people need to log in. Most buyers overestimate the keyword count by an order of magnitude and underestimate the seats.
02
Price the plan at that volume, not the headline
Take your three numbers to each pricing page and find the cheapest plan that clears all three. This almost never lands on the tier the vendor promotes, and it frequently lands one tier lower than you expected.
03
Check the currency and the date on any figure you did not read yourself
Vendor pricing pages geo-detect. Ahrefs, Surfer, SE Ranking and Ubersuggest all served us non-dollar prices from a US-bound request, and SE Ranking’s euro and dollar numerals differ. Roundups routinely quote a pound or euro figure with a dollar sign in front of it.
04
Trial the one you cannot budget for first
SE Ranking gives 14 days without a card, Semrush gives 7 with one, Ahrefs gives nothing. Spend the free trial on the workflow you do weekly, not on the feature tour, and see how many of the allowances you actually consume.
▸ And where we lose
The step every tool in this comparison leaves to you
Every platform above ends at the same place: a keyword export. You get volume, difficulty and a few thousand rows, and the job of turning that into pages, an order to publish them in and a reason to believe any of them will rank is still yours. That is the step Keywordpilot does, at $39 a month or $32 on annual billing, and it is the only thing we do.
Which also means we lose this comparison outright on most rows. We have no backlink index, no rank tracker, no site crawler, no API and no white label reporting. If any of those is the thing you are shopping for, buy one of the platforms in the table and do not buy us. If what is actually slowing you down is deciding what to publish next, none of them solve that, and the demo above will show you the difference in about twenty seconds.
▸ Questions buyers actually ask
SEO software comparison FAQ
How do you compare SEO software?
Compare the meters, not the feature lists. Every platform in this category crawls, tracks rankings and researches keywords, so the feature grids all look identical. What actually differs is how many tracked keywords, projects, seats and AI prompts each plan allows, and what an extra one costs. Price the plan at the volume you will genuinely reach in year one, then check what happens when you exceed it.
How much does SEO software cost?
Entry plans run from $29 to about $140 a month in 2026. Ubersuggest Individual and Ahrefs Starter are both $29, Keywordpilot is $39, Moz sells a $49 single-site plan, Moz Pro Standard is $99, Ahrefs Lite and SE Ranking Core are both $129, and Semrush Pro is $139.95. Mid tiers on the two market leaders sit near $249, and enterprise plans that publish a price start at $1,499.
What is the best SEO software?
There is no single best SEO software, because the plans meter different things. Ahrefs has the deepest link index and the most trusted difficulty score. Semrush covers paid search and reporting in the same seat. SE Ranking gives by far the most tracked keywords per dollar. Moz Pro is the gentlest interface. Ubersuggest is the cheapest credible option for one website.
Which SEO software gives the most tracked keywords for the money?
SE Ranking Core, by a wide margin. At $129 a month it tracks 2,000 keywords daily across 10 projects, which works out near 6.5 cents per tracked keyword. Ahrefs Lite costs the identical $129 and tracks 750, or about 17 cents each. Moz Pro Standard is the most expensive on this measure at roughly 33 cents. The metric only counts if you actually use the allowance.
Which SEO tools offer a free trial?
SE Ranking runs a 14 day trial with no credit card, which is the most generous in the category. Semrush offers 7 days but takes a card first. Moz shows a Try it free button on its pricing page. Ubersuggest offers a trial on all three tiers. Ahrefs runs no free trial at any tier, in any form, and has not for years.
Is Ahrefs or Semrush better value?
They are close, and the tiebreaker is what else you do. Semrush Pro is $139.95 against Ahrefs Lite at $129, and Semrush publishes a per tier annual rate of $117.33 while Ahrefs will only say up to 17 percent. Semrush includes paid search data and client reporting. Ahrefs has the stronger backlink index and the difficulty score most people trust.
Which SEO software tracks AI search visibility?
Moz Pro tracks four models on every tier: GPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, with 50 prompts on Standard. SE Ranking tracks 100 prompts daily on Core. Semrush sells AI Visibility separately at $99 per domain for 25 prompts. Ahrefs includes 5 prompts on Lite and sells Brand Radar AI from $199. None of them track Claude.
Do I need more than one SEO tool?
Usually not. Ahrefs and Semrush overlap by roughly 80 percent, so paying for both duplicates keyword data, rank tracking and site audits you already own. The pairing that does make sense is one broad data platform plus one narrow tool that does something none of them do, such as clustering a raw keyword list into pages and a publishing order.
You have compared the tools. Now decide what to publish.
Type one seed keyword and see the clustered content plan the platforms in this comparison hand back as a spreadsheet. No account, no card, about twenty seconds.
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