10 Best Ahrefs Alternatives & Competitors [Free & Paid]

Looking for the best Ahrefs alternatives?

Overall, Ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools available. It offers many excellent features such as keyword explorer, site explorer, backlink checker, etc.

However, with its recent price update, many people have started looking for alternatives to Ahrefs.

In this article, we’ll explore some of the best alternatives to Ahrefs by analyzing these main parameters: SEO features, pricing, and overall money value.

Let’s get started!

10 Best Ahrefs Alternatives

Below are some of the best free and paid alternatives to the Ahrefs SEO tool.

1. Semrush – Best Overall Ahrefs Alternative

Semrush is the most popular SEO tool on the market and, overall, the best Ahrefs alternative.

Like Ahrefs, it’s an all-in-one SEO platform with all the tools you need to do effective SEO and rank high on Google.

The best part about Semrush compared to Ahrefs is its number of features and the advantage of a seven-day free trial.

Both tools have similarities in the majority of features, which means you get key SEO features like competitive analysis, keyword research, link building, SEO audit, and rank tracking in both packages.

But Semrush still has the edge in terms of the total number of features. (The reason why it is no #1 Ahrefs alternative)

By offering more sets of features at the same Ahrefs pricing, Semrush is offering a better monetary value.

Ahrefs has missed these important tools: PPC tool, content marketing features, toxic backlinks finder, keyword cluster tool, etc.

Semrush Main Features:

• Keyword Research: Identify the best keywords for SEO and PPC campaigns.
• Competitor Analysis: Analyze competitors’ strategies in organic and paid search.
• Site Audit: Conduct a comprehensive audit of your website to find and fix SEO issues.
• On-Page SEO Checker: Get optimization ideas for specific pages to improve search rankings.
• Backlink Analysis: Analyze the backlink profile of any website, including competitors.
• Social Media Management: Schedule and post content and track performance across social media platforms.
• SEO Writing Assistant: Optimize your content for SEO with real-time suggestions.
• Local SEO: Manage your local listings and track local search performance.

Learn more in our complete Semrush review.

Pricing:

Semrush offers a similar pricing to Ahrefs. But it offers more features for the cheaper subscriptions.

Semrush Pro plan costs $139.95/mo. You can save up to 17% when you pay annually.

Semrush also offers a free plan that you can use or a seven-day free trial to test it out before upgrading.

So, if you need an all-in-one SEO tool, Semrush is a decent alternative to Ahrefs.

Try Semrush Free For 7 Days

2. SE Ranking – Best Affordable Alternative to Ahrefs

SE Ranking is the most cost-effective Ahrefs alternative. It has many of the same features but costs less than half the price.

Our favorite thing about SE Ranking is its Keyword Rank Tracker. We found it to be as good as Ahrefs Rank Tracker, if not better.

Like Ahrefs, it constantly tracks your average ranking position for all your target keywords in almost any location.

Plus, it gives you insights into the search volume each of your ranked keywords gets, the website traffic they’re forecast to send, and the SERP features you’ve earned.

It also offers one additional feature that Ahrefs does not: Content Score.

This is a SE Ranking proprietary metric. It shows you how effectively your ranked page is optimized for the keywords you’re tracking in contrast to your top-ranking competitors based on metrics like content length, structure, keyword density, placement, and so on.

Aside from the Keyword Rank Tracker, SE Ranking offers many other SEO tools. These include a competitor analysis tool, backlink checker, on-page SEO checker, and website auditing tool.

Overall, SE Ranking is a great option if you want Ahrefs’ features but have a limited budget.

SE Ranking Main Features:

• Keyword Rank Tracking: Monitoring of keyword positions across multiple search engines.
• Competitor Analysis: Detailed insights into competitors’ SEO strategies and performance.
• Keyword Research: Identification of valuable keywords and phrases for targeted SEO efforts.
• Website Audit: Comprehensive analysis of website health and performance.
• White Label Reports: Customizable, branded reports for clients.
• Content Marketing: Tools and strategies to optimize content for better search engine performance.
• On-Page SEO Checker: Evaluation and recommendations for improving on-page SEO.
• Backlink Monitoring: Tracking and analysis of backlink profiles.

Pricing:

SE Ranking, unlike Ahrefs, has a flexible price model. Its plan starts from $65/mo. You can save up to 20% when you pay annually.

Furthermore, all SE Ranking plans come with a 14-day free trial.

Try SE Ranking Free For 14 Days

3. Mangools – Best Ahrefs Alternative For Beginners

Mangools is the best free Ahrefs alternative for beginners. It’s much easier to use and also slightly cheaper, with plans starting at half the price.

The reason we find Mangools to be easier to use than Ahrefs is because the UI layout is much simpler.

With Ahrefs, you can do everything with the same tool: Check links, analyze competitors, research keywords, etc. That streamlines your workflow, but it also complicates the user interface for SEO beginners.

Mangools differ in that they divide everything into five separate tools rather than combining them all together.

For example, if you want to find or analyze keywords, you open the KWFinder and perform a search. To check a website’s backlinks, open LinkMiner. You can use the SiteProfiler to perform further in-depth analysis of a website.

That said, the trade-off is that the features on Mangools are not as reliable as they are on Ahrefs, nor is the data.

For example, we discovered that Mangools isn’t as excellent at finding backlinks, which is not unexpected considering that Ahrefs has the most active web crawler.

And Mangools doesn’t have as many filters in its backlink analysis tool either. You basically have filters for dofollow vs nofollow and active vs deleted, and that’s about it.

As a result, Ahrefs is a better SEO tool overall than Mangools. However, if you’re on a super tight budget, you can still get a lot out of Mangools.

Mangools Main Features:

• KWFinder: Provides data on search volume, keyword trends, and competitor analysis.
• SERPChecker: Offers insights into SERP features, domain strength, and competition.
• SERPWatcher: Provides a daily ranking update and performance index.
• LinkMiner: Allows you to analyze backlinks metrics like Citation Flow, Trust Flow, and the strength of backlinks.
• SiteProfiler: Offer a comprehensive overview of a website’s SEO performance.

Pricing:

The Mangools offers a free forever plan, but it is not worth it as it limits the amount of data you can fetch at a time.

A Mangools paid plan starts at $29/month. You can save up to 35% when you pay annually.

Try Mangool Free

4. Ubersuggest – Best Ahrefs Alternative For Keyword Research

If you are a blogger and just need a cheap keyword research tool rather than a comprehensive SEO tool, then you can definitely explore Ubersuggest.

Although it also offers features like site audit, rank tracking, and competitor analysis, they are nothing compared to Ahrefs or Semrush.

We can only vouch for its keyword research tool.

It’s only meant for keyword research, and it’s not an all-in-one SEO toolkit, unlike others in this list.

Furthermore, it also has a keyword visualization feature, which groups keyword ideas together based on the type of query they represent and displays them in a circular chart. We don’t think Ahrefs has anything similar to this, and it’s super useful.

Ubersuggest Main Features:

• Keyword Research: This helps you find keyword ideas based on what people are searching for on Google.
• Domain Overview: Provides an overview of the organic traffic, domain score, and backlink data for any domain.
• Site Audit: Analyzes a website’s SEO health by identifying issues and providing recommendations for improvement.
• Backlink Analysis: Shows the backlink profile of a domain, including new and lost backlinks, referring domains, and anchor texts.
• Content Ideas: Offers content suggestions based on popular articles and high-ranking pages for given keywords.
• Rank Tracking: Tracks the ranking position of a website’s keywords over time.

Pricing:

Ubersuggest offers a useful free version that you can use.

The paid plan starts at $12/mo. You can also save money with a lifetime plan that starts from $120. All plans come with a seven-day free trial.

Try Ubersuggest Free For 7 Days

5. Serpstat – Affordable Alternative To Ahrefs

Serpstat is an affordable alternative to Ahrefs if you’re looking for an all-in-one SEO platform. It comes with 55+ SEO tools, so it’s very feature-rich.

Serpstat has the features you’d expect from an SEO software suite, like backlink analysis, organic rankings reports, and more.

However, none of them quite match up to Ahrefs in terms of quality. In our testing, for example, its domain analysis did not always accurately identify the actual top keywords for which the site ranks.

However, its backlink analysis tool and rank tracker are good.

But where Serpstat has an edge over Ahrefs is when it comes to cost. Serpstat plans start at just a little over half the price of Ahrefs’ Lite plan. And in many ways, you get more for your money.

Serpstat Main Features:

• Keyword Research: Find high-performing keywords to optimize your content and improve your SEO strategy.
• Rank Tracking: Monitor your website’s ranking for specific keywords across different search engines and locations.
• Backlink Analysis: Analyze the backlink profile of any website, including your competitors, to improve your link-building strategy.
• Site Audit: Perform comprehensive audits to identify and fix on-site SEO issues, ensuring your website is optimized for search engines.
• Competitor Analysis: Gain insights into your competitors’ strategies by analyzing their keywords, traffic, and backlinks.
• API Access: Integrate Serpstat data into your own tools and applications for more customized and automated workflows.
• PPC Analysis: Optimize your pay-per-click campaigns by researching keywords, ad examples, and strategies of your competitors.

Pricing:

You can use Serpstat for free by creating a free account.

The Serpstat paid plans start at $59/mo. You can save $108 per year when you bill annually. All plans come with a seven-day free trial.

Try Serpstat Free For 7 Days

6. Majestic – Best Ahrefs Alternatives for Backlink Analysis

Despite being a little outdated, Majestic SEO remains one of the best SEO tools available.

Majestic is entirely focused on backlink reports. So, if you want a solution that handles all of your SEO tasks in one place, Majestic SEO is probably not the right option for you.

However, if all you care about is backlink data, Majestic SEO is a good alternative to Ahrefs Site Explorer.

Our tests found more backlinks for some domains than Ahrefs. This is likely due to both the size and quality of its databases.

Majestic actually maintains two databases. The Fresh Index has up-to-date links to all URLs crawled over the last 120 days. The Historic Index has backlink data for all the URLs they’ve crawled since 2006. There are literally billions of backlinks in the Fresh Index and trillions in the Historic Index.

Overall, Majestic is the better option if you want an affordable SEO tool that can compete with Ahrefs’ backlink data.

Majestic Main Features:

• Site Explorer: Provides a comprehensive overview of a website’s backlink profile, including the number of backlinks, referring domains, and top pages.
• Backlink History Checker: Tracks the growth and decline of backlinks over time, offering insights into link-building strategies.
• Trust Flow and Citation Flow Metrics: Measures the quality and quantity of backlinks to assess the overall authority and influence of a site.
• Topical Trust Flow: Analyzes the relevance of backlinks within specific topics or industries to gauge the thematic strength of a website.
• Bulk Backlink Checker: Allows for the analysis of multiple URLs simultaneously to compare backlink profiles at scale.
• Campaigns: Manages and tracks link-building campaigns within the Majestic platform for better organization and monitoring.
• Clique Hunter: Identifies common backlinks among competitors to discover potential link-building opportunities.

Pricing:

Majestic plans start at $49.99/mo and are free for two months with yearly billing.

Try Majestic

7. Screaming Frog – Best Free Ahrefs Alternative For Site Auditing

Regular website audits are an SEO best practice. To do this efficiently, you need tools that can detect technical issues that may impact your site’s visibility in search engines.

Screaming Frog is an SEO spider that scans your website and notifies you of major issues that might harm your SEO success.

While Ahrefs offers strong site auditing features, Screaming Frog is considerably more effective. The Screaming Frog spider tool crawls whole websites, allowing you to find and fix broken links, duplicate content, incorrect redirect chains, and other technical SEO issues. It also helps identify any SEO issues, such as missing titles or meta descriptions, so that they may be easily addressed.

Screaming Frog, unlike Ahrefs, does not offer a complete suite of SEO tools. Still, Screaming Frog is a great Ahrefs alternative for your site auditing needs.

Screaming Frog Main Features:

• Find Broken Links: Identify broken links (404s) and server errors.
• Discover Duplicate Content: Detect duplicate URLs, content, meta descriptions, and page titles.
• Review Robots and Directives: Analyze robots.txt, meta robots tags, and X-Robots-Tag directives for proper indexing.
• Audit Canonicals: Verify the correct use of canonical tags to prevent duplicate content issues.
• Generate XML Sitemaps: Creates XML sitemaps, including image sitemaps.
• Site Visualizations: Generate visualizations of your site’s structure using interactive tree graphs and force-directed diagrams.
• Scheduled Crawls: Automate and schedule regular website crawls.

Pricing:

Screaming Frog offers a free plan that lets you crawl up to 500 URLs.

To crawl unlimited URLs, the paid plan costs $259/year.

Try Screaming Frog Free

8. Moz Pro – Cost Effective Ahrefs Alternative

Moz Pro is another all-in-one SEO toolkit similar to Ahrefs. It provides everything SEO experts want in a single SEO platform. It offers six separate tools: Keyword Research, Rank Tracking, Site Crawl, On-Page Optimization, Link Research, and Custom Reports.

That’s the same stuff as you get on Ahrefs, and the starting price is cheaper (but not by much).

The quality of Moz’s data is up there with Ahrefs. It has a similar number of backlinks in its index, and it does a fantastic job of finding keywords.

It’s also worth mentioning that Moz and Ahrefs use different metrics to measure website authority. Ahrefs uses the term ‘Domain Rating,’ but Moz uses ‘Domain Authority.’

We found that Moz calculates a significantly different authority score than Ahrefs for several domains. Overall, Ahrefs is more accurate.

One benefit that Moz Pro has over Ahrefs is a 30-day free trial. Ahrefs doesn’t provide a free trial. Thirty days allows potential buyers to fully understand Moz Pro’s full capabilities and ensure that the software meets their needs.

Moz Pro Main Features:

• Keyword Research: Discover the best keywords to target for your SEO strategy.
• Rank Tracking: Monitor your website’s ranking performance for specific keywords over time.
• Site Audits: Identify and fix technical SEO issues on your site to improve overall performance.
• On-Page Optimization: Get recommendations to optimize individual pages for better search engine ranking.
• Backlink Analysis: Analyze your backlink profile and find opportunities to acquire high-quality links.
• Custom Reports: Create, schedule, and share custom SEO reports to track your progress and performance.
• SERP Features Tracking: Track the appearance and impact of SERP features like featured snippets and local packs.
• Crawl Diagnostics: Receive alerts and reports on issues affecting your site’s crawlability and indexing.

Pricing:

Moz Pro’s pricing is almost similar to that of Ahrefs.

The cheapest plan cost $99/mo. You can save 20% per year when you bill annually. Plus, it also offers some free SEO tools and a 30-day free trial to test it out.

Try Moz Pro Free For 30 Days

9. WebCEO – Best Ahrefs Alternative For Agencies

WebCEO is another excellent Ahrefs alternative for agencies. It offers 23+ pro-level SEO tools.

WebCEO provides everything an all-in-one marketing platform should do. From keyword research to traffic analysis to backlink checking and site audits, among other SEO tasks.

Aside from that, it offers some extra features that Ahrefs doesn’t have, like instant ranking checks, toxic links auditing, branded reports, white-label tools, and a free trial.

One unique feature it offers is its content submission tool. This helps you include your site in various directories and content promotion platforms.

Furthermore, also offers a ‘request a free SEO report’ widget that you can embed on your agency site to get new SEO leads.

All in all, it’s a great SEO tool for agencies.

WebCEO Main Features:

• Rank Tracking: Monitor your site rankings and your competitors on 370+ local and global search engines.
• Keyword Research: Find the most effective keywords gathered from 4 different Google sources.
• Technical Audit: Check your website for broken links and images.
• SEO Analysis: Run an SEO audit and get helpful advice for fixing all detected issues.
• Backlink Analysis: Analyze your backlink profile and discover new link-building opportunities.
• Content Submission: Submit your content to search engines and submission directories.
• Social Media Metrics: Track and analyze your social media performance.
• Custom SEO Reports: Create branded, detailed SEO reports for clients.

Pricing:

WebCEO entry-level plan costs $99/mo. You can save $300 when you bill annually. A free 14-day trial is available.

Try WebCEO Free For 14 Days

10. SEO PowerSuite – Best Ahrefs Alternatives For Agencies

SEO PowerSuite is the last Ahrefs competitor on our list. It’s similar to Ahrefs but for desktop use.

No other platform offers more value for money than SEO PowerSuite.

Not only is it extremely feature-rich (like Ahrefs, it is an all-in-one tool that includes rank tracking, SEO auditing, keyword research, and more), but it also provides unlimited access for a single fixed monthly fee.

As a result, you don’t have to be conscious of how often you generate reports and track ranking as you are with Ahref. You can use it as much as you want.

This makes it a great alternative for agencies with a large number of clients, and it offers strong, reliable white-label reporting features.

The primary drawback is that you are working with downloaded software. However, some of the software’s components are cloud-based. The backlink database is a prime example of this.

On the other side, the advantage of downloading software is that it is highly affordable. There is even a free plan that will gain you a lot of mileage.

SEO PowerSuite Main Features:

• Rank Tracker: Tracks and analyzes website rankings across multiple search engines.
• Website Auditor: Do a deep analysis of websites and find technical and on-page SEO opportunities for optimization.
• SEO SpyGlass: Review your link-building campaign and see the strength of your link profile.
• LinkAssistant: Find prospects and their respective email addresses to reach out to the link-building outreach campaign.

Pricing:

SEO PowerSuite offers a free plan that you can download and try out for free. Premium licenses start from $299/year. You can save 34% when billed for a three-year term.

Try SEO PowerSuite Free

Is Ahrefs the Best SEO Software?

Ahrefs is, without a doubt, one of the most powerful SEO tools available. However, to decide whether Ahrefs is right for you, you must check out the pros and cons of using Ahrefs and the costs associated with Ahrefs plans.

Ahrefs Pros & Cons:

Pros:

• All-in-one SEO tool
• Excellent backlink analysis tool
• Keyword research with accurate difficulty scores
• Rank tracking with historical data
• Provides data for nine search engines, not just Google
• Strong site audit capabilities
• Great for competitive research
• Data export options for flexibility
• Web monitoring for brand mentions
• Regular updates and new features

Cons:

• No free trial
• Only one ‘power user’ seat is included in all plans
• Ungenerous reporting limits
• Plans get pricey
• API only on Enterprise plan

Ahrefs Cost:

Ahrefs provides a number of free SEO tools, such as the Keyword Generator, Keyword Difficulty Checker, SERP Checker, and Website Authority Checker. These free SEO tools are useful for people with basic SEO research needs, but they lack the depth of data and feature set that a premium Ahrefs subscription provides.

Ahrefs offers four paid plans with monthly or annual subscriptions. When you pay annually, you get two months free. Every Ahrefs plan includes one user and powerful SEO tools.

The Ahrefs Lite plan is best for new entrepreneurs and small businesses with minimal SEO research needs. It costs $129/mo.

The Ahrefs Standard plan includes everything in the Lite plan plus site structure, outgoing links, AI suggestions, keyword clusters, content explorer, etc. It costs $249/mo.

The Ahrefs Advanced plan includes everything in the Standard plan plus Web Explorer, Looker Studio integration, HTTP authentication, etc. It costs $449/mo.

The Enterprise plan includes everything in the Advanced plan plus API, AI content grader, audit log, directory listing, etc. It costs $14,990/mo.

When To Choose a Competitor Over Ahrefs

Here are some scenarios where you might consider a competitor instead:

• If you have a limited budget and want a cheap SEO tool such as SE Ranking.
• Ahrefs is too difficult to use, and want a more beginner-friendly option, such as Mangools.
• Need SEO software with more PPC research and analysis tools, such as Semrush.
• Don’t need all the features Ahrefs offers. For example, you may need a simple keyword research tool such as Ubersuggest.

Best Ahrefs Alternatives: Final Thoughts

Ahrefs is a great SEO toolkit. However, it is not right for every business. All of the tools we’ve mentioned above are excellent alternatives to Ahrefs.

If you’re looking for a better SEO tool than Ahrefs, Semrush is the way to go because it provides more features and detailed data.

You can try Semrush’s 7-day free trial before committing to a subscription. This allows you to examine its capabilities and determine whether it meets your needs or whether another tool is more suited.

If you’re looking for a low-cost solution, consider Mangools or SE Ranking.

For more, check out these other helpful resources:

• SE Ranking vs Semrush: Which SEO Tool is Better?
• 10 Best Semrush Alternatives & Competitors
• 22 Best Free SEO Tools

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