10 Best Alternatives to Ahrefs: A Comparison Guide

Do you need to invest in SEO (search engine optimization) software for your company? Then, you've got a lot of reasons to read this article! Let's see...

You might feel overwhelmed by the wide range of solutions out there. Or you might just want to make sure that you're choosing the best solution for your company.

Most importantly, you might not have a pot filled with gold to spend on a costly solution. But you don't want to neglect your company's website performance on search engines at all!

Bottom line, you need a software solution to

• Appraise your website's on-page SEO and backlinking performance
• Study your competitors' organic traffic and paid traffic strategies
• Choose the best target keywords related to your brand, business, product, or service

Well, help is on the way! This article will guide you through the journey of picking the best cost-effective SEO software solution for your company and budget.

It's time to talk about how Ahrefs is widely adopted amidst the SEO community and a lot of major companies worldwide.

What's Ahrefs Used For?

Ahrefs is an SEO toolset to help you increase your company's website search traffic—whether it's organic or paid traffic—and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Some renowned companies you might know—such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Netflix, and Uber—use Ahrefs for different SEO efforts.

So, "Ahrefs must be pretty fancy..." you might be wondering.

Yep, that's true. Ahrefs provides exhaustive support to boost websites' SEO. And some interesting numbers prove it:

• The keywords database contains keywords that span across 10 search engines and 171 countries. That's equivalent to 131 million book pages.
• It crawls five million webpages every five minutes for backlink discovery.

Aren't these facts impressive? But what Ahrefs can do exactly to improve your company's website is what matters here.

Major Features

With Ahrefs toolset you can perform

• SEO content audits to your website for common SEO issues that prevent it from ranking higher in SERPs
• Competitor analysis by discovering the keywords for which your competitors rank best in either organic or paid traffic and the corresponding traffic
• Keyword research from a database of about 10 billion keywords and corresponding metrics such as search volume estimations and keyword difficulty
• Backlink research from a massive list of live backlinks to your website, which is updated with high frequency
• Content research to discover which content from competitors' websites is performing best for your target keywords
• Rank tracking to obtain a comprehensive keyword ranking history for any location
• Realtime monitoring of link building by receiving an email notification whenever you or your competitors win or lose a backlink

The magic that Ahrefs can do for your website doesn't resume to what you just read. Keep on reading for more information.

Additional Features

Besides the main features of Ahrefs, the toolkit allows you to

• Analyse your content gap by discovering the keywords your competitors rank for, yet you don't
• Find out the websites that link to your competitors' but not to yours
• Compare five of your competitors at a time for how well they're doing with backlinking
• View SEO metrics for any webpage you visit, with the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
• Perform SEO content audits and monitor backlinks to your WordPress website with Ahrefs SEO WordPress Plugin
• Examine your website for broken internal links and external links
• Evaluate your domain authority
• Set up automated ranking reports that you might receive in your mailbox
• Configure email alerts for relevant keyword mentions in other websites, not only for your brand but also your competitors'
• Exploit business opportunities with people who mention your business and your competitors' brands, yet don't know you
• Conduct social media monitoring by finding the most shared content for topics with more shares on social media

Ahrefs isn't all about a huge success among the highly accomplished and leading SEO experts and companies using it. So, what are the drawbacks of Ahrefs?

The Downside of Ahrefs

The fact that some of the most recognized companies in the world use Ahrefs must be a sign of high-quality SEO software, right? However, every heads has a tails.

Ahrefs is costly, so it can be a luxury for your startup or small company. The four pricing plans start at $99 per month and go all the way up to $999 a month. Nevertheless, if you choose annual billing, you'll get a discount of two months.

Now that you have a common ground to compare Ahrefs with its competitors, let's discuss those.

Top 10 Alternatives to Ahrefs

1. BuzzSumo

Price: BuzzSumo's four pricing plans start at $99 per month and go up to $499+ a month. If you prefer to pay yearly, you'll get a 20% discount. The $499+ plan is a custom plan for large companies or teams.

BuzzSumo might help you discover content ideas from the most popular content, identify great influencers in your niche, and more. It improves your website's SEO indirectly, through better content.

Features:

• Search the internet and social media for content trends given a specific topic—for instance, by analysing the most popular questions asked on forums
• Content analytics that includes metrics such as engagement, number of shares, backlinks, and so on
• Mention tracking, which is a feature centred on content
• Influencer search for a certain topic to help you start an influencer marketing campaign
• Content search and analysis history up to five years back

Ahrefs is more focused on SEO whereas BuzzSumo is more focused on content marketing. That means that if you prefer BuzzSumo over Ahrefs, your website's company ranking will depend on producing amazing content!

With that said, Ahrefs has a whole lot more SEO features than BuzzSumo.

Best for: content marketers or companies with the need to discover content trends and influencers, plus analyze engagement levels and other metrics

2. KWFinder

Price: KWFinder's three pricing plans range from $29.90 to $79.90 a month. And if you go for the annual plan, you'll save 40%.

KWFinder is a Mangools tool with keyword research powers. In other words, KWFinder is one of the best keyword planners you might find.

Features:

• Long-tail keyword discovery
• Keyword discovery from Google Suggest, which suggests the keywords you see under Google's search box while you're typing
• Ranking of keywords by their difficulty, which gives you an insight over the best low-competition keywords
• Bulk import of keywords to research them in batches
• Lists to organize all your keywords

KWFinder falls short of Ahrefs' features that go beyond keyword research.

Best for: content marketing professionals or businesses with a particular interest in keyword planning

3. Moz

Price: Moz Pro's four pricing plans go from $99 to $599 per month. But if you pay yearly, you'll benefit from a 20% discount. There's also the possibility to request a customized enterprise pricing plan.

Moz Pro is a popular suite of SEO tools.

Features:

• Automated reporting
• Long-tail keyword suggestions
• Domain authority and page authority metrics to assess ranking performance
• Extensive number of keyword research results
• Analytics from local SEO audits

Whereas Ahrefs constantly releases feature improvements, Moz Pro doesn't.

Also, Ahrefs stands out from Moz Pro in terms of link research.

Best for: individuals or companies interested in defining and maintaining an SEO strategy

4. SE Ranking

Price: SE Ranking's three pricing plans are between $29 and $129 a month. However, you can benefit from discounts based on the rankings check frequency and the subscription period.

SE Ranking is an SEO toolkit with a broad range of SEO features.

Features:

• On-page SEO verifier for posts and webpages
• Marketing plan
• Keyword grouping
• Suggestion of keywords
• Pay-per-click (PPC) competitor analysis

Despite that SE Ranking is feature-rich, it doesn't overcome the variety of features that Ahrefs has.

Best for: content marketers or businesses looking for a low-cost SEO solution to support their SEO approach

5. SEMrush

Price: SEMrush's three pricing plans vary from $99.95 to $399.95 per month. Nevertheless, if billed annually, you'll get a 16% discount.

SEMrush is one of the most popular SEO suites on the market. It specialized in keyword research, competitor analysis, and paid advertising campaign optimization. But it also has other features such as on-page SEO analysis, backlink research, and rank tracking.

Most likely, SEMrush is the closest tool to Ahrefs in completeness and quality, which is a good starting point!

Features:

• Broken links tracking
• Thorough SEO audit reporting
• Comparison of your domain's SERP ranking with up to five competitors'
• Search for the most profitable keywords in any niche
• Social media analytics with automated posting and advanced reporting

Nonetheless, Ahrefs surpasses SEMrush in a few things:

• User experience (UX) by providing a more complete side menu, which facilitates navigation to get to more specifics.
• Completeness of link analytics.
• Presentation of keyword research information, which is easier to read.
• Content research.
• Accuracy of traffic predictions for keywords with reduced search volume.

Best for: content marketing professionals or companies on the lookout for SEO software almost as complete and good as Ahrefs, yet less expensive

6. SERPed

Price: SERPed's pricing plans start at $79 per month and go up to $379 a month. If you prefer to pay annually, you'll get three months for free.

SERPed is an all-in-one SEO management system, which means that it contains over 40 SEO tools. And that makes it a great contender for Ahrefs!

Features:

• Google Chrome extension
• WordPress plugin
• Low-competition long-tail keyword discovery
• Bulk URL analysis
• Customizable PDF reports

Best for: individuals or businesses in need for a comprehensive set of SEO tools to structure their SEO strategy

7. Serpstat

Price: Serpstat's four pricing plans range from $69 to $499 per month. And if you pay annually, you'll save 20%. Serpstat also offers customized enterprise pricing plans on demand.

Serpstat is an all-in-one SEO platform.

Features:

• Easy-to-use backlink research tool
• Batch keyword research in up to 200 domains
• Batch comparison of the rankings of up to 200 domains
• Identification of competitors in Google Ads
• Ads research among competitors

Although Ahrefs and Serpstat are similar in their features, Ahrefs is probably still a better option.

Ahrefs stands out from Serpstat in the accuracy of keyword research and analytics. That's to say that the quality of the data extracted from keyword analysis is better in Ahrefs than in Serpstat. Examples of that data are keyword difficulty and keyword search volume.

Best for: content marketers or companies needing a broad SEO platform that’s almost at the level of Ahrefs as it can be, except for keyword analysis

8. SpyFu

Price: SpyFu's three pricing plans go from $39 to $299 a month. But if billed yearly, you'll benefit from a 15–33% discount.

In general, SpyFu is a great alternative to Ahrefs and Ahref's most complete competitor tool for keyword research.

Features:

• Discovery of keywords that competitors bought on Google Ads
• Listing of ad variations
• Monitoring of organic and paid rankings on Google, Bing, and Yahoo
• Download of competitors' PPC analytics
• Custom reports

When comparing SpyFu with Ahrefs, one difference pops up—the display of PPC analytics from different ad platforms. Whilst Ahrefs shows PPC analytics from Google, Bing, YouTube, and Amazon, SpyFu only shows those from Google Ads.

Best for: content marketing professionals or businesses particularly interested in a broad SEO management system with strong keyword research features

9. Ubersuggest

Price: Ubersuggest's three pricing plans are between $29 and $99 per month. However, if you choose annual billing, you'll get a discount of two months.

Ubersuggest is an SEO tool acquired by Neil Patel and specialized in suggesting target keywords for your website's content.

It might be the best available low-cost alternative to Ahrefs if you're focused on keyword idea generation. With Ubersuggest, you might invest in your website's content to improve its ranking.

Nonetheless, you can also perform SEO audits and backlink research with Ubersuggest.

Features:

• Comparison of the number of people who search for a keyword on a mobile device versus a desktop device
• Generation of keyword ideas regardless of the niche
• Easiness of use due to a great user interface (UI)
• Comparison between the number of times searchers click on paid search results and SEO results
• Checking of searchers' age range

Despite the pros, Ubersuggest doesn't have so many features as Ahrefs does.

Best for: content marketing beginners trying to find their way into SEO by discovering the best keywords

10. WebCEO

Price: WebCEO's three pricing plans vary from $39 to $299 a month. Nevertheless, if you prefer to pay yearly, you'll get three months for free. And if you've got multiple client sites, you might start with the $99 plan. As your business grows, that plan will add up some fees.

WebCEO is an advanced and diversified SEO toolkit. So, if you own an agency, you should seriously consider WebCEO over Ahrefs.

Features:

• Integration with Google Analytics and Google Search Console
• Mobile optimization check to find out if your website is adequately optimized for the mobile environment
• Testing of webpages' browser loading times
• Automatic emailing of reports and varied alerts
• Analysis of social media popularity

Best for: content marketing agencies that need an advanced SEO toolkit

What Alternative to Ahrefs Should You Go for After All?

Not all of the 10 best alternatives to Ahrefs in this guide are interchangeable. Certainly, not all of them are cheaper for the same quality you can get of Ahrefs!

Shortly, you should select the alternative that best suits your price range, your need for features, and your customer profile. But let's break down those variables a bit more.

You may be a freelancer, a website owner, or a blogger. Or you may own a startup, a company, or an agency. Or you may even be a project or a team leader. Regardless of that, your decision on Ahrefs versus one of its competitors depends on

• Your level of SEO experience or the maturity level of your enterprise or team.
• The extent to which you need SEO services and, consequently, either broad-spectrum or purpose-specific tooling. For instance, you may just need a content marketing or a keyword research tool rather than an entire SEO toolset.
• How much money you can put into an SEO tool or toolset.

To sum up, if you need a comprehensive SEO tool or toolset, you might go two ways:

• Invest in one of the most similar feature-wise competitors of Ahrefs—SERPed or WebCEO
• Choose a cheaper alternative to Ahrefs with a similar range of features—SE Ranking or Ubersuggest

Above all, keep in mind: SEO is the lion in the digital marketing kingdom. And it can make your business grow from the bushes!