Cheapest Semrush and Ahrefs alternatives, by the numbers

What the two anchors actually cost

Our scenario: single user, monthly billing. Semrush's Free plan gives 1 demo project and 10 reports a day across all tools; its SEO tier is $139/month ($117.33/month billed annually) for 5 websites and 500 keywords tracked daily. Starter SEO + AI Search is $199/month ($165.17/month annually), keeping those 5 websites and 500 keywords but adding MCP access and 50 AI-visibility prompts tracked daily. Pro+ is $299/month ($248.17/month annually) for 15 websites, 1,500 keywords and content optimization tools; Advanced is $549/month ($455.67/month annually) for 40 websites, 5,000 keywords and API data integration.

Ahrefs' Free plan limits Site Explorer and Site Audit to verified website owners. Starter is $29/month with limited details published. Lite is $129/month for 5 projects, 750 tracked keywords and 100,000 crawl credits for 1 user, with up to 2 additional users at $40/month each — paying annually saves up to 17%, though the exact annual rate isn't published. Standard is $249/month for 20 projects and 2,000 keywords (up to 5 more users at $60/month each); Advanced is $449/month for 50 projects and 5,000 keywords (up to 10 more users at $80/month each). Enterprise requires an annual commitment from $1,499/month ($17,988/year) for 3 users, with unlimited additional users beyond that.

Full suites at a lower entry price

SE Ranking's Core plan is $129/month ($103.20/month billed annually) for 10 projects, 1 seat and 2,000 daily keywords, plus rank tracking, keyword research, backlink analysis, site audit and white-label reporting. Growth is $279/month ($223.20/month annually) for 30 projects and 3 seats. SEO PowerSuite's desktop toolkit has a genuinely free version covering rank tracking, keyword research, backlink analysis, site audit and competitor analysis, with no paid plan published in our data — the free version is the only price we can confirm. Mangools' Basic plan lists at $18.85/month, but only as an annual-billed figure ($226.20/year); monthly billing costs more, and our research hasn't confirmed any of its capabilities, so treat it as a price only, not a feature match for Semrush or Ahrefs.

Content-optimization and keyword specialists

Surfer and Frase are narrower tools — content optimization first, not full-suite rank tracking — and both publish only annual-billed monthly rates, with monthly billing costing more. Surfer's Discovery plan is $49/month billed yearly ($588/year) for 1 seat; Standard is $99/month billed yearly ($1,188/year) for 3 seats; Pro is $182/month billed yearly ($2,184/year) for 5 seats. Frase's Starter plan is $49/month month-to-month ($39/month billed yearly) for 1 seat, 10 articles and 50 audit pages monthly; Professional is $129/month month-to-month ($103/month billed yearly) for 3 seats, 40 articles and 100 AI generations; Scale is $299/month month-to-month ($239/month billed yearly) for 5 seats and 100 articles.

LowFruits is a keyword-research specialist: Standard is $29.90/month ($20.75/month billed yearly) for 3,000 credits a month; Premium is $79.90/month ($62.45/month billed yearly) for 10,000 credits. Screaming Frog's SEO Spider has a free version capped at a 500-URL crawl; its paid licence is listed at $199/year — the pricing page uses a currency selector that may show equal numbers across $/£/€, so treat the exact USD figure as unconfirmed.

AI search visibility is a newer, adjacent job

Writesonic tracks how a brand shows up in AI answers (ChatGPT, Gemini and similar) rather than classic Google rankings — an adjacent job to Semrush and Ahrefs' core rank tracking, not a straight swap. Starter is $79/month billed annually ($948/year), with monthly billing priced higher (exact monthly rate not published); Basic is $199/month billed annually ($2,388/year) for 2 seats and 100 prompts tracked; Growth is $399/month billed annually ($4,788/year) for 3 seats. Surfer sells the same job as a standalone add-on too: its AI Search Analytics product is $158/month billed yearly ($1,896/year), separate from its main content-optimization plans. Semrush folds AI-visibility tracking into its higher tiers instead of selling it standalone, which is the real trade-off: buy it bundled with the rest of an SEO suite, or buy it purpose-built from Writesonic or Surfer.