Semrush Alternatives in 2026: 8 Tools Compared

Ahrefs is the first name most people reach for when they leave Semrush, and its pricing shows why it is a serious replacement. The Lite plan is $129 per month and Standard is $249 per month, which puts it in the same range as Semrush's own plans. Lite includes 750 tracked keywords, 5 non-verified projects and 150 AI prompt checks. Standard raises that to 2,000 tracked keywords and 300 AI prompt checks.

The cheapest way in is the $29 Starter plan, which covers keyword research and competitor research only. There is also Ahrefs Free, which shows data for sites you own so you can find and fix issues. For a link building agency like us, the appeal is obvious: backlink analysis sits at the center of the product.

The catch is that costs climb quickly. Extra seats on Lite are $40 per month each, and add-ons such as Brand Radar (from $199 per month) and Report Builder ($99 per month) are billed separately. Plan the real total before you commit.

SE Ranking is a straightforward all-in-one for teams that care about tracking more than exploring. Its Core plan is listed at $103.20 per month on annual billing, with $129 shown as the regular price. That includes 10 projects, 2,000 keywords tracked daily and 100 AI prompts tracked daily. The Growth plan is $223.20 per month on annual billing and raises the limits to 30 projects and 5,000 keywords.

Its trial is one of the easier ones to try. SE Ranking offers 14 days with no credit card, using starter limits of 10 projects, 750 tracked keywords per day and 20 AI prompts per day. That is enough to judge whether the interface and data suit you before paying.

The limits to watch are the seats. Core comes with one manager seat and Growth with three, so a small team may need to move up a plan sooner than the keyword count suggests.

Moz is one of the oldest names in SEO, and it still positions itself for small businesses that need the basics done properly. The Standard plan is $99 per month, or $79 per month when you pay yearly. It includes 1 user, 3 tracked sites, 300 tracked keywords per month and 400,000 pages crawled per month. Medium is $179 per month ($143 yearly) with 2 users, 10 sites and 1,500 tracked keywords.

Moz has added AI search features to those plans. Standard includes 150 tracked prompts across three AI models (GPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode) with weekly tracking. Moz also offers free tools, including Domain Analysis, Keyword Explorer, Link Explorer and the MozBar browser extension.

The honest drawback is scale. 300 tracked keywords is tight for anyone running several sites, and the AI tracking frequency is weekly rather than daily.

SpyFu is built around spying on competitors, which is a narrower job than Semrush's full suite. The Basic plan is $39 per month and includes 10,000-row search results and exports, 1 live site tracking project, 10+ years of historical data and 5,000 weekly tracked keyword rankings. Annual billing takes 25 percent off, and the page headline advertises plans from $29 per month.

The Pro + AI plan is listed at $59 for the first month and $119 per month after that, with unlimited search results and exports and 10 live tracking projects. The Team plan is $249 per month with 5 users included. SpyFu also lists a site audit, Google Ads campaign tools and AI brand monitoring across its plans.

The catch is the price gap. Basic is cheap, but its 10,000-row limits can bite during larger research jobs, and the next plan costs three times as much after the intro month.

Ubersuggest takes a different pricing approach from nearly everyone else on this list. When we checked, the pricing page was promoting lifetime access: $120 for Individual, $200 for Business and $400 for Enterprise, with the banner "Offer ends soon". Individual covers 1 user, 1 project, 125 tracked keywords per project and 150 searches per day. Business adds 2 users, 7 projects and 300 searches per day.

For a freelancer or a small shop with one site, paying once and skipping a subscription is hard to argue with. The tool also adds ChatGPT and Gemini to its keyword research and includes an AI chat and AI article credits each month. Monthly plan prices were not shown on the page when we looked, so check the website if you prefer to pay monthly.

The tradeoff is capacity. A lifetime deal that tracks 125 keywords will not replace Semrush for an agency, and since the offer is time-limited, the price may not stay.

Mangools is a bundle of separate tools rather than one giant dashboard: KWFinder for keywords, SERPChecker for results analysis, SERPWatcher for rank tracking, LinkMiner for backlinks and SiteProfiler for site metrics. It has also added AI Search Watcher for monitoring brand visibility in AI answers, and the homepage offers a free AI monitor.

You can create a free account with no credit card, and there are free mini tools that need no sign-up, including a SERP simulator and a Reddit threads finder. Paid plans come with a full refund if you ask within 48 hours of payment, though the policy says this does not apply to two consecutive subscriptions.

We could not pull a reliable current price for the paid plans, so we list it as See website. The practical limit is rank tracking: SERPWatcher updates weekly, and daily updates are reserved for the Agency plan. Mangools also does not try to cover areas such as ads or PR, which Semrush sells as separate products.

Serpstat is one of the cheaper full toolkits here. The Individual plan is $50 per month, charged as $600 upfront for the year, which the page says saves $228 compared with monthly billing. It covers 5 projects, 100 daily searches for sites, keywords and links, 10,000 keyword position checks and 30,000 pages to audit.

The Team plan is $100 per month ($1,200 upfront) and is where the extras live: unlimited projects, 500 searches per day, API access, a ChatGPT and Claude integration through MCP, and 1,500 AI Visibility checks across models such as ChatGPT, Grok and Gemini. The Agency plan is $410 per month.

The limit to weigh is the 100 daily searches on Individual, which a busy research day can use up. The annual commitment is also a real cash outlay compared with a monthly plan elsewhere.

Screaming Frog does not try to be a Semrush clone, and that is the point. It is a desktop crawler that checks a site for broken links, redirects, missing titles and other technical problems. The paid licence is $279 per year and the free version is limited to 500 URLs per crawl.

If the Semrush feature you actually use is Site Audit, this can replace it for a fraction of the cost. A paid licence at $279 per year is roughly a sixth of what Semrush's $139 monthly plan costs over a year ($1,668).

The catch is obvious: there is no keyword database, no backlink index and no rank tracker. Pair it with a research tool such as Mangools or Ubersuggest, or with Ahrefs Free for your own site, if you want a cheaper stack.