Ahrefs is a well known SEO tool that has a comprehensive backlink analysis, keyword research, and site audit capabilities. Some Ahrefs competitors have comparable features but may be more expensive or stronger in some other area.
These alternatives have introduced more options in terms of products and pricing that are valuable for users who are on a look out for tools for their specific needs.
The strongest competitor to Ahrefs is clearly Semrush, an all-in-one SEO service that includes powerful keyword research capabilities as well as traffic analytics and backlink analysis.
Ubersuggest and Moz Pro and Mangools, among others, offer some of the essential features found in a comprehensive set of SEO tools, to a greater or lesser degree.
Ultimately the best SEO tool is dependent on what features are needed and how much the user is willing to invest.
What Makes Ahrefs Unique
Ahrefs is know for strong backlink analysis, great keyword research capability, and good content discovery features .
These strengths are the reason it is a popular tool for SEO professionals and marketers.
Pricing is designed around large dataset access and systems that have high performance reliability.
Core Strengths of Ahrefs
Ahrefs is perhaps best known for its backlink analysis tools.
It’s one of the largest databases of backlinks, and provides in depth link profile and referring domain reports.
It helps give users an idea of their “link juice” and helps monitor the back linking strategies of a competitor.
They also have a good keyword research tool that returns a lot of keywords and search volume.
It offers contextual KW difficulty to help in finding opportunities.
Ahrefs’ Content Explorer allows a user to search for successful content in a particular niche, or successful popular content by topic .
It is these data sets which are available in user friendly format.
The tool is continuously updated daily which provides users with up-to-date relevant information at a fast pace.
Typical Use Cases for Ahrefs
Ahrefs is largely used by marketers to track and enhance their SEO backlink efforts.
This means they crawl their competitor’s backlinks in order to see what new links they should be targeting and how their competitors are getting their authority.
They are also great for content planning and keyword research in general.
The user identifies an opportunity in keywords with a good traffic potential and low difficulty, to optimize a current page or build a NEW page.
The Content Explorer is of particular benefit to content creators as it helps them “find trending topics and popular articles”.
This allows them to adjust content to consumer needs and therefore achieve increased organic reach.
It is also a very practical tool to easily conduct site audit and identify all the SEO problems of your website like broken links, redirects and performance etc.
Ahrefs Pricing and Plans
In terms of these latter categories Ahrefs has shifted to offering four main options: Lite, Standard, Advanced, and Agency.
Lite begins at around $99 monthly, while Agency is over $400 monthly.
| Design | Cost per month | What’s Great About It |
|---|---|---|
| Slightly | $99. | Keyword and backlink very basic data, Site Explorer |
| Traditional | $199. | Additional reports, more agency features, daily updates. |
| Sophisticated | $399. | Highest data only limits and users. |
| Empowerment | $999. | Advanced, but more seats and data than above |
Ahrefs is more expensive than many other options, but has good large datasets and is known to be accurate.
Other companies may turn to less expensive options but Ahrefs, in terms of both depth of data and speed of updating, comes out on top.
Key Features to Evaluate in Ahrefs Competitors
In selecting an Ahrefs replacement to focus on are the backlink analysis, keyword research, site audit capabilities, and rank tracking.
These characteristics define the ability of a tool to assist in advancing search ranks and keeping track of the health of SEO over time.
Backlink Analysis Capabilities
Majestic doesn’t offer a backlink analysis but this is a very important feature for SEO tools.
It shows users the backlinks to their own sites or those of competitors in terms of quality, number and from where they are coming.
A good backlink analysis tool will provide a large and regularly updated backlink database.
Features to look for are comprehensive backink profiles, ability to track new and lost links, and information regarding the authority of the link.
Some have some sort of capability for anchor text distribution and link relevance as well.
A strong backlink analysis process should provide insights into what good links your site is missing, while also helping you identify areas to investigate to detect possible toxic links.
It is crucial to gain a strong link profile as well as to battle for domain authority.
Keyword Research Tools
These are that a keyword tool must provide: information about search volume, competition, and the difficulty of a keyword.
A good crafted tool will make the user find both high performing and longtail keywords that are relevant to his niche.
The one you choose should have filters to’ll you so you narrow down keyword ideas, show trends across a period of time, as well as present related keywords.
They also improve the ability to research sharing abstractions in the form of keyword grouping and search intent.
Good keyword research is crucial for content strategy planning and for choosing terms that you would like to, or should be, found for in organic search results.
It is also a means of gauging the success and refining one’s approach as well as provides insights into keyword rankings.
Site Audit Functions
Site audit functionalities scrape websites to pinpoint technical SEO errors that can hurt rankings.
These include, for example, broken links, slow page speed, duplicate content and mobile usability.
An effective audit tool would supply users with unambiguous, well ranked reports as well as simple explanations of errors.
It must contain as well, suggestions as to how to address problems.
Regular site audits are necessary to keep a clean website structure, to maximize crawl-ability and to identify SEO problems before those problems can become serious enough to affect rank.
A pro is that it integrates with other SEO features.
Rank Tracking and Position Monitoring
Rank tracking tools will continue to check the position of the website for certain keywords over time.
They are useful to measure the success of SEO by telling you how a keyword has changed position on various search engines.
While it can vary between different programs, more advanced rank trackers should let you monitor multiple keywords for various devices in various locations.
They should present historical data and outputs such as graphical reports, charts, or graphs.
It’s also a useful SEO tool, allowing you to see what is and isn’t working in relation to your SEO efforts and allowing you to adjust your strategies as necessary.
Additionally, monitoring competitor rankings can unveil new opportunities.
Semrush vs Ahrefs vs Ubersuggest: Which SEO Tool is Best?
Top Direct Competitors to Ahrefs
There are a number of other SEO tools that are very similar to Ahrefs in terms of features and capabilities.
They do a good job on keyword research, backlink analysis and competitive insights.
While both are open-source and therefore freely available, prices and individual features differ based on those varied prices that can be selected to match budgets and requirements.
Semrush: Most Comprehensive Alternative
Semrush is most famously recognized for their many SEO and digital marketing tools.
Key elements are categorized as keyword research, backlink tacking, site audits, and PPC data.
It also has competitive research capabilities allowing users to see what their competitors are doing for both paid and organic search.
It can be paired with Google Analytics or Google Search Console, ideal for marketers that want all their data sources in one spot.
Semrush also gives insight on competitive traffic analysis and suggestions on optimizing content.
This can be a strong tool for companies who seek SEO and PPC analytics under one roof.
Pricing is higher, but this represents the level of tools accessed.
Semrush is ideal for teams that require in-depth reporting and flexible marketing campaign options.
Moz Pro: Trusted SEO Software
Moz Pro specializes in backlink analysis, site audits, and keyword tracking.
A common cause for this site widely thought of as ‘one of greatest internet firms’ and for any above positive feedback is that it offers a function called “domain authority”, which lets the assessor know the power of the site they are on .
Moz is also good, in particular because of their on-page optimization tools that help you optimize your web page, one by one.
It offers a simple user-friendly interface, better for marketers and SEO experts that need straightforward information.
It works with Google Analytics and Slack, so collaboration, reporting and success measurement are easier.
Moz may have less functionality than some of its competitors, but its focus on backlinks and domain authority are appealing to those looking to establish or grow in an online presence interested in link-building and site health .
Ahrefs vs Mangools: Side-by-Side SEO Tool Comparison
SE Ranking: Affordable All-in-One Platform
SE Ranking offers a complete SEO toolkit for an affordable rate.
It is a one-stop shop that combines keyword tracking, backlink monitoring and website audits.
SE Rankings has automated reports and is available as a white label service, which is great for multiple clients and agencies.
Its competitive research tools deal with keywords of competitors, traffic, and ad campaigns.
The interface is very user friendly and provides quick access to information about rankings and site performance.
SE Ranking works with Google Analytics and Search Console.
It just is a good option for those small businesses and marketing teams in need of getting a decent bang for their buck without sacrificing the important aspects of a SEO tool.
Niche and Specialized Alternatives
Some SEO tools are more geared toward particular aspects of SEO such as backlink analysis, performing a technical site audit, or rank tracking.
These types of specialty programs often provide more specific features for particular needs, which allow users to address individual parts of SEO that general tools may not delve into specifically.
Majestic: Backlink-Focused SEO Analysis
Majestic is especially good for deep backlink analysis.
One feature that makes it stand out are its two metrics – Trust Flow and Citation Flow – that attempt to provide an indication of link quality and influencing capabilities, that can be used to find out the overall strength of a site’s link profile.
It is particularly good at identifying places to build links and tracking the backlinks into your site, including those that might be damaging to your site.
Marketing and SEO professionals can monitor recent and historical link data over time to analyze strategies of competitors and help improve their own.
Majestic interfaces with Google Search Console to more effectively show the overall site health.
Its especially good for agencies and freelancers that specialize in backlink audits and domain authority improvement.
Screaming Frog: Technical SEO and Site Audit
Screaming Frog is a desktop crawler, mostly used for complex technical SEO audits.
It trawls websites for problems such as broken links, duplicate content, absence of metadata, and slow loading pages.
It is particularly useful for analyzing log files to find out how search engines see a website.
This information can help, for example, with managing the crawl budget as well as diagnosing and repairing indexing issues.
Screaming Frog often is used by agencies and SEO professionals to provide in-depth reports for site audits.
It easily integrate with Google Analytics and Google Search Console and craw data can be tied with actual user experience.
AccuRanker: Dedicated Rank Tracking
While all three of these tools can track keyword rankings, AccuRanker stands out because it is the only one built from the ground-up to track ranks in the most precise and fast way.
It has the ability to track keyword rankings on many search engines and in many locations and can give marketers a good idea of how well their SEO is working.
Google Search Console and Google Analytics are integrated with the platform in order to provide more complete data for stats information.
It provides customizable reports useful for managing multiple clients, and agencies.
Users like its easy interface and the ease with which it allows them to track fluctuations in their rankings and be able to react to increasing or falling search visibility.
SEO PowerSuite: Desktop Solution for Agencies
SEO PowerSuite does competing keyword research, backlink analysis, technical audits, and rank tracking with tools for the desktop .
This application too can be used offline, meaning that liberals can also store data in a way that is secure and local, important for agencies managing client projects that can’t access everything through the cloud.
It includes broken link checker, duplicate content analysis, and in-depth competitive research as a part of the suite.
The interface is designed for collaborative work and for producing reports for clients and you can integrate many different types of tools and information to work within the platform.
It also integrates with Google Analytics and Google search console, which could help aggregate SEO information.
SEO PowerSuite specifically caters towards agencies and freelancers working in desktop environments with more full-featured applications.
Feature Comparisons Between Ahrefs and Its Competitors
Ahrefs and its competitors vary in how they handle data, the user-interface experience, and collaboration.
Features range from lightweight interfaces to tools more focused on providing in-depth data insights or better elements of collaboration.
Each of these is good for different SEO capabilities, such as backlink checks, content monitoring and tracking, and campaign tracking etc.
User Interface and Usability
Ahrefs is easy to use and understand, without a lot of the excess.
There is an intuitive layout to help guide the user to backlink data, keyword difficulty and content reports.
The learning curve is a moderate one, and in fact it should be quite approachable for people who are new to SEO.
Semrush has a more complicated UI and more features, easier to get lost in for beginners but an advantage for people running larger SEO campaigns.
Ahrefs has fewer complex features than Moz, though Moz is frequently touted for its simplicity.
SE Ranking is unique in that it has a really great pricing model and for those marketers who don’t mind sacrificing the bells and whistles that come with incredibly detailed reporting, SE Ranking is a local SEO and keyword research marketers dream because SE Ranking is easy to use.
Data Accuracy and Coverage
Ahrefs offers access to search volume data and traffic potential data for keywords and boasts a sizeable index of backlinks.
This depth is useful as it helps users to analyze the competition and, finally, to find opportunities to grow.
Semrush has a broader data set including PPC information but has been critiqued for having a less complete backlink database than Ahrefs.
Moz is accurate but they often index smaller databases so it may not help with large scale campaigns.
Both SE Ranking and Serpstat have refined their backlink analysis and provide vast datasets, although not as up-to-date as Ahrefs.
SpyFu provides similar information at a more granular level of keywords, but not the complete detail of backlinks that Ahrefs offers since they are not a complete backlink analysis tool like Serpstat or Ahrefs.
Reporting and Collaboration Features
Ahrefs will let you generate detailed and customizable backlink profiles, track keyword rankings and perform a site audit. It has features for tracking campaigns, but is somewhat lacking in features for collaboration between team members.
Semrush is ahead in terms on collaboration in which multiple users can collaborate on projects and share detailed reports.
This is ideal for organizations running large and complex SEO projects.
MOZ and SE Ranking provide simple easy to share and comment on reports. This allows teams to collaborate on content and local SEO.
Serpstat also has multi-user capabilities, though with less customization.
Factors to Consider When Choosing an Ahrefs Alternative
SEO tools should be selected by weighting costs, compatibility with current software and good interfacing with other search engines.
Each of these can impact how easily a user is able to track rankings, handle paid campaigns or analyze the impact of social media.
Budget and Pricing Models
In comparison to their competitors, Ahrefs’ pricing is very low. Most have monthly plans at various feature tiers, and others have annual billing or desktop licenses that are purchased once.
Visitors will have to weigh the cost of the subscription plan versus these features, including backlink analysis, keyword research and site audits.
With this knowledge, one should be aware of whether the price includes for several users or client accounts – relevant to agencies.
Most of these offer a free trial or a demo version for one to try out its functionalities without the need to purchase.
It’s then also key to find a budget that is not disproportionate yet works well for your needs and essential SEO tools like for rank tracking for Google, Bing or Baidu, and some of the best SEO tools for Featured snippets or SERP features .
Integration with Other Marketing Tools
One thing to be aware of when choosing an SEO tool is the importance of it working well with the marketing tools you already use.
Some can even integrate with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and advertising platforms to make it easy to tie search engine and paid campaign information together.
It also integrates with social media management tools and can be useful for someone who wishes to report on the SEO benefits across channels.
Integration with collaboration solutions such as Slack or project management tools is one of the reasons it strengthens marketing efforts – it helps marketing teams in workflow management and reporting as well.
These integrations allow an overall health view of SEO, things such as search intent, robots.txt, content strategies.
Support for International Search Engines
It is important to look specifically at tools that can monitor rankings outside of Google as well as within.
Cross browser support for North America and China requires Bing and Baidu.
A solid Ahrefs alternative also supports functioning local search trends, keyword performance and backlinks tools for these engines.
This allows marketers to identify content that can be further optimized for particular algorithms and user behavior patterns.
The availability of such functionalities as local SERP tracking, knowledge panel detection, and search feature data increases the effectiveness of an international campaign.
Ahrefs vs Google Keyword Planner: Features,Pros and Cons
Frequently Asked Questions
There are several tools like Ahrefs that can be used for SEO, the main differences being price, quality and depth of data, and user experience.
Some are free, some have features for a more professional experience, and some are geared towards collaboration.
What are some free alternatives to Ahrefs for SEO and competitor analysis?
There is a free version of SEO PowerSuite to track unlimited keywords and free backlink audibility.
Moz gives you 10 free searches per month for keywords and backlinks.
A free, limited account is also available with Mangools offering keyword research and rank tracking.
They are perfect for small business owners and for those getting into SEO for the first time.
How does Semrush compare with Ahrefs in terms of features and functionality?
Its keyword research and backlink databases seem to be matching or above Ahrefs capabilities.
It also provides additional functionality for paid ads, social media and content marketing.
Semrush also automatically features keyword intent and clusters, eliminating the research time.
This second is a strong choice for agencies and companies with multiple websites as it provides support for team and profiles.
Can Ubersuggest be used effectively as a competitive analysis tool like Ahrefs?
Ubersuggest is also useful for its simple SEO information, including keyword research, estimating traffic and analyzing backlinks .
It is less comprehensive but is user friendly and less expensive.
While Ahrefs provides much more detailed competitive information, Moz’s tools can be helpful for mom and pop site owners.
What tools offer similar services to Ahrefs for tracking Google Trends?
AnswerThePublic is specifically designed to help you identify search queries and trends.
It doesn’t actually replace Ahrefs but can work in conjunction with it to identify popular categories and queries.
Serpstat also provides a keyword trends analysis for organics and PPC.
These are useful for monitoring shifts in search behavior.
Where can I find a robust platform for competitor analysis without any cost?
You can perform in-depth backlinks and keyword analysis using the free version of SEO Power Suite.
Moz has free limited queries useful for basic domain and competitor checks.
Mangools and AnswerThePublic are a couple of this type of free tools that are very useful for keyword research and trend analysis.
All of these are good options for those who require decent level insights at no up-front cost.
What are considered the best alternatives to Ahrefs for digital marketing professionals?
Semrush is another favorite due to it’s robust toolkit and good data accuracy.
Costs for Moz Pro are reasonable for what you get.
Raven Tools and Serpstat are designed for marketers who want to combine SEO, social media, and reporting functionality.
Majestic is used for researching the quality of backlinks and to an extent a little more relevant SEO analysis but not an overall equivalent to.