Ahrefs alternatives

12 tools that do a similar job, and what makes each one different.

What Ahrefs is

Ahrefs is a paid SEO toolset built around a backlink and keyword index, used to work out what competitors rank for, track your own positions and find the technical faults holding a site back. The suite is split into named tools: Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Rank Tracker, Site Audit, Content Explorer, Brand Radar, Web Analytics and Bot Analytics. Keywords Explorer is the research end. It holds 28.7 billion keywords across 217 locations, and for any one of them returns Keyword Difficulty, search volume, traffic potential and the parent topic the term sits under, along with a reading of intent as commercial, navigational or informational. Site Explorer handles the competitive side across 185 locations, and goes beyond organic data to report a rival's ad spend, ad copy, CPCs and ad positions country by country. Site Audit is the technical half. It crawls at up to 170,000 URLs per minute, checks for more than 170 technical and on-page problems and rolls the result into a single SEO health score. It executes JavaScript while crawling, so pages that assemble themselves in the browser are audited as a visitor would see them rather than skipped. What separates the plans is mostly scale and memory. Lite, at $129 per month, covers 5 projects, 750 tracked keywords and 100,000 crawl credits, with six months of historical data. Standard at $249 raises that to 20 projects, 2,000 keywords, 500,000 credits and two years of history, and Advanced at $449 goes to 50 projects, 5,000 keywords, 1,500,000 credits and five years. Site Explorer's index reaches back more than ten years, so on the lower plans you are buying access to a shorter window of it rather than a smaller archive. Enterprise, at $1,499 per month on an annual commitment, removes the history limit and adds SSO and uncapped API access. A Starter plan sits at $29 per month. Extra seats are charged on top at $40 per user on Lite, $60 on Standard and $80 on Advanced, capped at 2, 5 and 10 users respectively. Paying annually is stated to save up to 17 percent. Two things sit outside the plan ladder. Ahrefs Webmaster Tools is free and gives Site Explorer, Site Audit and Web Analytics, but only for sites you have verified ownership of, so it is a diagnostic for your own properties rather than a way to research anyone else's. Brand Radar AI is sold separately from $199 per month, and on the standard plans tracked AI prompts are capped at 5 on Lite, 10 on Standard and 20 on Advanced.

Semrush

Has a free tier, unlike Ahrefs

Freemium

Sitebulb

Technical SEO auditing that explains why each issue matters and what to do about it, rather than emitting a list of flags and leaving prioritisation to you. Crawls render JavaScript, and reports are readable enough to hand to a client. The educational framing is the differentiator; it is often run alongside a raw crawler rather than instead of one.

Paid

Screaming Frog

Has a free tier, unlike Ahrefs

Freemium

Surfer

Builds content briefs and scores drafts against what already ranks for a term, headings, length, entities and related terms drawn from the current top results. Useful as a check on a writer's instincts and dangerous as a substitute for them: optimising to a score produces text that reads like it was optimised to a score.

Paid

Mixpanel

Has a free tier, unlike Ahrefs

Freemium

Amplitude

Has a free tier, unlike Ahrefs

Freemium

Intercom

Support inbox, help centre and an AI agent that resolves a meaningful share of conversations before a human sees them. Messenger, tickets, articles and automation share one workspace, so an answer written once serves the article, the bot and the reply. Sold on deflection rate; priced accordingly, with resolution-based billing for the agent.

Paid

Writer

Enterprise writing where a style guide is enforced rather than suggested. Terminology, tone and compliance rules are applied consistently across everyone who writes, and the platform can be grounded in a company's own knowledge. Bought by large organisations for governance and consistency; overkill for a small team and precisely the point for a regulated one.

Paid

Grammarly

Has a free tier, unlike Ahrefs

Freemium

HubSpot

Has a free tier, unlike Ahrefs

Freemium

Jasper

Marketing copy at volume, kept inside one brand's voice. Brand Voice learns from existing material, campaign tools generate a full set of assets from a brief, and templates cover the usual formats. Built for marketing teams producing a lot of copy under a consistent identity, which is a narrower job than a general assistant.

Paid

GitHub Copilot

Autocomplete and chat inside the editor you already use (VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim, Visual Studio), plus review suggestions on pull requests. It is strongest at the code you would have written anyway: boilerplate, tests, the second half of an obvious function. Enterprise plans can index private repositories so suggestions match house conventions.

Paid