Ahrefs vs Semrush
Both are seo tools. Here is what separates them.
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.
What Semrush is
Semrush is a subscription platform covering SEO, AI visibility, content, local listings, advertising and social. It is organised into nine solution areas: Semrush One, SEO, AI Visibility, Traffic and Market, Content, Local, Advertising, AI PR and Social. Named tools include the Keyword Magic Tool, Site Audit, rank tracking, Backlink Analytics and an AI visibility checker. Those tools read from indexes that Semrush builds itself: 28 billion keywords, 43 trillion backlinks and 808 million domain profiles, held across 142 geographic databases. Four plans are listed, and they differ in how many websites, keywords and AI prompts they cover. The SEO plan is $139 per month, or $117.33 a month on annual billing, and covers 5 websites and 500 tracked keywords. Starter is $199 per month, or $165.17 annually, and covers 5 websites, 500 tracked keywords and 50 tracked AI prompts. Pro+ is $299 per month, or $248.17 annually, and covers 15 websites, 1,500 tracked keywords and 100 tracked AI prompts. Advanced is $549 per month, or $455.67 annually, and covers 40 websites, 5,000 tracked keywords and 200 tracked AI prompts. Users beyond the first are charged separately, at $45 each on Starter, $80 on Pro+ and $100 on Advanced. The SEO Toolkit is sold in Pro, Guru and Business tiers. Pro tracks 500 keywords, audits 100,000 pages a month and returns 10,000 results per report. Guru tracks 1,500 keywords, audits 300,000 pages and returns 30,000 results. Business tracks 5,000 keywords, audits 1,000,000 pages and returns 50,000 results. A single audit is capped at 20,000 pages on Pro and Guru, and at 100,000 pages on Business. Additional users on toolkits other than SEO cost $20 each regardless of tier. Without an SEO Toolkit subscription, Site Audit crawls only 100 pages a month and 100 pages per audit. Unused crawl budget does not carry over between months, and the allowance resets on the first day of each month. A seven day free trial is available.
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