Are you looking for Ahrefs alternatives?

After all, you don’t want to break the bank for trying to rank on Google.

There is no doubt that Ahrefs is the best SEO tool out there.

However, it is not for everyone.

Ahref’s numerous features can easily confuse the user.

That’s why you want an easy-to-use and cheaper alternative. The alternative should offer a good feature set, including backlink building.

Consider some of our ranking criteria before deep-diving into the Ahrefs alternative.

Ahref’s alternative must offer good UI and UX.

Additionally, it should be cheap and quickly index new backlinks.

Also, the tool must offer a robust keyword index so that you can learn about new keywords and emerging trends.

Overall, Ahrefs alternatives must offer similar or more refined features while offering value for money.

Best Ahrefs alternatives – Our picks

Semrush – Feature-rich alternative

Semrush is Ahrefs’ closest competitor and the best alternative. It offers tons of features at an affordable price.

In my Semrush review, I extensively cover how Semrush offers value for its users and caters to a broader audience.

Semrush improves on Ahrefs in almost every aspect. For example, Semrush excels at traffic analysis and offers one of the largest SEO keyword databases, which is on par with Ahrefs.

Statistically, Semrush (as of Feb 2024) offers 25.5 billion keywords, covering 808M domain profiles across 142 geo databases. On top of that, Semrush’s updated backlink database is bigger compared to Ahrefs.

Semrush and Ahrefs offer audit backlinks that allow you to find new opportunities. However, if we look at numbers, Semrush has a bigger backlink database, enabling you to find better opportunities. Semrush currently offers 36B backlinks, compared to 27B by Ahrefs.

Semrush’s main features include:

• Biggest keyword database: With Semrush, you get the biggest keyword database of 25.5 billion keywords.
• Competitive analysis: Semrush offers an extensive competitive research toolkit. You can explore all the essential domain data using the Domain Overview tool, learning about competitors’ traffic. Furthermore, the Keyword gap tool lets you identify the keywords worth targeting.
• Backlink building: Semrush excels at backlink tracking that continuously gets updated to showcase the latest information. With over 43 trillion quality backlinks, you can learn competitors’ backlink strategies and use them to your advantage (i.e., trying to get new backlinks or understanding backlink types).
• Advertising toolkit: With the advertising toolkit, you can get a complete PPC report of any site you want. The report contains valuable information such as ad copies, history, positions, changes, etc. In addition, you also get CPC Map(learn about Google Ads CPC prices), Ad Builder (build profitable ads), and PLA Research tool(learn about other PLA trends and create your strategy).
• Social media toolkit: Automate complete social media posting with this toolkit. It supports platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest. It also has an analytics section so that how well your social media campaigns are performing.
• SEO content template: Save time with the SEO content template as it analyzes the top 10 SERP competitors.
• Content marketing: Semrush offers a complete package including a content marketing toolkit. Here, you can do extensive SEO topic research, brand marketing, market explorer, and content analyzer tools.
• Semrush App center and AI: Semrush offers an app center where you can access popular marketing apps such as AdClarity, Ad Assistant, etc. You can also get access to AI apps such as ContentShake, which makes content creation faster.

Pros 👍

• Excellent value for money.
• Biggest keyword and backlink database.
• Top-notch traffic analytics features to easily track competitors and learn about new opportunities.
• Robust keyword indexing results in quick backlinks indexing.
• Get emerging trends due to the addition of new keywords.
• Excellent UI and UX for easy use.
• Great content marketing toolkit with access to writing assistant, SEO template creation, content audit, and topic research.
• Monitor brand directly from Semrush.

Cons 👎

• Lack of white-label reports at low-priced plans
• Keyword difficulty scores lack accuracy compared to competitors
• Very limited free plan, only good for learning about Semrush.

Semrush offers three plans for its users – Pro (starts at $129.95 per month), Guru ($249.95 per month), and Business ($499.95 per month). The Pro version is best for small teams as it supports tracking 5 projects and 500 keywords. The Guru increases the limit to 15 projects and 1500 keywords, whereas Business offers 40 projects and 5,000 keyword tracking.

🏆 Bottom line: Semrush is an excellent, easy-to-use Ahrefs alternative. Its feature set is at par with Ahrefs’s, offering better value for money. Also, it provides the biggest keyword database and backlinks, enabling you to quickly identify trends and steer your business to take advantage of them.

Serpstat – Affordable alternative

Serpstat is an affordable Ahrefs alternative you should not miss if you’re on a budget.

With Serpstat, you get a complete package ideal for organically growing your site.

When you first sign up and add your site, it automatically adds the probable competitors for you to analyze. You’ll learn about missing keywords you can target to grow your site.

Like Ahrefs, Serpstat offers a simple user interface that results in a good user experience.

In comparison with Ahrefs, Serpstat offers a decent backlink analysis. Here, you can identify new backlink opportunities by looking at historical data.

Surprisingly, Serpstat boasts a big database with 7.39 billion keywords and 2.14 billion keywords in SERPs.

Serpstat’s main features include:

• Site audit: Serpstat’s site audit is comprehensive, which helps you improve on-site SEO. It divides issues into high, medium, and low according to severity. As you solve these issues, your site score goes up (out of 100). The issues captured can be technical SEO-related, on-page SEO, or website speed.
• Keyword research: Serpstat indexes over 7.39 billion keywords. Their SERP accuracy is also good, giving you the right platform to perform detailed keyword research. Also, the tool is easy to use.
• Backlink analysis: Serpstat’s backlink analysis performs at par with other big players, including Ahrefs and Semrush. You can use it to strategize your site’s backlink methodology or learn about competitors and find opportunities. To make it easy, the backlink tool identifies stronger backlinks.
• Competitor analysis: With Serpstat competitive analysis (up to 5 competitors), you can know why you’re not ranking compared to your competitors. With the information (which covers 18 core metrics that can be further explored), you can improve the site’s SEO strategy.

Pros 👍

• Competitive Pricing
• Excellent keyword research tool with 7.39 billion keywords indexed.
• Site audit is comprehensive and offers actionable points.
• Extensive competitive SERP analysis feature that you can use to improve your SEO and backlink strategy.
• Accurate keyword difficulty score
• A 7-day trial enables users to test out service
• API integration is fairly priced

Cons 👎

• Has a poor UX and is not designed with specific SEO use cases in mind such as guest post outreach, broken link building, etc.
• Some columns in the reports are not sortable, hindering the analysis of important results.
• Online customer care reviews don’t look good.
• It can be cheaper for the features it offers
• The free plan offers limited features

Serpstat offers three plans. The cheapest plan, “Individual,” starts at $59 monthly. The higher plans are for teams and agencies.

Serpstat is considerably cheaper than Ahrefs. However, its value could be better considering the feature set it offers.

🏆 Bottomline: Serpstat is a worthy Ahrefs contender with plenty of features matching it. With a huge keyword database, excellent site audit features, and competitive analysis, Serpstat is a good choice. However, its value for money could be better considering the features it offers compared to Ahrefs.

KWFinder Mangools Beginner-friendly

KWFinder (also known as Mangools) is a great alternative to Ahrefs. It is extremely budget friendly with prices starting at just $29 per month.

Technically Mangools is an SEO software suite that gives access to five core tools/apps.

These include:

• KWFinder for researching keywords
• SERPChecker for competitive analysis
• LinkMiner for backlink analysis
• SERPWatcher for tracking ranks
• SiteProfiler for analyzing domains

To compare, Mongools make it super compact to access features. However, it does it by sacrificing true dashboard. This makes Mangools good for bloggers or businesses with limited budgets, but not ideal for businesses managing multiple projects.

So, if you’re comfortable working with separate tools, then Mongools is a good pick. Otherwise, it is better to stick to Ahrefs or other alternatives suggested here.

Mangools boosts a good keyword database with 120 million keywords and 10 million domains. They rely on Majestic SEO API for the data.

Mangools features include:

• Accurate difficulty score: Mangools gets the keyword difficulty score right compared to others. It is reliable and helps strengthen SEO strategy.
• Tool-specific features: If you’re new to SEO, you’ll appreciate Mangool’s tool-specific features. For example, if you want to do keyword research, you can open KWFinder, whereas analyzing domains requires using SiteProfiler.
• Keyword research with KWFinder: It is a simple-to-use tool that lets you refine your keyword strategy by finding long tail keywords with low SEO difficulty.
• SERPChecker: Learn keyword difficulty, page authority, and metrics comparison with top 10 SERP results.
• SERPWatcher: Track keywords conveniently and see which keyword is trending. It shows estimated traffic and search volumes as well.
• Backlink analysis with LinkMiner: Learn about backlinking opportunities with the LinkMiner tool that deep dive into your site’s backlink profile and competitors.
• Site profiler: Learn about your site’s popularity, referring IPs, Facebook profile, and other essential site metrics, including backlinks, in one place.

Pros 👍

• Value for money, especially for those with a limited budget
• Tool-specific features make it user-friendly
• Excellent website preview feature

Cons 👎

• Lacks a centralized dashboard
• Lacks features compared to big players in the SEO market
• Lacks integration between its apps/tools.
• It doesn’t have its backlink index; it relies on Majestic’s index.

Mangools is one of the cheapest SEO tools out there. Its basic plan starts at $29 per month with three more pricing tiers, up to $129 monthly.

🏆 Bottomline:  Mangools is a great Ahrefs alternative for bloggers and small businesses trying to follow the SEO path to reach new audiences. It offers excellent long-tail keyword research, making starting your blog rank on Google easy.

Ubersuggest – Cheapest keyword research tool

Ubersuggest is one of the fastest-growing Ahrefs alternatives. It is the brainchild of Neil Patel, an authoritative figure in the SEO marketplace.

Its recent success is attributed to its growing keyword database, keyword tracking, and adding multiple new features, including AI writer for faster content creation, affordability, and lifetime plan.

The best part is that it has a free keyword research tool.

With Ubersuggest, you get all the necessary tools to manage your SEO campaign, including keyword research tools, site audits, traffic estimation, backlinks, and SEO opportunities. Other features include site speed monitoring, a free Chrome extension, and a clean dashboard.

Ubersuggest is a great option compared to Ahrefs. It offers a feature-rich package without the need to spend a lot. It does a great job of finding keywords that are easy to rank.

However, the keyword difficulty may not be as accurate as that of Ahrefs due to the limited backlink database.

In short, Ubersuggest is an excellent mix of features and value, especially compared to Ahrefs.

Ubersuggest’s key features include:

• A clean dashboard: Ubersuggest offers a clean overview of your projects, making it easy to track projects and how they’re performing. These include organic traffic trends for all devices, keyword rankings, estimated traffic value, backlinks, and on-page SEO. In addition, it also shows top SEO opportunities, ideal for improving rankings.
• Keyword research: Find keywords that can help you bring traffic to the site by looking at SERP metrics. It also lets users analyze competitors. Moreover, you can also do keyword visualization and get new content ideas.
• Traffic estimation: Get traffic numbers of your site or competitors. It helps you to identify successful keywords and use them to improve your site’s search results. Its “Top pages by traffic” tool lets you scan any site to see which pages they’re ranking on.
• Backlinks discovery and opportunity tool: Dive deep into competitors’ backlinks to find opportunities to create new ones for your site with the Backlinks discovery tool. It lists referring domains and also tracks link history to showcase growth. The opportunity tool lets you find backlink opportunities comparing your domain with a competitor.

Ubersuggest is one of the cheapest SEO tools with pricing starting at just $12 per month. It makes it perfect for bloggers or small businesses who are just starting. It also has a Business and Enterprise plan for users with more needs. However, you must also know that Ubersuggest keeps the pricing low as they source backlinks through Moz API.

Furthermore, it is the only SEO tool in our list that offers a lifetime subscription (one-time purchase), with pricing starting at $120.

If you’re not sure, you can try their 7-day free trial.

🏆 Bottom line: Ubersuggest is undoubtedly a great alternative to Ahrefs. It has valuable tools that cover most of your SEO needs. Also, its pricing is excellent, giving it the best value-for-money option.

SE Ranking – A growing alternative to Ahrefs

SE Ranking is a growing SEO tool, making it an excellent Ahrefs alternative. Its spontaneous growth is due to multiple factors including an intuitive interface, cost-effective plans, and the addition of niche features such as page change monitoring and a user-friendly website auditor.

Additionally, it offers a top-notch SEO toolkit, giving you a complete package. For example, you can run a full site audit, keyword analysis, and competitive analysis and create or fine-tune your existing SEO strategy.

SE Ranking takes a more straightforward approach than Ahrefs. It ensures a more approachable way to do SEO with refined UI and UX. Its dashboard is well-designed and provides an eagle-eye view of all your projects.

With SE Ranking, you can do complete backlink analysis, competitive research, audit websites, and keyword rank tracking. You can also find new ideas and generate content with the AI writer tool.

Statistically, the SE ranking is strong. It houses 3.3B keywords across 188 geo databases. The backlink database is also robust at 3T backlinks as it covers and maintains 2.2 B domain profiles, making it a strong contender to Ahrefs.

The best part is that you can try it out with their demo account. They also offer a free trial.

SE Ranking’s key features include:

• Keyword rank tracker: SE Rankings lets you monitor and track keywords across all major search engines. The rank tracker provides insights via SERP metrics, including referring domains, average position, indexed pages, and more.
• Content editor: The content editor makes content creation easier, as you can enter keywords to target and select country, region, search engine, and language. It scans the top 20 SERP results and information on how competitors are ranking. From there, you can write the content yourself or ask an AI writer.
• Competitive research: Just like most SEO tools, SE Rankings also offer extensive competitive research capabilities where you can learn about competitors’ domain trust, page trust, organic keywords, SERP features, keyword difficulty, search volume, and so on.
• Website audit: Learn how to optimize your site for SEO by running a complete website audit. The tool generates technical SEO reports covering over 12 parameters. However, it makes it easier to follow as it highlights major site problems and their fixes.
• Backlink checker: SE Ranking boasts strong 3T backlinks, making it an excellent way to learn about backlink opportunities.
• Content idea finder: Use the clustering technique to find new content ideas based on keyword difficulty, monthly search volume, and CPC.

Pros 👍

• Excellent UX and UI
• Offers visualized reporting, which is easy to understand
• Big keyword and backlink database
• Top-notch competitor and keyword research
• Value for money

Cons 👎

• It can take time to learn and use it effectively
• AI writer has a word limit
• The agency pack doesn’t have add-ons to surpass limitations

SE Ranking is decently priced, with an essential plan starting at $55 monthly, offering 10 projects. Their two-tier plans include the Pro and Business plan, which offers unlimited projects and more manager seats (3 and 5, respectively).

🏆 Bottom line: SE Ranking is an impressive SEO tool that showcases that it can grow even in a saturated market. The pricing is just right and hence offers excellent value for money.

SpyFu

SpyFu is a well-known SEO tool. It offers extensive features, including keyword research, deep PCC/CPC analysis capability, and interactive reporting. You can also track backlinks. SpyFu is ideal for digital marketers, advertisers, and small to medium-scale businesses.

Majestic

Majestic is known for its web crawling capabilities. Due to continuous indexing, It offers an impressive historical index. Continuous indexing also means you get a fresh index, finding trends faster.

This makes Majestic the right Ahrefs alternative if you use it for backlink features.

Some of the Majestic key features include Site Explorer, Topics Report, referring Domains, majestic’s Backlinks Report, and Content Explorer.

Keywordtool.io

Keywordtool.io offers excellent keyword research capabilities, especially if you want long-tail keyword suggestions. It is reliable and offers good suggestions as it relies on Google autocomplete to generate relevant long-term keywords.

It also refines the result in a clean, readable format where you can see keyword data across high-volume sites like Amazon, YouTube, and Google.

However, it is expensive for what it does and also lacks any free trial. Its competitive analysis feature could be stronger.

Lowfruits

Lowfruits is an excellent Ahrefs choice if you’re looking for low-competitive keywords with credit-based pricing.

So, if you’re someone who wants to do competitive analysis, then Lowfruit is a good choice as it offers bulk SERP analyzer.

Additionally, it also offers wildcard keyword research feature that let you refine your keyword research.

Just like keywordtool.io, LowFruits also depends on Google as it fetches the relevant results to you. All these make LowFruits a perfect pick for advanced SEO specialists and small business owners.

Lowfruits make it easy to do searches. Its reports are also well-organized and easy to understand. The pricing is decent as it offers different options.

Keyword Chef

Keyword Chef makes it easy to find interesting ideas and suggestions from keywords. It was founded by Ben Alder in 2021.

On the feature side, it has a simple interface for discovering keywords and checking out generated reports. With wildcard keyword search, you can find low-competitive keywords better than your competition.

You need to follow a few steps to search for keywords, including choosing the geo-location, setting the keyword category(How-to, Wildcards, Questions), and then entering the keyword term(s).

It’s other features include,

• How-to category: Finds keywords starting with “How-To”
• Wildcard category: Aids in brainstorming new creative ideas
• Best category: Delivers results starting with “best”
• Compare category: Provides ideas for comparisons
• Question category: Operates similarly to the How-to category but with a broader scope
• Bulk SERP checker: Enables users to check and analyze top SERP results in bulk
• Powerful filters: Allow for fine-tuning of search queries

Keyword Surfer

Keyword Surfer is part of SurferSEO’s toolset. You can access it via the free Chrome extension. Once installed, it highlights important data about searches you perform on Google. It displays similar and relevant keywords and vital SERP metrics, including volume, number of words written in articles, and similarity.

Raven Tools

Raven Tools focuses on technical SEO for your site. It offers key features such as site auditor, competitor research, backlinks explorer, and keyword research. You can also track keywords and use its semantic analyzer (powered by IBM Watson technology) to analyze competitor sites for semantic information.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo aids your SEO effort with data-backed content research. The cloud-based content research tool helps teams to increase traffic to their content. BuzzSumo has indexed 8 billion pages at the time of writing, helping more than 300 million users reach their audience.

BuzzSumo’s key features include idea generation, influencer discovery, and content research.

WebCEO

WebCEO is a collection of digital and SEO marketing tools. Here, you get access to 23 pro-level software tools, including audit tools, backlinks tools, competitor research tools, and so on. It is primarily aimed at agencies and SEO teams serving multiple clients simultaneously.

Moz Pro

Moz Pro is a popular SEO suite offering access to features such as keyword explorer, SEO crawling, link explorer, and Moz Local. Moz’s free Chrome extension, MozBar, enables you to instantly understand SERP results with access to crucial SERP metrics. Overall, Moz Pro is a top-notch SEO tool that provides a deep SEO tool suite.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is Google’s free keyword tool. It helps SEO teams, freelancers, and agencies to discover new keywords. As Google’s tool, it offers accurate SERP metrics, including estimated search volume. Google Keyword Planner is also easy to use and is an excellent tool in anyone’s SEO toolkit.

Wrap Up

The SEO tool marketplace is overcrowded, with top tools such as Ahrefs, Serpstat, and Semrush capturing the most user attention.

However, Ahrefs is not your only option.

All these tools give you a clear alternative, and you can pick the one that fits your needs.

If you want a cheaper yet feature-rich, look at Semrush, Serpstat, and Ubersuggest. Each has a different price point, and your final choice depends on your budget.