Are you looking for the best yet affordable Semrush alternatives?

Then you are in the right place.

Today in this post, we are going to review the best free and paid SEMRush alternatives.

Semrush is an all in one SEO tool that comes with a lot of useful features. After raising $40m in early 2018, it has launched new features. You can check out my SEMRush review to explore more on this.

But to be honest, it is not for everyone. When it comes to price, it is high compared to some other SEO tools in the market.

After carefully researching, we have prepared this list of Semrush alternatives by keeping all the aspects in mind.

Top 10 Semrush Alternatives (Editor’s Picks)

	Product	Starting price	Features	Explore
1	Serpstat	$69/mo	Positions tracking Backlink analysis Keyword research Site audit	Get Serpstat
2	Ahrefs	$99/mo	Competitive analysis Keyword research Backlink research Content research	Get Ahrefs
3	SEO Powersuite	$299 lifetime access	Rank monitoring Link analysis Keyword research Content optimization	Get SEO Powersuite
4	SpyFu	$39/mo	Domain comparison Adword templates Ad history Domain reports	Get SpyFu
5	Moz	$99/mo	Backlink research Rank tracking SEO toolbar Domain analysis	Get Moz
6	Majestic	$49.99/mo	Site explorer Backlink checker Domain compariso tool Link profile fight	Get Majestic
7	Raven Tools	$79/mo	Site auditor Backlink analysis Rank tracking Rank tracking	Get Raven Tools
8	Ubersuggest	$12/mo	Backlink overview Competitive analysis Advanced link filtering	Get Ubersuggest
9	KWFinder	$49/mo	Keyword difficulty tool Competitor keyword research tool Local keyword research tool	Get KWFinder
10	Monitor backlinks	$25/mo	Backlink analysis Keyword research Competitor research	Get Monitor backlinks

Serpstat

Serpstat is one of the best alternatives for Semrush. This is a growth hacking tool for SEO agencies, PPC, and content marketers.

It comes with keyword research, competitor spying, backlink analysis, and also SERP analysis.

Serpstat has the biggest database of 3.5 billion keywords in its Google USA database. Also, it has over 5.34 billion keywords around 230 Google databases across the countries around the globe.

It comes with dozens of features like:

As a keyword research tool, it displays several metrics like volume, competition, keyword difficulty, CPC similar to SEMRush.

When compared to Semrush and Ahrefs, the number of organic keywords relative to seed keyword that Serpstat displays are comparatively less. It means that its database is not as huge as Semrush.

But nevertheless, it is a great budget-friendly alternative to Semrush.

Serpstat also offers a free plugin to analyze the website quickly. With just a single click you will get complete SEO analysis like page analysis, domain analysis, and on-page SEO analysis.

Serpstat offers a free trial with limited features. But it is sufficient to get to know about this tool. As a paid tool Serpstat comes with four plans. The first is the lite plan costs $69/mo provides 4000 queries per day and 10,000 results per report. This plan doesn’t come with team management and branded reports functionalities.

Whereas Semrush costs $119.95/mo. But with this, you can only analyze 3000 reports per day with 10,000 Analytic results per report.

Thus Serpstat wins over SEMRush when it comes to pricing.

Their standard plan costs 149/mo. It comes with 5,000 queries per day and 30,000 results per report.

Higher plans like advanced and enterprise plans cost $299/mo and $499/mo respectively.

White-label options are available with only an enterprise plan similar to Semrush.

Features	Lite	Standard	Advanced	Enterprise
Pricing	$69/mo	$149/mo	$299/mo	$499/mo
Queries per day	4000	5000	8000	12000
Results per report	10000	30000	50000	75000
White-label reports	No	No	No	Yes
Branded reports	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Number of domains to track	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Team management	Not possible	3 users	5 users	7 users

All of these plans provide access to 230 Google and 9 Yandex databases.

Pros:

• Has on-site auditing
• Affordable pricing
• Email alerts for position changes
• SEO site audits are customizable
• Offers free trial
• Special features like missing keywords & keyword clustering

Cons:

• No integration with Google Search Console or Google Analytics
• Filtering options are not possible with backlink analysis

Bottomline: If you have a small business, SEO agency, or if you are just a newbie blogger then Serpstat is good to get started. It is a cheap alternative to SEMRush with no extra added features like social media posters, brand mentions, etc.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools with the largest backlink database next to Semrush.

Next to Google, Ahrefs’ crawler is the second most active crawler on the web.

Every day it crawls around 5 billion pages and 170 million root domains. Its keyword database is also huge with access to 10 search engines.

Ahrefs comes with tools like:

1. Site explorer
2. Content explorer
3. Keywords explorer
4. Backlink analyzer
5. Rank tracker
6. Site audit
7. Alerts
8. Seo toolbar

With these tools, you will get a handful of features like

With its keyword research tool, you can get the data for these search engines

1. Google
2. YouTube
3. Amazon
4. Bing
5. Yahoo
6. Yandex
7. Baidu

Ahrefs also comes with an SEO toolbar for Chrome and Firefox. It pulls the data from Ahrefs. With this toolbar, you can analyze both page-level and domain-level stats along with SERPs. This tool is similar to the SEOQuake toolbar from Semrush.

This is very helpful for a quick analysis of the SERPs for keyword competition analysis.

Ahrefs and SEMRush are quite similar when it comes to the features they offer. But when it comes to exhaustive backlink database and SEO related features, Ahrefs is the winner for me.

Along with SEO, if you need a complete digital marketing toolkit with features like PPC, social media posters, brand mentions, and others then SEMRush is the way to go.

I’ve reviewed Ahrefs previously. You can check out my Ahrefs review to understand the tool completely.

Pricing:

It offers 7 days free trial just for $7. It’s more than enough to get started. The trial gives access to all the features.

Ahrefs comes with four pricing plans.

The first is the lite plan starts at $99 but is limited to just 1 user. This plan is enough to get started. But the features are limited. The downside with this plan is that you can’t access their historical and recent indexes.

This pricing is almost similar to SEMRush.

Second is the standard plan costs $179 providing access up to 1 user.

Plans	Lite	Standard	Advanced	Agency
Monthly pricing	$99	$179	$399	$999
Users	1	1	3	5
Broken pages	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Number of projects for site auditing	1	10	25	100
Allowed keywords for tracking	500	1500	5000	10000
Mobile ranking	No	No	Yes	Yes
Domains per day	25	100	250	1000
Access to a historic and recent index	No	Yes	Yes	Yes

You are free to upgrade/downgrade/cancel these plans at any time.

Pros:

• Easy to use
• User-friendly
• Powerful filtering options for all the tools
• Easy to analyze SERP features
• Detailed metrics
• Largest backlink database
• Suggests parent topic for the keywords

Cons:

• Pricey
• Lacks an outreach tool
• With the first plan, features are very limited making it not worth to buy
• The relevancy score is not available for keyword suggestions
• It doesn’t integrate with Google Analytics or Search Console
• Traffic stats are not as detailed as other tools

Bottomline:

Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool that replaces Semrush. Ahrefs is a great tool for bloggers and SEO agencies who want to speed up the execution of their SEO strategies.

But if you are on a budget, this is not for you. Because the lowest plan is not worth it, if you have more than 3-4 sites to manage. To access all of its features you need to go with their advanced plan.

SEO Powersuite

It is the best desktop SEO application available for Mac or Windows.

The best thing about this tool is it pulls the search results from local regions hence benefiting local SEOs. Also, it has its own server-side keyword analysis database.

It comes with tools like:

SEO Spyglass:

1. This tool comes with features like inlink score, penalty score, and also backlink traffic to determine the quality of backlinks.
2. You can also get the reports for backlink analysis, domain comparison, and others. You have the ability to compare your domain with 5 of your competitors.
3. With its link intersection feature, you can analyze the backlink of upto 5 sites at once, get the reports of penalty links, and analyze the link with 50+ quality metrics. It also lets you run automated link checks on autopilot.
4. Its bulk analysis feature is great to scale up link building, you can analyze up to 200 domains.
5. Unlike SEMRush or Ahrefs, Spyglass comes with inbuilt email templates and an inbuilt browser for prospection. This is really a great feature.

• Link Assistant:

It is the best tool you can use for link building. It pulls the email addresses of prospects. With this tool, you have the ability to outreach prospects right inside the dashboard.

If you want a huge list of prospects you can go with its “look for prospects” feature. You can find the prospects separately for guest posting, commenting, forums, and directories.

To validate these links it gives you several metrics like social shares, domain inlink score (how trustworthy a prospect is), and domain age.

You can also track your progress and generate link building reports.

Pros:

• Freemium tool with a generous free plan
• It has unique TF-IDF tools and semantic features
• Compared to cloud apps it costs less
• Tag-based tracking is possible
• Track geo-specific rankings
• Comes with safety search settings
• One-time fee

Cons:

• The database is not as huge as SEMRush or Ahrefs, but quite decent for the price
• Consumes too much memory hence slows down your PC depending upon your specs
• SEO Powersuite comes with unexpected algo update subscription without which
• some crucial features will be restricted.

Pricing:

SEO Powersuite offers a generous forever free plan with access to unlimited domains and keywords.

With a free plan, you can manage all the SEO activities, but you don’t have the ability to save projects. The good thing is that you can track unlimited keywords and websites, export the reports, and also integrate with external sources like Google Analytics and Adwords.

If you want to access all of their features you need to go with the enterprise plan that costs $699. It is ideal for professional SEOs and agencies.

Features	Free plan	Professional	Enterprise
Lifetime price	$0	$299	$699
Data access	Unlimited sites and keywords, SEO with volume restrictions	Unlimited sites and keywords, SEO with unlimited data	Unlimited sites and keywords, SEO with unlimited data
Schedule tasks to run on autopilot	NO	Yes	Yes
Exporting data	No	No	Yes
White labeling	No	No	yes
Saving and delivering the client reports	No	No	Yes

Bottomline: SEO Powersuite is significantly cheaper than Ahrefs and Semrush but lags behind other tools when it comes to data and speed. Nevertheless, it is a perfect tool for SEO agencies and serious budget bloggers.

SpyFu

SpyFu is the most comprehensive SEO tool but not a complete alternative to Semrush. But this is the best SEO tool you can use for keyword research.

It has an index of up to 7 billion results across 96 million domains.

SpyFu comes with tools like:

1. SEO research
2. PPC research
3. Keyword research
4. Backlink checker
5. Rank tracker

With these tools you will get features like:

• Domain comparison
• Adword templates
• Ad history
• Domain reports
• SERP checker
• Influencer marketing

What I really liked about this is it displays the data in the form of a Venn diagram with its Kombat feature. So it is easy to analyze the data.

Its keyword grouping is almost similar to Semrush, but keyword filtering is not as powerful as SEMRush.

When it comes to backlink analysis, its backlink reports are not as detailed as SEMRush or Ahrefs.

One downside with this tool is that unlike Semrush, you cannot do PLA research, display advertising, and video advertising research.

One great thing is that SpyFu has recently introduced the Adwords template. SpyFu users can download the template on their blog and are free to upload them on their Adwords account.

It offers a unique “Business leads” feature which you cannot find in most of the SEO tools. With this, you can easily get the contact details of the people in your niche. This will be great for outreaching purposes.

Pricing:

SpyFu’s basic plan starts at $39/mo while Semrush costs $119.95/mo.

Unlike other tools like Semrush or Ahrefs, all of its plans come with an unlimited domain search, keyword research, keyword grouping, backlink analysis, and competitor/domain comparisons along with unlimited data export.

For its cheaper price, the functionalities this tool provides are great.

If you don’t like the tool, you will get money back within 30 days.

Pros:

• A powerful set of keyword research tools
• Unlimited domain overview PDFs
• 30 days money back
• Easy to navigate interface with good UI
• Access to unlimited data and reports

Cons:

• Limited crawlability
• The database is limited to U.S and U.K

Bottomline: It is the best bet for companies ranging from small businesses to mid-size and newbie bloggers to get started.

Moz

It is a powerful SEO tool with keyword research and backlink analysis. But it is a quite-outdated tool. Considering the popularity of the brand, if they consider diverting some of their content marketing capital to the development of the tool, it’ll be very awesome.

Moz provides a 30 days free trial to decide whether you need to buy it or not.

It comes with SEO tools like:

1. Keyword research
2. SEO audit & crawl
3. Backlink research
4. Rank tracking
5. SEO toolbar
6. Domain analysis

Its keyword research tool displays the data by considering 170 Google search engines. With this, you have the ability to sort the data by various keyword metrics.

Backlinks data provided by Moz is quite poor when compared with Semrush or Ahrefs. They recently rolled out a big update to their link database and also their flagship metric Domain Authority, which led to some improvements in the size of the backlinks database.

One biggest downside is that the Moz while displaying the backlinks will not show the page title. You need to dig in to explore the page title. In this regard, Ahrefs does the job well of displaying all the relevant metrics to easily allow you to determine the quality, relevancy and overall effectiveness of the backlinks.

Also, you cannot filter the backlinks by DA or PA in Moz. This is quite a major downside as it’ll be hard for you to determine the quality of the backlinks.

But its spam analysis feature is quite useful to identify the toxic backlinks.

Moz also has its link opportunities feature. This feature is quite unique in Moz. It provides reclaim links, unlinked mentions, and link intersect features.

To analyze the page on site it provides Mozbar that comes with metrics like DA and PA.

The rank tracker tool of Moz is similar to SEMRush or SpyFu. But it lacks most of the features and also it doesn’t show any graphs.

I have compared these tools, Semrush vs SpyFu vs Moz vs Serpstat previously. You can refer to the guide for further help in your buying decision.

If you are very serious about link building then Moz may not be for you. It’s not worth the price. It lacks most of the important features that its competitor tools come with.

Thus it is better to avoid Moz and look at its alternatives.

Pricing:

Its standard plan costs $99/mo. With this, you will get only 150 queries/month. This plan lacks most of the features and is not worth the price. If you need to access all of its features, you need to go with higher plans.

Features	Standard	Medium	Large	Premium
Price	$99/mo	$179/mo	$249/mo	$599/mo
Campaigns	5	10	25	50
Keyword rankings	300	900	1900	4500
Keyword lists	0	30	60	100
Branded reports	No	Yes	Yes	Yes

When compared to the best-in-class SEO tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs, the features and the data Moz is providing are really limited. I personally think that this tool is overpriced.

Pros

• Accuracy is great and reliable
• Full control of the site’s SEO
• Ability to check the spam score of backlinks
• Has provided Moz bar to get the metrics quickly

Cons:

• Not worth the price
• The tool lacks most of the features
• Rank tracker is not powerful and won’t display any graphs
• Displays the backlinks without the page title
• Costs more

Bottomline: If you want to take your business to the next level then Moz is not for you. I don’t recommend using this tool for everyone.

But its site audit reports feature is quite great and may be beneficial for SEO agencies.

Majestic

Majestic is a web-based application and is not an all in one SEO tool. But it masters when it comes to backlink analysis.

The biggest strength Majestic comes with is the backlinks.

Its backlink profile is more detailed than SEMRush. It displays visual reports and analytics with a strong backlink profile. It displays various metrics including citation flow and trust flow.

To analyze the site instantly it provides several extensions for Chrome and Firefox.

Majestic comes with two indexes: fresh and historic index.

The fresh index keeps the data upto date with the last 120 days. It includes lost and new links in that period. With a historic index, the database will be having up to last 5 years of data.

Majestic comes with tools like:

1. Site explorer – This is the main tool of Majestic. It displays metrics like citation flow, trust flow, and topical trust flow.
2. Bulk backlink checker – You can enter upto 400 URLs and get the information quickly
3. Domain comparison tool – You can compare up to 10 domains side by side. It displays the data in graphs. The site with the highest score is marked darker in the graph
4. Link profile fight – It displays the graph of citation flow vs trust flow
5. Clique hunter – It is a great tool to explore link building opportunities. It provides filtering options also.

By providing 10 URLs as inputs you can find sites that are backlinking to more than 1 competitor. This feature is similar to the link intersect in Moz pro and Ahrefs. But it is available only for pro users.

1. Search explorer – It is the Majestic’s search engine. It displays the results based on the occurrence of the target keyword in the title and URL. But it won’t replace Google.
2. Neighborhood checker – It gives a list of the sites hosted on the same IP or subnet. The backlinks coming from the same IP address are not as valuable as links coming from different subnets.

Except for site explorer, all the tools are multiple backlink comparison tools.

There is no free plan or free trial available. With its free account, you can just preview its limited functionalities and tools.

Majestic’s lowest plan is the lite plan costs $49.99/mo while pro plan costs $99.99/mo. Both these plans are limited for a single user.

If you need access to search explorer, keyword checker, email alerts, and clique hunter then you should go with their pro plan.

The last is the API plan costs $399.99/mo and is perfect for data-hungry agencies and developers who need access to its API.

When compared to SEMRush, the price is quite cheap for the features this tool is offering. But if you want to access all of its features you need a pro plan.

Pros:

• It is one of the most extensive SEO web crawlers that has great backlink database
• Handles bulk requests very well and particularly popular for its API
• Strong backlink profile
• Indexing rate is fast and fresh
• It displays government and educational backlinks separately. These are the backlinks with more weight
• Reports the backlink profile in easy to analyze graphs

Cons:

• Not all in one SEO tool
• UI is not good
• No integration with Google Analytics on onpage SEO

Bottomline: If you are not on a budget, then Majestic SEO combined with other SEO tools would be great to get started. Majestic alone won’t do your job.

Raven Tools

It is an SEO software with features like SEO audit, rank tracking and marketing reports.

It comes with tools like:

Raven tools also come with plenty of features like:

• Social media management and reporting
• Data integrations
• Content management
• On-demand keyword tracking
• Historical data storage
• Task manager
• Automated client reports
• Customized dashboard

Pros:

• Affordable pricing
• Great features for the price
• Gives around 45+ features
• All the plans come with unlimited data

Cons:

• The interface is not good
• Doesn’t come with an outreach tool
• Costs more

Pricing:

It provides a 7 days free trial to get started. The first is the “start” plan that costs $79/mo with 4 user access. Next is the “grow” plan, which costs $139/mo. Compared to Semrush it is quite cheap.

The good thing is that it provides almost all the required features for the price. But except for competitor and keyword research, there is a restriction for accessing the data and it varies depending on the plans.

Features	Start	Grow	Thrive	Lead
Pricing	$79/mo	$139/mo	$249/mo	$399/mo
Client reports	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimite	Unlimited
Backlinks	40 reports	60 reports	80 reports	100 reports
Customizable dashboard	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Competitor and keyword research	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
SERP Tracker – Monthly Trackable Keywords	15,000	20,000	25,000	30,000

Bottomline: It is a perfect SEO tool for SEO agencies and for serious bloggers.

Ubersuggest

This is the best free SEO tool by Neil Patel but not a complete alternative to SEMRush.

You don’t need to register or sign in to use this.

It comes with SEO tools like:

1. SEO analysis
2. SEO checker
3. SEO audit report
4. Backlink checker

Its backlinking tool comes with:

• Backlink overview
• Competitive analysis
• Advanced link filtering

It is an awesome tool that offers several metrics like search volume, CPC, and SEO difficulty for free. It also suggests long-tail keywords.

Ubersuggest also pulls in cost per click (CPC) and difficulty numbers from AdWords.

Pros:

• Free tool
• Suggests long-tail keywords
• Easy to use
• Provides real-time keyword suggestions
• No need to login

Cons:

• Not an all-in-one SEO platform
• Limited searches
• Lacks most of the features
• Displays limited metrics
• Data is not highly reliable

Bottomline: As it is not an all-in-one platform you obviously need to go with other tools. But as it is a free tool it can be useful for newbie bloggers. But to grow your business you need to go with paid SEO tools.

KWFinder

KWFinder is a simple and easy to use keyword research tool offered by Mangools. It is the best affordable keyword research tool to find the low SEO difficulty long-tail keywords.

Its keyword database is not as huge as Semrush and is not a replacement for SEMRush.

It comes with tools like:

1. Keyword difficulty tool
2. Competitor keyword research tool
3. Local keyword research tool

This tool provides several metrics like:

1. Search volume
2. PPC
3. CPC
4. Keyword difficulty
5. Domain authority
6. Page authority
7. Moz rank
8. Facebook shares
9. Link profile strength of the URL

You can find highly profitable long-tail keywords by applying the “results filter”. This is very helpful to target the low hanging fruits.

With KWFinder you will get the search volume with historic data in trends. This will be very helpful if you are targeting seasonal keywords.

The good thing is that if you are into local SEO, this tool provides you location-specific long-tail keywords. You can find the keywords targeting ~50k locations.

Pricing:

It provides three plans: Basic, premium, and agency.

Features	Basic	Premium	Agency
Pricing	$49/mo	$69/mo	$129/mo
Keyword lookups / 24 h	200 of 700	700 of 700	700 of 700
Competitor keywords/search	25	Unlimited	Unlimited
SERP lookups / 24 h	100	500	1200
Backlink rows / 24 h	2,000	7,000	15,000
Simultaneous logins	No	3	10

If you are not satisfied with this tool you will get 48-hour money back.

Pros and cons:

Pros:

• Cheapest keyword research tool
• Accurate data reporting
• Provides long-tail keywords

Cons:

• Low limits for keyword suggestions.
• No integration with Google Analytics or Search Console.
• Keyword reports are not as powerful as SEMRush or Ahrefs

Bottomline: It is a powerful tool to find the easy to rank and profitable keywords. Best for bloggers and SEO consultants who are on a budget.

Monitor backlinks

It is one of the best easy to use SEO monitoring tools to spy on your competitors.

This tool allows you to do backlink building and rank tracking.

It pulls the backlink data from Moz and Majestic.

It comes with tools like:

1. Backlink analysis
2. Keyword research
3. Competitor research
4. Reports
5. Disavow tool

This tool helps you recover the lost backlinks by letting you know immediately when the prospect sites removed your links. It also informs you when you get new backlinks. So it will be easy for you to build relations with your influencers.

It displays all the metrics like Alexa rank, Moz rank, DA, CF and TF, speed, and spam score at one place thus making the analysis pretty easy.

Its disavow tool is very helpful to fight against negative SEO. It makes your job easier in removing all the spam links by providing appropriate filters and gives you a disavow list for submission to Google.

If you are doing local SEO, this tool comes with the local pack to skyrocket your business.

Its email alerts and reports features save your time. You can track these reports without logging in.

Some of the reports it generates are:

1. Traffic overview of the last week
2. Keyword changes in Google
3. New vs lost links
4. Dofollow vs nofollow backlinks
5. Backlinks indexed by Google vs not indexed
6. Changes in Alexa rank and page rank
7. Organic traffic comparisons with last week

Pricing:

Pricing varies depending on the number of domains you manage.

This tool offers a 30 days free trial to get started.

Compared to other SEO tools the features this tool is offering are less.

Domain	Plan	Price	Features
1 monitored domain	Start	$25/mo	2 competitors/domain 2,500 links 50 keywords 10 on-demand credits
2 monitored domains	Plus	$49.90/mo	4 competitors/domain 12,500 links 200 keywords 20 on-demand credits
3 monitored domains	Professional	$99.90/mo	4 competitors/domain 25,000 links 400 keywords 40 on-demand credits
4 monitored domains	5D4C	$124.90/mo	4 competitors/domain 31,250 links 500 keywords 50 on-demand credits

All the plans come with:

1. Automatic verification
2. Email alerts
3. Backlink management
4. In-depth reports
5. Bulk link import
6. Link disavowal

For SEO agencies and bloggers handling multiple websites, this tool is not worth buying as they need to pay on a per-domain basis.

Pros:

• Ease of use
• Tag-based tracking
• Free trial
• Local SEO

Cons:

• Pricey
• Need higher plans for multiple site owners
• Not good for SEO agencies
• Not feature-rich

Bottomline: Monitor Backlinks is a good SEO tool for beginner bloggers who own a single site. But it is not a complete replacement to SEMRush. Hence I won’t advise this tool for serious bloggers and entrepreneurs.

Conclusion

SEMRush is not for everyone. There are many SEO tools that can partially replace SEMRush. Choose the one based on your requirements.

According to me, Ahrefs is by far the best alternative to Semrush. But if you consider Semrush or Ahrefs to be expensive, you can also opt for SERPstat. It comes with all the essential features required for an individual blogger and also for small agencies.

Hope you guys found this post on SEMRush alternatives helpful.

If I have missed out any tools that you think deserve to be in this list, let me know them in the comment section below.