Ahrefs Pricing Worrying You? Use These 11 Better Alternatives

Intro

Ahrefs is a toolset that you can use to boost the effectiveness and efficiency of your SEO and link-building efforts. It’s no secret that many SEO experts trust and love Ahrefs. However, recently Ahrefs moved to a more expensive credit system, raised prices, and also canceled the accounts of people who were on the old pricing plan. These changes have inevitably made people look for more economic alternatives.

This article aims to provide information about some fantastic alternatives. Some of these SEO automation tools offer features very similar to Ahrefs, maybe even with much higher limits at the same price or a lower cost. There are even tools with more capabilities. For example, DataForSEO has an API feature and can be used for a lot of scraping of Google search and Google Maps, and is cheaper than Ahrefs.

Let’s take a brief look at the best features and characteristics of Ahrefs so that you know what the other tools are up against. Rather than viewing this as a list of the beneficial features and tools of Ahrefs, look at it as a list of functions or criteria for the selection of other tools:

• Site Explorer tool from Ahrefs is useful for analyzing the backlink profiles of your competitors.

• Keyword Explorer helps identify relevant keywords and their competitiveness. It offers insights into factors such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and click-through rates.

• Site Audit tool provides insights into SEO issues that might be affecting the performance of a website and preventing it from ranking high on the SERPs. It helps learn about the technical and on-page issues

• Content Explorer tool can help discover top-performing content and trends.

• The Rank Tracker tool helps monitor desktop and mobile rankings, charts performance against competitors and provides inbox reports.

• Alerts provide timely information about changes in backlinks and keyword rankings as well as new web mentions.

• Ahrefs offers visual representation in the form of charts and allows the export of data for further analysis.

The alternative tool doesn’t necessarily need to have all these features. Various tools perform different types of functions and no tool will do absolutely everything. Select the SEO tool that ticks most of the boxes of the features that you need. If you need extra features, you can use the most suitable tool in a cost-effective combination with others.

It’s time to shine the spotlight on some worthy contenders. Here are some alternatives that you need to check out:

Ranktracker

Ranktracker is useful for tracking chosen keywords and your SEO progress. It is an excellent alternative to Ahrefs’ Portfolios feature. A very advantageous point of RankTracker is that it has a very small learning curve. It’s remarkably user-friendly and makes tracking ranking data seem like a breeze even to novices. Moreover, it shows data from mobile, desktop, and different search engines.

With excellent analysis tools and insights, Ranktracker makes it easy to understand how different factors are affecting a site’s ranks over time. You can also use RankTracker to conduct an in-depth website audit for SEO errors, check the backlinks of your competitors, and monitor your backlinks.

RankTracker does not cost an arm and a leg like other platforms offering similar features. The price for the starter plan is 24 dollars per month (even less than that if the yearly amount is paid as a lump sum), and there’s also a free trial. With regular updates to the plugin, the RankTracker team ensures that it remains one of the most accurate rank-tracking tools in the market.

Semrush

Semrush is one of the biggest players in the market. In the realm of digital marketing, it is probably the toughest competitor for Ahref. Semrush offers almost the same features as Ahrefs and also has a lot of additional features that Ahrefs does not have.

While pricing is similar as well, Semrush doesn’t restrict usage via credits and allows more exports than Ahrefs. On the whole, Semrush is as accurate as Ahrefs, and therefore a notable contender.

At the time of writing (Dec 2023), Ahrefs has a keyword database of 19.8 billion keywords versus Semrush’s 20.8 billion keywords. However, Ahrefs has compiled those keywords from 10 search engines, as opposed to Semrush which focuses on Google.

Semrush also has 2 different APIs which you can select from.

• Standard API - is $50 per 1M API units and you require a Semrush Business level subscription to quality for that.
• Traffic Analytics API - The minimum cost to access the TA API is $625 per month, but you can purchase this along with any plan.

The TA API is interesting, and has a significant advantage over the Ahrefs API, in terms of how it analyzes traffic. It doesn’t just simply calculate the organic search traffic but will give you a breakdown, and total traffic number based on - direct, referral, organic search, paid search, organic social, paid social, email, and display advertising. This, in theory, should give you a more holistic view of the traffic profile of a website.

From a link-building standpoint, this may ultimately be a more accurate picture of what you’re looking for, if you’re trying to qualify websites in terms of them meeting certain quality criteria.

SearchAtlas

Although SearchAtlas is a comparatively newer player, it has a lot of features such as content planning, blog idea generation, keyword research, backlink analysis, content optimization, and on-page audit. The Backlink Analyzer tool from Search Atlas is especially powerful, and its competitive analysis tools are also commendable. Search Atlas is cost-effective and currently offers a 7-day free trial, with access to all its tools and features. Subscribers also get access to a library of tutorial videos, and weekly webinars to help them leverage the full potential of the SEO platform.

DataForSEO

DataForSEO offers state-of-the-art API solutions. These have more features than the Ahrefs API while also being comparatively cheaper than Ahrefs. Ahrefs also only gives API to the very top enterprise customers and forces them to take a 2 million API units plan. The pay-as-you-go (pay only for the services you utilize) model of DataForSEO ensures that you get more value for money.

Another advantage of DataforSEO is that there are a lot of additional API options, other than just for backlink analysis or keyword research. They have a very extensive set of API docs which you can see here.

So it can help if you are scraping the SERPs for your prospecting lists, or scraping Google Maps in bulk.

Majestic

If you need to focus on backlink analysis, this is the tool for you. The metrics TF (Trust Flow) and CF (Content Flow) are more reliable than Ahrefs DR (Domain Rating) and great for quality control purposes. Majestic also has TTF (Topical Trust Flow), which can give interesting insights into link strategy as well. The API comes with the top plan, is more cost-effective (available at half the price of Ahrefs), and is less confusing to use.

Majestic can help you spot spammy domains from miles away, and the metrics they use (CF and TF) are a better measure of this compared to the Ahrefs DR metric, which is very easily manipulated. The most unique feature of Majestic is its neighborhood checker, which allows you to check the sites sharing an IP address with you if you’re using shared hosting. This can help you take measures to distance your site from anything that may be inadvertently affecting your search performance.

The Link Graph feature is also really cool and helps when you need to visualize a backlink profile during an audit and find potential sources of unnatural links, or the root cause of a penalty.

UberSuggest

UberSuggest is beginner-friendly while also being a first-rate toolset for experts. It’s great for bulk keyword research, but it also has a ton of other useful features. You can use UberSuggest for rank tracking, competitor analysis, and site audit among other things. It provides daily status updates and alerts about critical issues. UberSuggest is a commendable option for domain-level analysis. Rank Lightning has been hailed as the best local SEO tool for small business owners and freelance SEOs.

With this platform, you’ll get the most bang for the buck. The monthly deals are very budget-friendly but they are also running an inexpensive lifetime deal. With the free trial, you can get a feel of its many SEO features.

KeywordsInsights

Keyword Insights generates keyword ideas and clusters them into topical groups. It’s a great tool for content or keyword research. You can use it to create more effective content or optimize existing content.

Source: Keyword Insights

Keyword Insights can quickly generate fresh blog titles and content briefs based on SERPs and with the help of AI. The SERP similarity tool will show you the overlap between keywords, while SERP explorer will help you view search results from any location without the need for proxy or VPN. Some of these tools are free up to a certain daily limit, while others come under affordable monthly, annual, or pay-as-you-go plans. A 4-day trial is available for $1.

The clustering feature is also particularly useful, and it helps when you have a large set of keywords, which you need to cluster together into groups. Ahrefs doesn’t have this feature at all, and especially with SEO now increasingly moving towards thinking more in terms of “entities” and topical clusters, a tool like this can help with content strategy.

If it’s difficult for you to find the time for all of these types of SEO tasks, consider outsourcing them. This move can improve the efficiency of your SEO efforts. For professional SEO services, opt for SEO Hero.

KeywordKeg

Keyword Keg is great for comprehensive bulk research and extracting data about keywords if you need it. Ahrefs has similar features but they have set limits, and searching anything up to 10,000 keywords (even if it's only 1 keyword) will consume a credit. KeywordKeg is more economical as even the lowest plan allows 100,000 keywords per day.

This helps if you have large sets of keyword lists, and have to gather data on them - without incurring heavy charges.

Mangools

Mangools offers five separate tools for these functions: SERP analysis, competitor analysis, keyword research, rank tracking, backlink analysis, and monitoring key SEO metrics. The month-by-month keyword volumes and the daily updation of the rank tracker are two of the most significant benefits of Mangools.

The metrics of Mangools are an aggregate of multiple metrics from different tools, so this suite of tools is more reliable. Mangools offers four types of pricing plans, with the highest one (Agency Plan - $129) being close to the Lite plan ($99) offered by Ahrefs.

Particularly if you need a replacement for KD - Mangools have their own Keyword Difficulty metric, which is widely thought to be more accurate than the Ahrefs Keyword Difficulty score. The Ahrefs KD metric is entirely based on backlinks, which can be a flawed way of calculating difficulty level. Mangools in comparison, calculates KD using an aggregate of metrics from Moz and Majestic.

SERanking

SERanking is a marvelous SEO and link-building tool. Although it does not have quite as many features as Semrush or Ahrefs, it is very reasonably priced in comparison. It may not be as powerful as Semrush and Ahrefs in its link analysis features, but using this in combo with a lower plan of Semrush should cover most bases.

Optimonk

With user experience coming to the forefront, and it not purely just being about link metrics or volume, you may need to tighten up your UX to improve your conversions. This is where Optimonk can help you. This toolset fills the gap that the Ahrefs’ tools were not able to address.

Optimonk occupies a prominent position among the providers of the best website optimization tools. The Optimonk toolset was designed to make life easier for busy marketers. Using Optimonk, you can align the messaging of your landing pages with your ad campaigns, to boost relevance and conversion rates.

Source: Optimonk

The Smart A/B Testing feature can help you conduct multiple fully automated A/B tests on sections of your web pages simultaneously. With the Smart Product Page Optimizer, you can transform product detail pages into high-converting sales pages. Other beneficial features of Optimonk include detailed marketing analytics and easy integration with other tools.

Let’s Run the Numbers

Let’s get into the costs of these tools - what it would cost you to do this with Ahrefs, versus using a combination of alternatives.

This is based on our own experience of using different tools, and the impact the Ahrefs credit system would have on spend.

(Calculations correct as of Dec 2023)

Option 1 - I.e. no requirement for API usage

Let’s imagine:

• We are an agency or company that is at the level where we are building 100 links a month. And it is a natural split up, of guest posting, resource link outreach/skyscraper.
• SEO tools are primarily used by management and prospectors, let’s assume we have 1 admin (the account owner), and 5 junior people prospecting who each need access.
• Let’s assume the average standard, that we build 100 links with a 2% success rate = 5,000 website targets prospected and outreached to.
• The use of credits is very hard to pin down, as every time you run a batch analysis, use a filter, or click on a feature, it essentially uses 1 credit. By our calculations, once you are at the 100 links per month feature, with the size of the team mentioned, you should expect to use at least 3000 credits between the team. An Ahrefs Advanced plan comes with 750 credits included, already, but this means you need to purchase another 2250 credits (5 packs of 500 credits)

If we use Ahrefs on the current model:

Ahrefs Advanced costs = $399 plus 2 Casual users = $30 * 2 = $60 Plus 3 Power users = $50 * 3 = $150 Plus 5 packs of 500 credits = $35 * 5 = $175

Total monthly cost = $784

If we use Semrush on the current model: Semrush Guru = $250 per month Users = $80/mo per user If assuming 5 additional users = $400

Total monthly cost = $650

Account limits:

• Ahrefs Advanced allows 75,000 rows to be exported per export. Semrush Guru only 30,000 per export. Semrush Business allows 50,000.
• Ahrefs allows 4M export rows per month. Semrush Guru technically allows 150 million export rows per month, so we can safely say it has very high limits when it comes to exports, and there is no drawback of heavy credit costs.

So Semrush wins out here and has the benefit of a lot of additional features if that’s something you find useful.

Option 2 -_ if link analysis is particularly important_

1. Semrush Guru (with 5 users) + Majestic Lite

= $650 + $50

Total monthly cost = $700

2. Semrush Guru (with 5 users) + Majestic Pro

= $650 + $100

Total monthly cost = $750

It’s no secret that many consider Ahrefs to be superior to Semrush when it comes particularly to analyzing links. However, Majestic comes very close and actually beats Ahrefs when it comes to quality analysis. The good news is that they are transparent with account limits and don’t implement a credit system.

( c ) Semrush Guru (with 5 users) + Semrush Trends add-on

= $650 + $200

Total monthly cost = $850

The Trends add-on is really good if you need to qualify your link targets in bulk, and want a very accurate measure of traffic - this will give you the same traffic measure as the Semrush Traffic Analytics API we mentioned earlier.

**Note: **The advantage to this combination of tools, is that at least you know what you’re paying each month, and if you or a senior prospector have to spend a lot of time digging into backlink profiles, analyzing link quality, auditing etc - you don’t have the concern about credit usage.

Heavy API usage options

Option 3

Majestic API + Semrush Guru (with 5 users)

= $400 + $650

Total monthly cost = $1050

If you are going to be having API usage, this is where a combination of Majestic for extracting link metrics and doing analysis, and Semrush for day to day work, comes in.

This comes with 100 million API units, compared to the Ahrefs 2 million API units they give for their $999 Enterprise plan.

Option 4

DataforSEO Add-on

You can take any combination of Semrush and Majestic, but if you want to have a more flexible API plan, that gives you the option to do SERP analysis, backlink analysis, GMaps, etc - then DataforSEO is well worth adding in.

Let’s look at the backlink analysis API. Pricing is as follows:

So let's take the $0.05 per 1000 rows pricepoint.

Since we need a minimal commitment of **$100 a month, **that gives us room for 2,000,000 API rows. This is probably more than enough for our scale.

Combine this with a cheaper plan of Semrush, and you can mix and match with the other tools in this list - this would likely come at a much lower cost than Ahrefs, and you’ll have more flexible tools without the restrictions caused by credits.

Final Thoughts

Choosing one tool over another does not necessarily mean that one is superior to the other. Rather, it’s about choosing those that suit your needs and budget. There are always more economical options with varying capabilities. The features and tasks that you wish to focus on should be your criteria.