The category looks like one market and behaves like four. Deciding which of the four you are in removes most of the shortlist immediately.
The four kinds of tool
All-in-one platforms — Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz Pro, SE Ranking, Serpstat — cover keyword research, rank tracking, audits and links in one subscription, priced from US$49 to US$455 a month at the entry tier.
Desktop crawlers — Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, SEO PowerSuite — run on your machine and audit a site in depth. They are cheaper, they have no monthly data quota, and they only do part of the job.
Specialists — Majestic for links, Advanced Web Ranking for positions, Surfer for content — do one thing at a scale the generalists charge more for.
Plugins — Rank Math and Yoast SEO — control on-page settings inside WordPress and cannot crawl the site from outside.
Check the seat count before the price
Most published prices in this category are one-seat prices. Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz Standard, SE Ranking Core and Serpstat Individual all include a single user. Extra Ahrefs seats are US$40 to US$80 a month depending on the plan, and extra Sitebulb users are £7 a month.
Advanced Web Ranking is the exception worth knowing: every plan includes unlimited users and unlimited projects, and only the keyword count changes.
Work out which quota runs out first
Each vendor meters something different, and the one that runs out first decides your real plan:
- Ahrefs: projects, tracked keywords and crawl credits
- Semrush and Moz: websites, tracked keywords and pages crawled
- Serpstat: searches a day
- Advanced Web Ranking: tracked keywords only
- Majestic: analysis units and rows returned
- Sitebulb: URLs per audit
A daily cap and a monthly cap fail differently. A daily cap stops a research sprint and resets tomorrow; a monthly cap stops the month.
Free editions are real here
Unlike most software categories, several of these tools are genuinely usable for nothing: Screaming Frog to 500 URLs, SEO PowerSuite's perpetual free edition, the free versions of Rank Math and Yoast, Ahrefs' free tier and Majestic's free backlink checker. For a small site, that combination covers a surprising amount of the work.
What we could not verify
Some vendors do not publish figures on the pages we can read. Mangools shows plan names without prices behind a currency switch, and Sitebulb's cloud edition shows "from" with no number. Where that happened we recorded the plan without a price rather than estimating one.
