Home / SEO Tools Cost Calculator / Start here
With so many SEO tools out there, how do you pick the one to pay for?
Summary
Pick by the job you repeat every week, not by the brand. If all you need is to see how your own site performs in Google, Search Console is free and covers it. Broad suites that handle competitor research, backlinks, rank tracking and audits start at $129 a month for Ahrefs Lite and SE Ranking Core and $139 for Semrush's SEO plan, billed monthly. Tools built for a single job cost far less: Screaming Frog is $279 per user per year for technical crawling, and Surfer's Discovery plan is $49 a month, billed yearly, for content work.
One subscription for most of the work
Three suites dominate this price band, and their entry plans differ more than the prices suggest.
Semrush's SEO plan costs $139 a month, or $117.33 a month billed annually. It covers five websites and 500 keywords tracked daily.
Ahrefs Lite costs $129 a month with one user included. Rank Tracker holds 750 keywords, but Ahrefs refreshes rankings weekly on every plan, Lite included. Site Audit gets 100,000 crawl credits a month. There is no limit on sites you have verified as your own; the five-project cap applies to unverified sites, which in practice means competitors.
SE Ranking Core costs $129 a month, or $103.20 a month billed annually, and tracks 2,000 keywords daily across 10 projects with one manager seat.
If you care about day-to-day rank movement, the weekly refresh on Ahrefs matters more than the $10 gap with Semrush.
A second user reshuffles the order
The prices above assume one person. Add a colleague on monthly billing, using the lowest add-on price each vendor shows, and the totals look like this:
| Plan | Base | Second user | Two people |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 | $40 | $169 |
| SE Ranking Core | $129 | from $16 | from $145 |
| Semrush SEO | $139 | from $45 | from $184 |
Ahrefs Starter can't add users at all, so a two-person team sharing Ahrefs starts at Lite.
Cheaper ways into competitor research
Ahrefs Starter is $29 a month and renews monthly only. It comes with 200 credits a month and access to Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, Site Audit and Rank Tracker. SpyFu Basic is $39 a month, or $29 a month on an annual plan, with one seat and 5,000 keyword rankings tracked weekly.
Tools that do one job
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a crawler you download and run on Windows, macOS or Linux. The free version stops at 500 URLs per crawl. A $279 annual license per user lifts that cap, after which the ceiling is your computer's memory and storage.
Surfer is for writing and optimizing pages. Its Discovery plan, $49 a month billed yearly, includes 120 documents, 10 tracked pages and one seat.
Every figure here comes from the vendors' pricing pages and public documentation. Nothing in this comparison is based on hands-on testing, and there are no star ratings.
Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.
Sources
- https://www.semrush.com/pricing/seo-ai-search/
- https://ahrefs.com/pricing
- https://ahrefs.com/blog/starter-plan/
- https://seranking.com/subscription.html
- https://www.spyfu.com/pricing
- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/pricing/?wmc-currency=USD
- https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
- https://surferseo.com/pricing/
- https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7576553?hl=en
Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.