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Is one all-in-one SEO suite cheaper than a few specialist tools?
Summary
For one person, a stack of specialists usually comes out cheaper. Screaming Frog, Surfer Discovery and Ahrefs Starter total $1,215 a year, against $1,548 to $1,668 for a suite on monthly billing. Add a second user and the order flips: two of those three tools won't take another person on the entry plan, and the stack climbs to $3,774 a year, more than any of the suites.
The one-person math
- Stack: Screaming Frog $279 per year, Surfer Discovery $588 (billed yearly at $49 a month) and Ahrefs Starter $348 ($29 a month for 12 months). Total $1,215, or $101.25 a month.
- Ahrefs Lite: $129 a month, $1,548 a year.
- SE Ranking Core: $1,548 on monthly billing, or $1,238.40 at the $103.20 annual rate.
- Semrush SEO: $1,668 on monthly billing, or $1,407.96 at $117.33 a month billed annually.
SE Ranking Core on annual billing is only $23.40 a year more than the stack, and it includes 10 projects, 2,000 keywords tracked daily and 250,000 audit pages a month. Ahrefs Starter, by contrast, gives you one unverified project, 50 tracked keywords and 200 credits a month. What the stack has that the suites' plan pages don't list is Surfer's content editor and Screaming Frog's desktop crawler.
Adding a second person
| Tool in the stack | What changes for two users | Yearly cost |
|---|---|---|
| Screaming Frog | Licenses are per user, so buy two | $558 |
| Surfer | Discovery has one seat; Standard has three ($99 a month billed yearly) | $1,188 |
| Ahrefs | Starter can't add users; Lite is $129 plus $40 for the second user | $2,028 |
| Total | $3,774 ($314.50 a month) |
The suites just add a seat. On monthly billing that's $169 a month for Ahrefs Lite, from $145 for SE Ranking Core (extra manager seats start at $16) and from $184 for Semrush SEO (extra users start at $45). Over a year: $2,028, from $1,740, and from $2,208. Even if you keep Surfer Standard ($1,188) next to a suite for the content work, Ahrefs Lite comes to $3,216 and SE Ranking Core to $2,928 and up, both still under the stack. The user pricing guide goes through how each vendor counts seats.
Paying three times to crawl one site
Look closely and the stack pays for crawling three ways. Screaming Frog is a crawler, Ahrefs Starter includes Site Audit, and Ahrefs Free already gives verified sites a Site Audit with 5,000 crawl credits per project per month. Credits are only used on HTML pages that return a 200 status, so a site under 5,000 pages can be crawled in full once a month on the free allowance. Drop Screaming Frog and the one-person stack falls to $936 a year. The SEO tools cost calculator on this site lines up yearly totals by users, projects, tracked keywords and billing basis if your setup differs from these examples.
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.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/pricing/?wmc-currency=USD
- https://surferseo.com/pricing/
- https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/9419051-about-ahrefs-starter-plan
- https://ahrefs.com/pricing
- https://ahrefs.com/free
- https://seranking.com/subscription.html
- https://www.semrush.com/pricing/seo-ai-search/
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.