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How do you choose between Semrush and Ahrefs when the entry plans cost about the same?
Summary
Start with how often you need rankings refreshed. Semrush's SEO plan is $139 a month and checks 500 keywords every day, while Ahrefs Lite is $129 and checks 750 keywords once a week. Once you add people or more keywords, the gap widens and sometimes flips, so the cheaper tool depends on the workload you bring to it.
Daily or weekly rankings
Semrush refreshes tracked keywords daily on every plan listed on its pricing page. Ahrefs lists "Weekly" as the update frequency for Rank Tracker on all four plans, from Lite to Enterprise. If you report ranking changes to a client every Monday, weekly is enough. If you want to see what a Google update did to you yesterday, it isn't.
Semrush's annual price for the SEO plan works out to $117.33 a month. Ahrefs says annual billing saves "up to 17%" but does not publish the annual amount.
Three people on one account
Ahrefs Lite includes one user and lets you add two more at $40 each, so a team of three pays $209 a month. Semrush lists extra users "starting at $45/mo," which puts three people on the SEO plan at $229 or more. A fourth person pushes Ahrefs from Lite to Standard, because Lite caps extra users at two.
Lite also limits research to 1,000 credits per user each month. Standard and above remove that cap.
Tracking 1,000 keywords
Neither entry plan covers it. Semrush's SEO and Starter plans stop at 500 daily keywords, so you'd need Pro+ at $299 for 1,500. Ahrefs Lite stops at 750, and Standard at $249 raises that to 2,000, still weekly. Here Ahrefs is $50 cheaper, while Pro+ adds historical data, content optimization, multi-location tracking and 15 monitored websites.
Counting sites
Semrush counts websites you monitor: five on the SEO plan, your own and competitors alike. Ahrefs only counts sites you haven't verified as yours, with five on Lite. Verify your own properties and you can add as many as you like.
Getting data out
Ahrefs publishes row limits by plan. Lite shows up to 2,500 rows per report and exports 500,000 rows a month; Standard moves to 30,000 and 1.5 million. API and MCP access start at Lite, capped at 100 rows per request. Semrush lists MCP access from Starter and API data integration only on Advanced, at $549 a month.
Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.
Sources
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.