Pick Ahrefs when your competitive analysis starts from backlinks and organic search, and platform traffic estimates alongside the link index cover your audience questions.
- Starting price
- $29/mo Starter plan (limited: 200 in-app credits/mo, 1 unverified project, 50 tracked keywords, 1 month historical data, no exports, no API-unit allowance, and additional users or credits cannot be purchased on it); the cheapest plan with API v3 access is Lite at $129/mo, which includes 100,000 API units/mo and the full core toolset
- Free option
- Ahrefs Free (Webmaster Tools): free Site Explorer + Site Audit for websites you verify ownership of (1,000 backlinks & keywords visible at once; 5,000 crawl credits/mo per verified project; all 170+ audit issues), Web Analytics up to 1M events/project/mo, Social Media Manager (unlimited while in beta), AI Content Helper (1 document/mo), SEO Toolbar (DR & UR metrics only). Also a free public Domain Rating API endpoint (subject to terms of use) and Firehose, a free real-time web-mentions API; the API's free test queries require a paid plan, not a free account
- The catch
- No per-lookup or standalone API pricing: API v3 access requires at least the $129/mo Lite suite subscription, so light programmatic users pay for a full SEO toolset they may not use