Ahrefs Alternative: What It Costs to Replace Each Ahrefs Feature

Ahrefs also sells Starter at $29 a month. Its pricing page lists no limits for it, and Ahrefs' September 2024 launch post gave it 200 credits a month. Lite is the baseline here because it is the first plan with published tracked-keyword and crawl-credit limits. Each higher plan adds keywords, crawl credits and history, so start with the limit you hit first.

Enterprise lists at $1,499 a month. Check the Ahrefs pricing page for current plan details before you budget.

Extra users cost $40 a month each on Lite, $60 on Standard and $80 on Advanced. Users you have not prepaid are charged automatically on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Add-ons cost extra on top of the plan. Report Builder costs $99 a month. Traffic Analytics and Content Kit start at $99 a month. Project Boost Pro costs $20 a month per project, and Project Boost Max costs $200 a month per project.

Ahrefs Free works on an unlimited number of sites you own. It uses the same data as the paid plans, with smaller allowances. Competitor sites need a paid subscription.

Only HTML pages that return status 200 use Site Audit credits. After you cancel a paid plan, the account falls back to Ahrefs Free for your own sites.

For comparison, Semrush Free is $0 and includes 1 demo project and 10 reports a day across its vital tools.

Search Console is free and shows only sites you own. It has no competitor data. Its tables and export options set the limits you plan around.

The Links report does not say whether a link is nofollow. It can also list links that have since been removed.

For query-level work beyond the table cap, use the Search Analytics API or the BigQuery export.

Each figure below is the monthly price divided by the tracked keywords on that plan. For example, $129 / 750 = $0.172 for Ahrefs Lite. Every row uses monthly billing. The last row is the monthly rank tracking cost of GrowthVector's own OpenSEO setup: $5.16 / 368 = $0.014.

Ahrefs updates its Rank Tracker weekly on Lite, Standard and Advanced. Semrush and SE Ranking track keywords daily on their entry plans, so the update speed differs as much as the price does.

SE Ranking Core gives the lowest cost per keyword among the 2,000-keyword plans. Growth costs less per keyword at 5,000 keywords, and Ahrefs Advanced is the cheapest Ahrefs option at that size.

• Weekly tracking fits most content sites. Ahrefs Lite does this for 750 keywords.
• Daily tracking needs a plan such as SE Ranking Core (2,000 keywords) or Semrush SEO (500 keywords).
• Moz Pro caps rank checker queries at 200 a day on Standard and Medium, and 500 a day on Large.
• DataForSEO's Google organic SERP API costs from $0.0006 per SERP, with a $50 minimum top-up. Its standard queue costs less but takes longer to return results.
• DataForSEO has no subscriptions, and the balance never expires. You pay only for the requests you run.

Ahrefs Lite exports up to 500,000 rows a month, but one report stops at 2,500 rows. On a large link profile, the report cap runs out first. Standard and Advanced raise the report cap to 30,000 and 75,000 rows.

Mangools caps backlink data at 100,000 a month on Basic, 500,000 on Premium and 1.2 million on Agency, according to its plans page.

The Search Console Links report tables and Ahrefs Free both cap what they show at 1,000 rows. Neither one shows a competitor's backlinks.

Ahrefs says it has the world's largest index of live backlinks, updated every 15 to 30 minutes. The big-data page gives its crawl and index totals.

DataForSEO says its index has billions of live pages and trillions of backlinks. Moz says Moz Pro lets you track trillions of links. Mangools says LinkMiner has 9.5 trillion backlinks to explore.

These claims count different things: records, pages, live backlinks and links to explore. Vendor claims cannot rank the tools, so do not choose a tool on them.

Live mode costs $0.024 per request plus $0.000036 per row returned. The formula gives $0.06 for 1,000 rows. The vendor's calculator shows $0.05 for the same 1,000 rows. Budget with the formula, and confirm the total on your own invoice before a large run.

At $0.06 for a 1,000-row pull, the $129 price of Ahrefs Lite buys about 2,150 pulls (129 / 0.06 = 2,150). That is a budget comparison, not a like-for-like feature comparison.

The Ubersuggest limits above are its lifetime-plan figures. Ubersuggest lists monthly plans from $29 a month (Individual) to $49 (Business) and up to $99; see the Ubersuggest pricing page.

Search Console reports real clicks and impressions for the queries where your own sites appear in results. It does not report search volume or keyword difficulty for other keywords.

Use it to grow a keyword list from your own data, then price the new terms in a paid tool. Search Console does not replace a volume and difficulty tool.

For volume and difficulty data, a pay-per-task API replaces the keyword tool. DataForSEO's standard Google Ads keyword data endpoint costs $0.06 per task of up to 1,000 keywords, and GrowthVector's own run of 5 seed phrases returned 527 keyword ideas for $0.18. The DataForSEO API guide and the keyword research API guide price every endpoint.

Ahrefs Project Boost adds an always-on audit. Boost Pro costs $20 a month per project and audits 10 pages a minute. Boost Max costs $200 a month per project and audits 30 pages a minute.

A site with about 5,000 HTML pages or fewer gets one full audit a month on Ahrefs Free, if you own the site. A 4,000-page site audited weekly would use about 16,000 credits a month (4 audits x 4,000 pages, if each audit crawls every page once). That is above the 5,000 free credits, so the free plan covers one audit a month only.

The Mangools product list (KWFinder, SERPChecker, SERPWatcher, LinkMiner and SiteProfiler) shows no site-audit crawler. It does not replace this part of Ahrefs.

For a free technical audit of any website, the SEO Oracle audit tool on this site has a free plan.

These are list prices from each vendor's pricing page in October 2026. Each price is for monthly billing. Annual billing costs less wherever a vendor offers it.

Semrush Pro+ costs $299 a month for 15 websites and 1,500 keywords tracked daily. Moz Pro Medium costs $179 a month for 10 sites and 1,500 keywords. Moz Pro Large costs $299 a month for 25 sites and 3,000 keywords.

Annual billing lowers the monthly price. Semrush SEO is $117.33 a month billed yearly, Moz Pro Standard is $79 a month billed yearly, and SE Ranking Core is $103.20 a month billed yearly. Moz Pro's entry plan for one site costs $49 a month.

Ahrefs includes API and MCP access on Lite and above. SE Ranking Core includes 25K API credits with MCP access. Mangools includes API and MCP access in its plans.

AI prompt tracking is bundled into the plans. Ahrefs Lite includes 150 checks on AI prompts a month.

GrowthVector runs its rank tracking, keyword research and site audits on OpenSEO, with DataForSEO as the data source. OpenSEO is open source under the MIT license, and it runs on the Cloudflare free plan or in Docker.

For the setup steps and the monthly cost breakdown, read the Semrush alternative guide on OpenSEO and DataForSEO.

DataForSEO has no subscription. You add funds with a $50 minimum top-up, and the balance never expires.

• OpenSEO is not a full Semrush or Ahrefs clone. Those suites have their own link indexes, traffic estimates and years of history.
• The cost figures in the Semrush alternative guide cover rank tracking, audits and keyword research, not backlink pulls. The DataForSEO Backlinks API charges $0.024 per request plus $0.000036 per row.
• Keyword and Labs endpoints have their own prices, listed in the DataForSEO API guide.
• You run it yourself. Updates, settings and errors are your job.

• Teams that rely on the Ahrefs backlink index and its history. Lite keeps 6 months of data, Standard 2 years and Advanced 5 years.
• Teams that run an AI-agent workflow. Ahrefs includes API and MCP access on Lite and above.
• Teams that need deep history. Enterprise keeps unlimited historical data.

• Backlink index scale. Each vendor's claim uses different units, so test the index yourself.
• Setup time. A pay-per-request stack trades the subscription for setup time, and it has no bundled UI features such as traffic estimates.
• Speed. DataForSEO's standard queue costs less, but its results take longer to arrive.
• Competitor data in Search Console. Search Console has none, and its tables stop at 1,000 rows.

When you cancel Ahrefs, your own sites fall back to Ahrefs Free, which softens the move.

Ahrefs does not issue refunds in general, so run the replacement before you cancel. SE Ranking offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card. Mangools offers a 48-hour money-back guarantee.

Run the same five known backlinks, a rank check and one site audit through each tool. Compare the results with the limits in this guide before you switch. Other tools in each category are listed in the marketing tools directory.