9 Best Ahrefs Alternatives (Free & Paid)

Looking for a quality Ahrefs alternative? Read on.

Let me start by saying that Ahrefs is a quality all-in-one SEO toolset.

In fact, Ahrefs has been an important part of my SEO stack for several years.

It allows you to:

• Run technical site audits
• Perform keyword research
• Gain valuable content insights
• Check the backlink profile of any site
• Track keyword rankings

But it’s not the perfect tool for everyone. 

Some may think it’s too pricey and want a cheaper or free alternative.

User may feel the functionality, such as rank tracking or technical SEO audits, is better served with a standalone tool. 

Others may prefer the user interface or find the data more accurate in other tools.

There are a lot of reasons why you might be looking for another option, and an equal number of alternatives to consider. 

In this guide, we’re going to take a close look at the top 9 free and paid Ahrefs alternatives, highlight their key use cases, and discuss how they compare to Ahrefs.

To make it easier to navigate, we’ve broken out the Ahrefs competitors into the categories below:

Semrush (aff) is a leading all-in-one SEO platform that excels in all the core SEO areas – Domain analytics, competitor analysis, keyword research, daily rank tracking, content and technical audits, backlink audits and analysis, and white-label reporting.

Semrush boasts over 10 million users, including notable brands like Tesla, Amazon, Vodafone, Walmart, IBM, and Booking.com.  

And it’s a tool I’ve been using for over 8 years as an integral part of my SEO and PPC toolset for personal and client projects.

Semrush contains a huge set of tools that rival most of the standalone SEO tools in each category below. There’s loads of firepower under the hood, for a relatively low monthly fee.

Semrush’ keyword database (23B+ keywords) is larger than Ahrefs’ (19B+ keywords), and the platform provides daily desktop and mobile ranking updates for all users, in addition to white-label reporting options. 

On the other hand, Ahrefs does not currently provide the capability to create and schedule custom reports, and users will need to pay between $100-$250 extra per month to get access to daily ranking updates. 

While Semrush has made some major gains in recent years, the user interface still falls a bit short of Ahrefs across a couple of their toolkits. And, I still find myself using Ahrefs more for competitor backlink analysis.

But overall, Semrush provides an immense amount of data and insights to drive your SEO, and broader digital marketing campaigns. You’ll find that it gives you an almost unfair behind-the-scenes look at your competition.

Since Ahrefs is an SEM toolset, I’ve kept the comparison focused only on the Semrush SEO and Advertising toolkits, and broken down the key features and use cases below.

The Traffic Analytics tool lets you find out which channels – organic, paid, direct, referral, social – are driving traffic to any site. And then check estimated bounce rates, average visit duration, and other engagement metrics. The platform provides this insight by analyzing an enormous amount of clickstream data provided by multiple proprietary and third-party data sources.

It’s like SimilarWeb and Google Analytics had a baby. 

Enter any website, and you’ll discover:

• Which channels drive the most traffic.
• Which websites drive the most referral traffic.
• Which subdomains or subfolders get the most visits.
• Which pages/posts pull in the most organic traffic.
• Which individual keywords generate the most traffic.
• Which countries send the most traffic.
• Which devices – mobile or desktop – send the most web traffic. 
• How traffic and engagement varies by device type. 

Semrush gives you access to a huge database of over 23B+ billion keywords through several tools.

Use the Keyword Overview report to:

• Check search volume, click potential, keyword difficulty, search intent, CPC data, volume trends, SERP features, top competitors and more.

Use the Keyword Magic tool to:

• Get loads of related search terms divided into subgroups and question-based topics from your seed keyword.

Use the Keyword Gap tool to:

• Get a side-by-side keyword comparison of up to five competitors and analyze the common keywords shared by each site, the total keyword overlap, and all of the untapped opportunities to target.

Use the SERP Overview report to: 

• Determine SERP competition levels. You can analyze page authority, backlink count, and content types to understand better which keywords are more realistic short- and long-term targets.

If you want to see Semrush’ powerful keyword research toolset in action, the video below will show you some of the ways I use it to uncover high-value keyword opportunities for several different types of businesses. 

The Semrush Position Tracking tool lets you track daily keyword ranking changes from an international level, all the way down to a local level, and across all device types.

You can use the Position Tracking tool to:

• Check rankings across tags, devices, locations, and different SERP features.
• Compare your target keywords performance against competitors.
• Monitor SERP feature movements and quickly spot new opportunities.
• Spot new, improved, declined and lost keyword across ranking distributions. 
• Uncover potential keyword cannibalization issues.  
• Generate visual rank reports and integrate data with Google Data Studio. 

The Semrush database contains over 43 trillion backlinks which you can access via several different tools:

Use the Backlink Analytics tool to

• Monitor your backlink profile, so you can reclaim any lost backlinks.
• Analyze competitors’ backlinks at scale to find their most powerful links.
• Analyze backlink type, location and categories.
• Identify unlinked brand mentions. 

Use the Backlink Gap tool to:

• Compare the backlink profiles of up to five competing websites, so you can quickly identify backlink opportunities that you’re missing.
• Filter the results by authority scores, traffic and number of matches to find the highest quality, and most probable backlink targets. 

Use the Backlink Audit tool to:

• Check your domain’s backlink profile for any suspicious links that may be toxic, and create a disavow file to send to Google.

Semrush’s Site Audit tool lets you quickly analyze the health of a website. The report generates a list of prioritized issues so you can see precisely where the website is struggling.

You can use the Site Audit tool to:

• Identify issues like duplicate and thin content, broken links, HTTPS implementation, crawlability and indexation problems.
• Uncover core web vital, structured data markup and hreflang problems. 
• Audit the desktop or mobile version of a site, plus include or exclude specific pages.
• Compare crawls side-by-side from different points in time to see how errors, warnings, and notices have changed over time.
• Run on-demand audits and schedule auto re-crawls on a daily or weekly basis.
• Send audit action items from Semrush directly into other project management tools like Trello. 

The Listing Management tool is a collaboration between Semrush and Yext that saves you the time and effort of uploading and maintaining your local business listings.
Input your data once, and the tool keeps all the details correct on your website, local maps, apps, social networks, and review directories.

• Manage and publish local business information to dozens of authoritative directories, including Google, Yelp, Facebook, and Alexa.
• Edit or update listings to make them more consistent across the web.
• Upload logos, pictures and videos, and your listings will automatically be updated. 
• Track and reply to all customers’ reviews in one place and manage your ratings. 

Semrush’ Reporting tools let you build white-label PDF reports, so you can share the results of a website audit, present a competitive analysis, or show the progress of an SEO/PPC campaign with clients or colleagues.

You can also build professional branded campaign reports by dragging and dropping widgets into pre-built reporting templates using Semrush and other data sources such as Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Business Profile.

• Create branded reports from scratch or pre-built templates.
• Combine multiple data sources – Semrush, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Business Profile – in a single report.
• Schedule reports for automatic email delivery.
• Organize reports by project or client profile. 

Semrush’s Advertising Toolkit provides a top-level overview of how much paid traffic your competitors get each month, the number of keywords they bid on, and their estimated budget, plus historical trends and reports.

You can use the Advertising Toolkit to:

• Scrutinize your competitors’ click-winning ad copy so that you can emulate winning ads with the Ad Builder.
• Find out which ads have been running the longest and what ad copy has a successful track record in the Ad History reports.
• Look at all the landing pages your competitors use to convert paid traffic and determine where they place ads on the Display Advertising network.
• Identify the display ad creatives – images, text, and HTML – that your competitors are using and the properties – web pages, YouTube videos, and YouTube channels – where they are displaying them.
• Optimize your PLAs with better titles, descriptions, and pricing by studying your competitors’ pricing strategies in the PLA Research reports.
• Build keyword lists, organize them into groups, and set negative keywords with the PPC Keyword Tool. Then download the data into a CSV file and import it into the Google Ads Editor.
• Find out which keywords your competitors are running, but you aren’t, by running a Paid Keyword or PLA Gap Analysis. Afterward, add them to your Semrush PPC keyword list or export them to the Google Ads editor.

Semrush has three premium plans with the option to pay monthly or yearly:

• Pro = $119.95/month
• Guru = $229.95/month
• Business = $449.95/month

Ubersuggest is a free SEO tool that can help you generate keyword and content ideas, analyze traffic, top pages, and backlinks for competitors.

Ubersuggest gives you access to over 6 billion keywords, 2 trillion links, and 1 billion pieces of content.

Use the Keyword Ideas report to:

• Find keywords, suggestions, questions, comparisons, and prepositions related to your search query.

Use the Content Ideas report to:

• Check how many times a topic’s been shared on Facebook and Pinterest. Plus, get an idea of keywords those pages rank for on Google and backlinks they acquired.

Use the Backlinks report to:

• Get a detailed analysis of how many backlinks and referring domains your competitors have, plus a list of the individual backlinks.

Ubersuggest has 3 pricing plans starting at $29/month. There’s also the option to pay once for lifetime access, starting from $290.

Mangools is a user-friendly, 5-in-one SEO toolset covering keyword research, site analysis, SERP analysis, backlink analysis, and rank tracking.

However, unlike Ahrefs and Semrush, the tools aren’t integrated. So if you check a domain in KWFinder, you then have to go to Link Miner to check its backlink data.

While it doesn’t provide as many use cases as Ahrefs, such as technical audits or content analysis, it does present a lot of valuable insights, it’s easy to navigate, and it’s more affordable.

Here’s how you can use the Mangools SEO toolset: 

• SERPChecker helps you qualify potential keyword targets. The report gives you a high-level summary with the KD score and average number of SERP features.

  For each result page listed, scores are color-coded to identify the strongest and weakest competition.

• SERPWatcher lets you track keyword rankings and their search volumes in any location, on any device. It includes its own Dominance Index to check if you’re dominating the search results for your tracked keywords.