Ahrefs is well-known for its advanced SEO toolset with perfect web crawling features and backlink indexing. However, plenty of marketers look for an Ahrefs free alternative because this high-end service doesn’t provide free search trial while some other platforms offer similar options and give you a few free searches a day. Experts in digital marketing note that SEO reports made on Ahrefs lack some important points. For this reason, programs offering the same features as Ahrefs gain popularity.
Best Free Alternatives for Ahrefs
The platforms listed below are not as costly as Ahrefs. Conversely, they even offer free options. Thus, you’ll be able to reduce your marketing expenses and still have your website shown on the first search page. The following Ahrefs alternatives will fit tiny marketing studios and agencies, individuals and representatives of small businesses.
Semrush
SEMrush is the most famous and popular platform that comes second to Ahrefs. It features a wide range of opportunities for high-quality keyword research and is able to organize the data of other websites. Let’s look at its advantages.
- Offers a seven-day free trial for a premium keyword research tool
- Deals with four marketing fields: SEO, social networks, paid traffic and public/content relations
- Allows you to analyze competitors (their visibility on the page of the search engine, backlink profile including anchors, top-ranked and organic keywords and ad strategies)
- Considers your target audience location (you can pick a country to see information only about its users)
In other words, it’s designed as a versatile solution to develop and implement a marketing strategy as well as to track its results. And, it is rather helpful to build the AdWords campaign.
Note that this service is as expensive as Ahrefs. It offers the same prices: $99 for freelancers, startups, in-house marketers and $399 for businesses. However, you can enjoy its seven-day free trial to check out the program’s functionality before purchasing a subscription.
Serpstat
Serpstat is a versatile platform that allows you to practice an integrated approach to marketing in addition to keyword research. It helps check website performance and proceed with competitive analysis (including backlinks), as well as monitor ranks. It also sorts out backlink profiles, reveals new and lost backlinks, displays anchors and indicates the authority of links.
When searching for keywords, this platform is able to show related keys and offer long-tail keys (in both affirmative and interrogative forms) that it has collected from Google. And, you can be aware of the keywords’ competition to choose more relevant and less competitive ones. Moreover, the platform is smart enough to cluster keys based on their relevance.
Serpstat offers a free trial but doesn’t give access to the whole set of its options. It allows you to research keywords, analyze competitors, and get acquainted with other features.
However, even if you purchase a subscription with Serpstat, it will be cheaper than Ahrefs. The minimum price starts at $19 per month and goes up to $299 for accessing the full functionality. In addition, Serpstat offers 20% discount on an annual subscription. Large companies can use Plan H ($2,000 per month) to open infinite possibilities – a million queries per day and a million results per report, 20M pages to audit and the unlimited number of projects.
Moz
When looking for Ahrefs alternatives, pay attention to Moz which is another useful platform for digital marketing. It is a multifunctional platform created in 2004 as a SEO consulting company. It’s remarkable for its capability to determine the website’s authority on a scale from 0 to 100.
Its distinctive feature is a set of filters that makes it possible to choose metrics. For example, one can create settings to see either external or internal links. Also, one can find out resources that are linked to direct competitors.
Its free offer has no time limit and allows you to create a free account to process five queries a day and use site explorer limitlessly. Its standard plan costs $99 per month and the premium plan is $999 monthly for large agencies.
Majestic
If you’re interested in sites like Ahrefs, take a look at Majestic. It is good for analyzing web resources that outreach for content placement. It’s one of the best services in estimating the natural growth of a company over time in terms of backlinks.
Majestic provides you with top-notch competitive research since it allows you to track any competitors closely because it helps searching for activities by date. The platform is helpful in assessing whether the website has a lot of spam or implements deceptive practices.
It’s also an indispensable platform for developing link-building strategies. Thus, Majestic:
- Tracks and improves incoming website links
- Follows both new and old/leaving incoming links
- Defines their overall value
- Formulates impartial recommendations for ongoing link building
Note that this platform isn’t tailored for SEO promotion of websites. You can register a free account to proceed with the basic analysis. If you need full functionality, its API plan is quite affordable and costs $400 per month. Besides, it’s possible to save your budget if you choose an annual plan. The service offers seven-day cash-back for new subscribers.
Best Commercial Alternatives for Ahrefs
The alternatives to Ahrefs below cannot boast free plans or low-cost tariffs, because they’re developed for medium and large companies that need tons of options to succeed with marketing and extinguish competitors.
Raven Tools
Both Ahrefs and Raven Tools suit businesses and demonstrate good overall quality and credible performance. While you’ll pay a minimum of $99 per month for Ahrefs, Raven Tools will cost you only $79 per month. Unlike Ahrefs, Raven Tools offers a 14-day free trial which is very useful for checking the platform’s functionality.
Besides, this platform can be integrated with social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in order to take data from social media campaigns and turn it into user-friendly custom reports.
It’s not a versatile service, but it focuses on website audits, social analytics and website analytics integration. It’s a great tool for daily, weekly and monthly reports, and it will save you time if you have to login into several accounts or websites to pull information, which takes significant time. So, it’s a win-win time saver because it allows you to compile all that data into one report and it even generates a cover page and table of contents.
SEO Power Suite
SEO PowerSuite is designed as a complete set of effective SEO software to let customers reach and keep top positions in any search engine. What are its capabilities?
- Precise rank tracking
- Deep and detailed link analysis
- Keyword research
- Website audits
- Content optimization
- Competitive analysis
- Reports on every SEO aspect
A professional subscription costs $299 for six months. If you purchase an annual plan, it will cost you $29.95 monthly. However, there are discounts and promotions, so you’ll have to check the pricing page from time to time.
The platform fits nonprofits and small businesses that need to tackle their own SEO. This service provides you with a full package of SEO tools to improve your website and remove technical errors, as well as handle content optimization.
It also includes a backlink tool to view the competitors’ backlinks and to improve your own backlink strategy.
If comparing with Ahrefs, SEO PowerSuite is a bit slow to pull the data, but it’s much more affordable and ensures accurate results. In addition, it contains a set of blog posts for educational purposes.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is another one of the multiple Ahrefs competitors. It is a free SEO spider tool for small businesses (it doesn’t offer multi-user capability). It offers the opportunity to buy a license to crawl more than 500 URLs and have access to such advanced options like Google Analytics integration, free technical support, revealing broken links, errors and redirects, etc. This British service costs 149.00 pounds a year.
It tracks website links, images, CSS, scripts and apps. It yields key onsite page elements for SEO and helps work on typical SEO issues. While Ahrefs is great for keyword research and backlinks, Screaming Frog focuses on auditing websites on a deeper level.
It exports data to an Excel file after indexing a website and delivers accurate information (number of pages, titles and meta descriptions, broken links and more) to provide high-quality website optimization.
Buzzsumo
BuzzSumo hit the market with its ability to reveal popular content and influencers as well as find out the most engaging topics and articles. It’s remarkable for its intuitive navigation and fast results. Its most expensive plan for enterprises costs $500 per month.
The platform focuses on measuring backlinks and the level of social sharing. For example, you can check how many times an article has been shared across the web. The platform is tailored for specific audiences and sectors. So, the process of content research is easy and fast. You’ll get results in just a couple of clicks. It is a great tool if your main goal is to make viral content.
Unlike Ahrefs, BuzzSumo can filter information by type of content and display people who have shared it, including a specific Twitter user.
Best Ahrefs Alternatives
When looking for a credible alternative to Ahrefs, it is important to think of your business objectives. As you can see, not all services fit large businesses and support multiple users, so the choice of platform depends on the size of your company as well as on your goals. Besides, some programs are more cost-efficient than others, so there is another point to think of: just compare features of different platforms and subscription prices. Also, ask yourself whether you have enough resources and time to dive deeply into analyses or you want to have a brief overview of your website performance. The integration with other marketing tools is also meaningful. All in all, today there is an enormous selection of tools for digital marketing, and if you are looking for an Ahrefs alternative, you’ll easily find one.