12 Best Ahrefs Alternatives (2024 Pros & Cons)

Looking for the best Ahrefs alternatives? You’re in the right place.

Ahrefs is an incredible SEO tool—but it isn’t the right choice for everyone. For one thing, it’s super expensive. It doesn’t offer a free plan either, and not everybody loves its UI.

In this post, we’ll be sharing what we think are the best alternatives to Ahrefs on the market right now. We’ll discuss how each of them compares to Ahrefs and share our personal experience using them.

The best Ahrefs alternatives – comparison

#1 – Semrush

Semrush is our top pick for the overall best Ahrefs alternative. Like Ahrefs, it’s an all-in-one platform with all the tools you need to do effective SEO and rank on Google.

No other platform is as close to Ahrefs as Semrush. The two are similar in every way: Features, quality… even pricing.

Both cater to serious marketers who want to handle all their SEO activities from one platform. As such, they each come with all the essentials, like a keyword research tool, competitor analysis tool, backlink checker, rank tracker, and so on.

But Semrush takes it one step further. It goes beyond SEO and gives you 40+ tools to help with all areas of digital marketing.

For example, with Semrush’s social media toolkit, you can schedule posts, manage your social inboxes, analyze your social media profiles, etc. Ahrefs, on the other hand, doesn’t offer any social media marketing tools.

The other big difference between them is that Semrush offers a free account, whereas Ahrefs doesn’t.  You can use Ahrefs Webmaster tools for free, but only if you have your own website, and you’ll only be able to check your verified domains.

In contrast, you can analyze up to 10 domains per day for free using Semrush’s Domain Overview tool. 

Domain Overview is like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer in that it shows you the search traffic and backlink profile of any website, as well as their top ranking pages, top organic keywords, etc. And personally, I find it much easier to work with.

The biggest difference is the price. Semrush may appear more expensive but if you look at the usage allowances, you’ll see that the base Ahrefs plan offers 500 reports per month and Semrush offers 3000 domain reports per day.

Key features

• Domain Overview: Analyze any URL or domain to get instant insights into your competitors, like Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
• Keyword Research: Discover new keyword ideas and analyze them.
• Link Building: Analyze link profiles, reach out to prospects, and build backlinks
• SEO Writing Assistant: You don’t get this on Ahrefs – it helps you optimize your SEO content and scores it on readability, originality, tone of voice, and SEO in real-time as you write.
• Other features: 40+ tools for on-page SEO optimization, site auditing, local SEO, social media, advertising, content marketing, and more

Pros and cons

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start from $129.95/month, and save up to 17% when you pay annually.

Read our Semrush review.

#2 – SE Ranking

SE Ranking is the best Ahrefs alternative in terms of value for money. It shares most of the same features but you can get it for less than half the price.

My favorite thing about SE Ranking is its Keyword Rank Tracker. I found it to be every bit as good as Ahrefs Rank Tracker, if not better.

Like Ahrefs, it constantly tracks your average ranking position for all your target keywords, in pretty much any location. 

Plus, it gives you insights into things like how much search volume each of your ranked keywords gets, how much website traffic they’re forecast to send, and what SERP features you’ve earned.

It also provides one extra insight that Ahrefs doesn’t: Content Score. 

This is one of SE Ranking’s proprietary metrics. It tells you how well your ranked page is optimized for the keyword you’re tracking compared to your top-ranking competitors, based on factors like content length, structure, keyword density and placement, etc.

Aside from the Keyword Rank Tracker, SE Ranking also offers lots of other SEO tools, including a competitor analysis tool, backlink checker, on-page SEO checker, and website auditing tool. 

That’s pretty much everything you get with Ahrefs. But unlike Ahrefs, it won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

Key features

• Keyword Rank Tracker: Similar to Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. Use it to keep a close eye on your ranking position for target keywords.
• On-Page SEO Checker: Analyze your blog posts to make sure they’re well-optimized, and find out how to fix any issues.
• Website Audit: Similar to Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool. Use it to check your website for SEO errors and fix them.
• Backlink Checker: Analyze any site’s backlink profile and find new link prospects 

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $55/month, save up to 20% with annual billing. Get started with a free trial.

Read our SE Ranking review.

#3 – Mangools

Mangools is the best Ahref alternative for beginners. In my opinion, it’s much easier to use. It’s also significantly cheaper, with plans starting at half the price.

The reason I find Mangools to be easier to use than Ahrefs is because the UI layout is much simpler.

With Ahrefs, you do everything from the same tool: Check links, analyze competitors, research keywords, etc. That streamlines your workflow, but it also makes the user interface very ‘busy’. 

There are tons of features on the same page, and if you’re new to SEO, it can be tough to figure out how to find the data you need.

Mangools is different in that it separates everything up into five completely different tools, rather than stitching it all together.

For example, if you want to discover or analyze keywords, you open up the KWFinder and run a search. If you want to check a site’s backlinks, you open up LinkMiner. Or to analyze a website in more detail, you open up the SiteProfiler

You can use the SERPChecker to analyze the SERPs. And to track your keyword rankings, add them to the SERPWatcher.

Keeping everything in five separate tools like this simplifies the user interface and makes it easier to focus on one job at a time without getting overwhelmed with data you don’t need.

That said, the tradeoff is that the features themselves aren’t quite as solid on Mangools as they are on Ahrefs; nor is the data. 

For example, I’ve found Mangools isn’t as good at finding backlinks, which isn’t that surprising given that Ahrefs has by far the most active web crawler. 

And Mangools doesn’t have as many filters in its backlink analysis tool either. You can filter by things like follow/nofollow tags, but not by things like URL rating or link type.

Key features

• KWFinder: An alternative to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Use it to find long-string keyword ideas and analyze opportunities
• SERPExplorer: Analyze the search engine results pages to assess the competition
• SERPWatcher: An alternative to Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. Use it to monitor your keyword ranking positions
• LinkMiner: A backlink checker tool that you can use to analyze your link profile and find who’s linking to your competitors
• SiteProfiler: Check the authority of any competitor website and extract other useful insights

Pros and cons

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start from $29/month, and you can save up to 35% with annual billing. 

Read our Mangools review.

#4 – Serpstat

Serpstat is an affordable alternative to Ahrefs if you’re looking for an all-in-one SEO suite. It comes with 55+ SEO tools, so it’s very feature-rich.

The tools you get with Serpstat include domain analysis, keyword research, backlink analysis, rank tracker, site auditing, and AI content generation.

On their own, none of them quite match up to Ahrefs in terms of quality. For example, in my tests, its domain analysis didn’t always accurately identify the real top keywords the site ranks for. And its traffic estimation was quite a ways off.

However, its backlink analysis tool is pretty good, as is its rank tracker.

But where Serpstat has an edge over Ahrefs is when it comes to cost. Serpstat plans start at just a little over half the price of Ahrefs’ Lite plan. And in many ways, you get more for your money.

For example, you get 100 domain/keyword/link searches per day on Serpstat, compared to just 500 per month on Ahrefs (that works out to be more than x6 as many). You also get 10,000 tracked keywords per month to Ahrefs 750 per week, which is a big difference.

Key features

• Domain Analysis: Similar to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Uncover SEO insights for any website.
• Keyword Research: Discover keyword ideas from a seed keyword or domain search
• Backlink Analysis: Find referring domains for any website and analyze the strength of each backlink.
• Other tools: Rank tracker, URL analysis, site audit, AI content writing, etc.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $59/month, save money with yearly billing. Get started with a free trial.

#5 – Majestic

Majestic is the best Ahrefs alternative for checking backlinks. It has one of the best backlink databases in the industry and some unique features you won’t find elsewhere.

Unlike Ahrefs, Majestic isn’t an all-in-one tool. So, it doesn’t come with a site auditor, rank tracker, or any of the other stuff you get with Ahrefs.

It’s almost exclusively focused on backlink checking—but it does that really, really well.

You just search for a domain/website page, and Majestic will generate an in-depth report with everything you need to know about that site’s backlinks, including a complete link profile.

In our tests, it was able to find more backlinks than Ahrefs for some sites. And that’s likely down to the size and quality of its databases.

Majestic actually maintains two databases: The Fresh Index, which has up-to-date links of all URLs crawled over the last 120 days; and the Historic Index, which has backlink data for all the URLs they’ve crawled since 2006. There are literally billions of backlinks in the Fresh Index and trillions in the Historic Index. 

In your backlink report, you have all the metrics you need to evaluate the strength of individual backlinks, as well as the site’s overall authority and the health of their backlink profile. That includes authority metrics like trust flow, citation flow, topical trust flow, etc.

I really like Majestic’s Link Context feature too. It tells you the context each backlink appears in, so you can see things like whereabouts on the page it appears (at the top, in the footer, etc.), what images it appears alongside, the number of links next to it, whether it’s editorially placed or in a directory, etc. 

This is something unique to Majestic that you don’t get on Ahrefs (or any other tool for that matter) and it’s super helpful when trying to work out how valuable a given backlink is.

Aside from backlink reporting, Majestic also comes with basic keyword research tools. They’re not as good as Ahrefs, but it does the job.

Key features

• Link Intelligence data: Gather insights into any website’s backlink profile in the Site Explorer tool.
• Authority metrics: Analyze link strength with metrics like Trust Flow, Citation Flow, visibility flow, Topical Trust Flow, and more.
• Link Context: Analyze the context that links appear in
• Keywords research: Use the keyword checker to analyze keywords, or the keyword generator to come up with new ideas

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $49.99/month, get 2 months free with yearly billing. A 7-day money-back guarantee is available for new customers.

#6 – Morningscore

Morningscore is another easy-to-use alternative to Ahrefs, with probably the best user interface of any tool we’ve tried.

Like Ahrefs, Morningscore is an all-in-one platform that gives you everything you need to ‘do’ effective SEO, including a keyword research tool, rank tracker, link scanner, website health check (auditing tool), and website scanner (competitor analysis tool).

But what makes it different from Ahrefs is its unique tasking system: SEO Missions. It’s by far my favorite thing about Morningscore.

Basically, SEO Missions are personalized recommendations that Morningscore serves up to tell you the things you should do to improve your search engine optimization.

For example, one mission might be to ‘get [this keyword] from position 9 to 3’. Another might be to ‘fix 3 SEO problems on [this page]’ or ‘achieve a linkscore of 1,500’.

Morningscore rates each mission in terms of difficulty and ROI, so you can prioritize the easiest wins that’ll have the biggest impact..

You’re also rewarded with a certain amount of XP points for each mission you complete. And as you gain XP, you level up.

This sort of gamification manages to make doing SEO on Morningscore fun. 

In stark contrast, Ahrefs is dry and boring—you’re overwhelmed with data and features, and it’s tough to know where to start. So if you’re the kind of person who struggles to stay motivated and gets easily overwhelmed, Morningscore may be a better alternative.

Key features

• Keyword research: Find new ideas for keywords you might want to target, and evaluate them with keyword metrics.
• Rank tracker: Check how you’re ranking for all your target keywords.
• Website health check: Run an SEO audit to make sure your website is as optimized as possible and uncover technical SEO issues like broken links, etc.
• Traffic valuation: View the value of your SEO traffic at the top of the dashboard.
• SEO Missions: Get a list of the tasks you need to complete to rank higher in the SERPs, with rewards for completing them.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $65/month, get 2 months free when you pay annually. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

#7 – WebCEO

WebCEO is the best Ahrefs alternative for agencies. It comes with 23 tools for things like keyword research, SEO auditing, link building, rank tracking, backlink checking, and beyond.

What makes WebCEO different from Ahrefs is that it’s been built specifically for marketing agencies, and that’s reflected in its feature set.

For example, unlike Ahrefs, WebCEO comes with a ‘request a free SEO report’ widget that you can embed on your agency site to get new SEO leads.

It’s also fully white-label, so you can host the WebCEO app on your own domain as if it were developed by you, in-house. Plus, send out beautiful white-label reports to your clients, featuring your company logo and brand colors.

And of course, WebCEO also has all the features you need to collaborate with your team, like custom user roles, project management workflows, etc.

Despite all that, it’s very affordable. WebCEO’s Agency Unlimited plan is in a similar ballpark to Ahrefs’ Lite plan, but comes with unlimited keywords, projects, and teammates. And there’s a much cheaper WebCEO plan for solo users, which starts at almost a third of the price of Ahrefs.

Key features

• Rank tracking: Monitor your ranking position for target keywords
• Keyword research: Generate keyword ideas and analyze them with keyword metrics
• Site audit: Check your site’s technical SEO to spot and fix any issues that could be hurting your rankings. 
• Agency features: White-labeling, reporting, team collaboration, lead generation widget, and more.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start at $37/month, save 16% with annual billing. Get started with a free trial.

#8 – ContentStudio

ContentStudio is a good replacement for Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, but it’s more focused on social media than SEO. 

The idea behind Ahrefs’ Content Explorer is to help you discover top-performing blog posts and articles in your industry.

And ContentStudio does exactly the same thing. You can search for keywords or domains to create and populate custom topic feeds, where you can see all the best-performing blog posts from across the web.

However, because ContentStudio is designed more for social media marketing than for backlink building, it doesn’t include the same kind of metrics as Ahrefs.

On Ahrefs, you can see at a glance how much traffic each piece of content gets, as well as the number of referring domains, and the website page’s domain rating.

ContentStudio doesn’t tell you any of that. But it does tell you how many engagements (e.g. shares, likes, comments) each piece of content has had on social media, as well as its sentiment.

With that in mind, I wouldn’t recommend using ContentStudio to find and analyze link prospects. But it is great for coming up with new content ideas and finding ‘likely sharers’ (which is useful if you plan on promoting your content on social media)

ContentStudio also comes with a bunch of other features that can help you promote your content on social, like a social scheduling tool, a unified social inbox, and more.

Key features

• Discover: Find and curate trending, top-performing content in your niche, much like Ahrefs’ Content Explorer tool
• Publishing: Plan and schedule posts to social media in advance
• Engage: Interact with your audience on social from one unified inbox

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $25/month, get 20% off with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

#9 – AccuRanker

AccuRanker is the best replacement for Ahrefs Rank Tracker. It’s one of the fastest and most accurate rank tracking tools on the market.

Unlike Ahrefs, AccuRanker doesn’t try to be an all-in-one SEO platform. It’s 100% focused on rank tracking, and that’s reflected in the quality of its features and data In fact, AccuRanker’s rank tracking data is so good that Ahrefs uses it in their own platform. And at a rather steep markup.

The way AccuRanker works is you add your website and the keywords you want to track, and it will generate a report letting you know how you’re ranking on Google and other search engines.

In the report, you’ll be able to see your average ranking position for each tracked keyword and how that changes over time. Ranks are updated every 24 hours. 

You’ll also be able to see other important metrics like your share of voice, the search intent of each keyword, your organic traffic figures, ranking distribution, top organic competitors, etc. 

One of my favorite things about AccuRanker is its ‘refresh keyword’ feature. You can click on it next to any keyword in the report and Accuranker will check it again and give you an updated ranking. 

This comes in useful if, for example, you’ve recently made a big change to a webpage, or Google’s just rolled out an algorithm update, and you want to immediately know how it’s affected your ranking position without waiting 24 hours.

I also like the ‘keyword discovery’ feature. It shows you keywords that you might not have realized you rank for, so you can add them to your tracking list.

Key features

• Rank tracking: View your average ranking position for all your target keywords, with updates every 24 hours.
• Keyword discovery: Find keywords that you already rank for but that you’re not tracking, then add them to the rank tracker in a couple of clicks
• Refresh keywords: Get an instant, real-time update on your average ranking position in one click.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $129/month, save money with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

#10 – Moz Pro

Moz Pro is another one of the most popular Ahrefs alternatives on the market. It’s probably the platform’s second biggest competitor after Semrush.

Like Ahrefs, Moz aims to be a complete solution and provide everything SEO professionals need in one platform. It’s made up of six different tools: Keyword Research, Rank Tracking, Site Crawl, On-Page Optimization, Link Research, and Custom Reports. 

That’s pretty much the same stuff as you get on Ahrefs, and the starting price is a little cheaper (but not by much).

The quality of Moz’s data is up there with Ahrefs. It has a similar number of backlinks in its index, and it does a fantastic job of finding keywords.

It’s also worth noting that Moz uses a different metric to measure website authority than Ahrefs. Ahrefs uses ‘Domain Rating’, while Moz uses ‘Domain Authority’.

I’ve found that for some websites, Moz comes up with a wildly different authority score than Ahrefs. And for the most part, Ahrefs seems to be more accurate.

For example, Ahrefs says BloggingWizard has a Domain Rating of 81, whereas Moz puts it much lower at 56.

Key features

• Keyword Research: Analyze, discover, and prioritize keywords.
• Site Crawl: Crawl and audit your site to find and fix technical SEO issues
• Link Research: Check the health of your link profile, discover and analyze your competitor’s backlinks, and find new link prospects.
• Other tools: reporting, on-page optimization, rank tracking, and more.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans currently start from $69/month in the cyber sale (usually $99/month), and you can save up to 40% when you pay yearly. Get started with a 30-day free trial.

#11 – Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a good free alternative to Ahrefs. They have a pretty generous free version that you can use to do a few searches per day. And if you need more, the paid plans are pretty affordable.

Like Ahrefs, Ubersuggest offers multiple SEO tools in one place. That includes tools for research, domain analysis, backlink analysis, and site auditing.

I particularly like its keyword research tool. You can search by domain or seed keyword to view hundreds of related keyword ideas, alongside metrics like their estimated monthly search volume, difficulty, CPC, and trend data.

They also have a nifty ‘keyword visualization feature’, which groups keyword ideas together based on the type of query they represent and displays them in a circular chart. I don’t think Ahrefs has anything similar to this (if it has, I haven’t seen it), and it’s super useful.

Ubersuggest’s Domain Overview tool is very similar to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. It gives you all the SEO insights you could want about any domain in one report, like organic traffic estimations, Domain Authority (like Ahrefs’ Domain Rating), top-ranking keywords, top-ranking pages, backlinks, etc.

In terms of its backlink data, Ubersuggest seems to pull in very similar data to Moz. It’s entirely possible that they use the Moz API. 

Key features

• Keyword ideas: Get hundreds of related keyword suggestions and check their average monthly search volume, CPC, difficulty, etc.
• Backlink data: See what content people are linking to and identify link prospects.
• Domain Overview: View all the most important SEO insights for any domain, e.g. organic keywords, traffic, top pages, etc.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Free version available. Paid plans start from $29/month, and you can save money with a lifetime plan. Get started with a 7-day free trial.

#12 – SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is the last alternative on our list. It’s like Ahrefs, but for desktop.

No other platform gives you as much for your money as SEO PowerSuite. 

Not only is it incredibly featured rich (like Ahrefs, it’s an all-in-one tool that offers rank tracking, SEO auditing, keyword research, and more), but it also offers unlimited usage for one fixed yearly price.

So, you don’t have to be conscious of how often you’re generating reports and tracking rankings like you do with Ahrefs. You can use it as much as you want.

This makes it a great choice for agencies that manage a lot of clients—so too does its excellent solid white-label reporting features.

Part of the reason SEO PowerSuite is such great value for money is that it runs on your desktop and stores most of the data locally, so you don’t get charged a premium for cloud-based storage. 

Some features are powered by cloud-based tools, however. For example, they have a rather extensive backlink database that is cloud-based.

Key features

• Rankings: Local and global SERP tracking and analysis
• Keyword research: Discover keywords, check their difficulty, and find keyword gaps in your current content strategy.
• Backlinks: Link prospecting, backlink analysis, and toxic link removal
• Technical SEO: Site auditing, page speed checking, etc.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Free version available. Paid plans start at $299/year.

Read our SEO PowerSuite review.

Final thoughts

So, those are the 12 best Ahrefs alternatives on the market. The only thing left to do now is choose your favorite.

The most important thing to consider is which specific features you need. Do you want an all-in-one tool that can do it all? Or do you want a dedicated tool that just replaces one or two of Ahref’s features, like keyword research or rank tracking? 

The other big factor to think about is budget. Some of the tools in this list are super affordable, whereas others are expensive. Go with whatever fits your budget, but make sure you read the small print and get enough credits in your chosen pricing plan for your needs.

If you still haven’t found what you’re looking for, see our roundup of SEO reporting tools for more platforms like Ahrefs. To learn more about search engine optimization, check out these SEO statistics.

---

Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. If you click on certain links we may make a commission.