Frase vs Clearscope vs MarketMuse: content brief software pricing compared, and the one that will not publish a price

Frase is the cheapest of the three at $39 a month billed yearly and covers the most ground, from research through to a drafted article. Clearscope costs $129 a month and is the better grader, and every plan now tracks how your brand shows up in ChatGPT and Gemini. MarketMuse publishes no price at all: as of 21 August 2026 its pricing page carries a Book a demo button and not one dollar figure.

All three sell the same promise in different shapes, which is that a writer given the right document up front produces a page that ranks. Where they differ is how much of the job they take on, and how much of the bill is on the sticker.

What each of the three actually is

Frase is the widest of the three. It researches a keyword, builds an outline from the pages currently ranking, drafts against that outline, and since this year it will also host the finished blog: free on a Frase subdomain, $19 a month on your own domain, $99 a month at a million page views. It is the only one of the three trying to own the whole pipeline including publication.

Clearscope is the narrowest and the most opinionated. Its core output is a grade: it reads the pages ranking for your term, extracts the vocabulary they share, and scores your draft against that set. What has changed in 2026 is what surrounds the grade. Every plan now includes prompt tracking across ChatGPT and Gemini, brand visibility tracking across AI systems, and what Clearscope calls query fan-out awareness, meaning the searches an assistant fires to build one answer. It is drifting into being an AI visibility product with a content grader attached.

MarketMuse works a level up. Instead of optimizing one page it models a topic: what you have published, what you have not, where authority is thin, and which cluster to build next. Its free tier caps at 10 queries and 5 content briefs a month, which is enough to see the output but deliberately not enough to work in.

Frase vs Clearscope vs MarketMuse on published prices

Read on 21 August 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page. Frase quotes both an annual and a month to month figure and the gap between them is real money, so both are shown.

The add-on lines are where the bill actually grows

The sticker price decides less than it looks in this category, because both published vendors meter the thing you will run out of first.

Frase includes one seat on Starter, three on Professional and five on Scale, then charges $29 a month for each additional seat on the two upper plans. Past your allowance it switches to pay as you go: on Professional that is $5 per extra article, $0.50 per audited page and $0.25 per AI prompt, dropping to $4 and $0.40 on Scale. FraseCMS hosting is a separate line again on top of the plan.

Clearscope goes the other way. Users and projects are unlimited on every tier, which sounds generous until you notice the constraint has moved to pages. Essentials covers 50 pages and 20 drafts a month. Additional pages are $25 a month per block on Essentials and $15 on Business; additional drafts are $50 and $20. A team publishing sixty pages a month on Essentials is not paying $129.

Worth doing the division before you choose. Clearscope Essentials at $129 for 50 pages is about $2.58 a page. Frase Professional at $103 billed yearly, with three seats and a monthly article allowance, is cheaper per seat and more expensive per overage article. Which number matters depends entirely on whether your bottleneck is people or output.

Which one to buy for content briefs specifically

If the brief is the deliverable and someone else writes from it, Frase wins on price and on how complete the handoff is. If the draft already exists and the question is whether it is good enough to publish, Clearscope is the tool built for exactly that moment. If you are deciding what to write across a hundred pages rather than how to write one, MarketMuse is the only one of the three modelling that, and the demo requirement is the price of admission.

One thing none of the three does well is the page you already published. All of them are oriented around the next article, and the higher-return work for most sites is usually the opposite direction: going back through posts that ranked once and have since slipped tends to move more traffic per hour than another new draft, because the page already has history and links.

That is the same reason our own SEO content brief generator starts from a live URL rather than a blank keyword. It reads the page as it currently renders, then hands back the corrected title under 60 characters with the keyword first, a meta description in the 140 to 160 band, the heading outline the page should have had, an opening paragraph and four to six terms the ranking set uses that you do not. It is a smaller product than the three above: no topic model, no draft generation, no hosting. It writes the brief for a page that exists.

Frequently asked questions

Is Frase better than Clearscope?

For value and coverage, yes. Frase Starter is $39 a month billed yearly against $129 for Clearscope Essentials, and Frase covers research, brief, outline and draft. Clearscope is better at grading a finished draft against the terms ranking pages use, which is a narrower job done more precisely.

How much does Frase cost?

Starter is $39 a month billed yearly, or $49 month to month, with one seat. Professional is $103 yearly or $129 monthly with three seats. Scale is $239 yearly or $299 monthly with five seats. Extra seats are $29 a month each. Read 21 August 2026.

How much does Clearscope cost?

Essentials is $129 a month for 50 pages, 50 tracked prompts, 20 topic explorations and 20 drafts. Business is $399 a month for 300 pages and 300 tracked prompts. Enterprise is custom. Users and projects are unlimited on every tier. Read 21 August 2026.

Does MarketMuse publish pricing?

No. On 21 August 2026 its pricing page carried no dollar figure anywhere, only plan names and a Book a demo button. The free tier is documented: one user, 10 queries a month and 5 content briefs a month. Everything above that requires a sales conversation.

Does MarketMuse have a free plan?

Yes, and it is the only one of the three with a permanent free tier rather than a trial. It allows one user, 10 queries a month, zero tracked topics, 5 content briefs a month and 1 strategy document a month. That is enough to judge the output quality, not enough to run a content program on.

Is Clearscope worth it?

It is if a numeric content grade changes what your writers do. At $129 a month for 50 pages, the cost per briefed page is about $2.58 before add-ons, which is cheap next to a writer's time. It stops being worth it when nobody looks at the grade before publishing.

What is a good alternative to MarketMuse?

Frase, if the appeal was briefs and drafting, at a published $39 a month. Clearscope, if the appeal was rigor in scoring. If what you wanted was the topic model that plans a whole cluster, nothing else in this price band replicates it, which is a large part of why MarketMuse can decline to publish a price.

Which content optimization tool is best for agencies?

Frase Scale at $239 a month billed yearly, on seat economics: five seats included and $29 for each one after. Clearscope includes unlimited users at every tier, which beats that on paper, but its page allowance is the constraint instead: 50 pages on Essentials, then $25 for each extra hundred.

Do these tools write the article for you?

Frase drafts, and meters it: $5 per extra article past your allowance on Professional. Clearscope includes a monthly draft allowance, 20 on Essentials, with extras at $50. MarketMuse produces briefs and strategy documents rather than finished copy. None of the three publishes the page for you.

What does query fan-out mean in Clearscope?

It is Clearscope's term for the web searches an AI assistant fires off behind the scenes to assemble one answer. Seeing that fan-out tells you which queries actually feed the response, so you can write for those rather than for the question the user typed. Every Clearscope plan now includes it.

The short version

Frase at $39 a month billed yearly is the cheapest complete workflow and the right default for a small team briefing and drafting its own work. Clearscope at $129 buys precision rather than breadth, and its 2026 additions mean you are now also buying AI prompt tracking whether you wanted it or not. MarketMuse is the deepest of the three and the only one that will not quote you, which is itself information about where its floor sits. Budget from the add-on lines rather than the sticker, because seats at Frase and pages at Clearscope are what actually decide the invoice.

If your shortlist is wider than these three, the content brief template and generator page carries the full field list and the worked example, Surfer SEO alternatives covers the content editor end of the category, and SEO software pricing puts the wider market on one grid.

Last updated August 2026. Frase, Clearscope and MarketMuse prices and plan allowances read on 21 August 2026 from frase.io, clearscope.io and marketmuse.com. MarketMuse published no price on that date.