Moz pricing vs Semrush pricing for a small in-house SEO team: the seat line that reverses the answer

For a three person in-house team, Moz Medium at $179 a month and the Semrush SEO plan at $139 a month end up costing almost exactly the same once seats are added: $228 against $229. Moz gets you 1,500 tracked keywords for that money and Semrush gets you 500. The headline prices point one way and the real bill points the other, because Semrush prices every published plan for a single login and charges $45 a month for each person after that.

That one line is the whole comparison for small teams, and it is buried in both companies' pricing pages rather than shown on the cards. What follows is the arithmetic, using Moz's published rates read on 30 August 2026 and Semrush's read on 25 August 2026, plus the two plans neither company puts on its grid.

How much does Moz Pro cost compared to Semrush?

Tier for tier, Moz is the cheaper ladder and it is not close. Semrush publishes SEO at $139 a month, Starter at $199, Pro+ at $299 and Advanced at $549. Moz publishes Standard at $99, Medium at $179 and Large at $299, with an unlisted Starter plan at $49.

The comparison that matters is not card against card, though, because the tiers are not cut at the same capacity. Line them up on tracked keywords instead and the picture sharpens:

The middle row is the one most teams land on after outgrowing an entry plan, and it is the most lopsided. Identical keyword capacity, $120 a month apart, which is $1,440 a year. Nothing else in this comparison is that stark, and it is worth knowing before you renew rather than after.

None of that means the two products are interchangeable. Semrush carries a deeper backlink index, and it covers advertising, PR and social alongside SEO. If the same three people also buy or manage paid media, Semrush is replacing subscriptions rather than competing on keyword allowance, and the price comparison stops being the relevant one. The full tier-by-tier read on both ladders is on our Moz Pro vs Semrush comparison.

What a three person team actually pays

Here is where the headline prices reverse. Semrush prices every published plan for one login. Extra seats are $45 a month each. Moz includes one seat on Standard, two on Medium and three on Large, and sells additional seats at $49.

Run the same three people through both:

• Moz Medium: $179 for the plan with two seats included, plus one seat at $49, so $228 a month. Capacity: 1,500 tracked keywords across 10 sites.
• Semrush SEO: $139 for the plan with one seat, plus two seats at $45, so $229 a month. Capacity: 500 tracked keywords.
• Semrush Pro+: $299 plus two seats at $45, so $389 a month for the same 1,500 keywords Moz gives you at $228.

A dollar apart at the bottom, $161 a month apart at matched capacity. Over a year that last row is $1,932, which for a small in-house team is a contractor month or most of a conference budget. This is also why headline-price roundups mislead: they compare cards, and no team of three buys a card.

The same logic runs the other way at team size one. A solo in-house SEO on Moz Standard pays $99 against $139 for Semrush SEO, a $40 gap rather than a structural one, and at that size Semrush's extra surface area is often worth the difference.

The $49 Moz plan that is not on the pricing page

Moz sells a Moz Pro entry plan at $49 a month for individuals managing a single website. It does not appear as a card on the comparison grid. It sits in a line of text underneath, and a buyer who scrolls the three cards and picks the cheapest one pays $99.

That is a $600 a year difference resting entirely on whether you read past a pricing table, and it is the single most useful thing we found while transcribing all three Moz products. Moz publishes no quota grid for it beyond the statement that it suits one site, so ask what it includes before assuming it is Standard with fewer campaigns. We put it next to every other tier on our Moz pricing breakdown, along with Moz Local and the Moz API, which are separate subscriptions with their own ladders.

Semrush has no equivalent hidden tier, but it does have the mirror-image trap: its API is sold as a separate purchase on top of a qualifying plan, so programmatic access is two line items rather than one. If that is the part you were pricing, the arithmetic is on our Semrush API pricing page and it is higher than most people expect.

Where paying yearly changes the numbers

Moz advertises 20 percent off annual billing and the published totals check out exactly: $950 for the first year of Standard against $1,188 monthly, $1,719 for Medium against $2,148, and $2,868 for Large against $3,588. Savings of $238, $429 and $720. There is no rounding trick.

One phrase to raise with sales: Moz words those as billed for your first year and does not publish the renewal rate. If you are putting a multi-year line into a budget, get the year two number in writing rather than assuming the introductory total repeats. That is standard practice in this category and it is not a criticism of Moz specifically, but it is the sort of thing that turns a clean comparison into an awkward conversation eleven months later.

We did not re-verify Semrush's annual discount this week, so we are not going to quote one. Comparing an annual Moz rate against a monthly Semrush rate would flatter Moz for no good reason, which is why every side-by-side figure above is monthly for both.

Which should a small in-house team buy?

Buy Moz if the three of you do SEO, the budget is a real constraint, and Domain Authority is already the number your reporting runs on. At matched capacity you keep roughly $1,900 a year, and the interface has been stable long enough that onboarding a new hire costs an afternoon rather than a week.

Buy Semrush if those three people also touch paid search, social or competitive PR, or if backlink depth is genuinely load-bearing for the work. Semrush wins on index size and on breadth, and once it is replacing two other subscriptions the per-seat surcharge stops mattering.

Buy neither, or buy the cheaper one, if what is actually slowing the team down is not knowing what to fix. That is the more common failure and it is worth naming honestly. Three people can generate more findings in a week than they can implement in a quarter, and the tool that produced the list does not shrink it. If the backlog is the constraint rather than the data, a cheaper research subscription plus something that turns findings into shippable copy usually beats upgrading a tier. Teams running both tools in parallel also hit a smaller version of the same wall on reporting, where wiring the exports into one place turns into its own maintenance job before anyone has acted on a single recommendation.

What we do, and what we do not

We should be plain about our position here, because we sell a competing product. Seomake is not a Moz replacement and not a Semrush replacement. We have no link index, no keyword volume database and no crawler behind us, and if Domain Authority or backlink data is what you are buying, buy one of them.

What Seomake does is the step after the audit. Paste a URL and the keyword it should rank for, and it reads the live page and writes the corrected title tag, meta description, heading outline, intro and the keyword gaps, as copy you can paste into the CMS. Moz meters AI content briefs at 2 a month on Standard and 10 on Medium. We do not meter audits at all. Our ladder is $49, $149 and $499 a month and is published on our pricing page.

If the reason you are here is that Semrush costs more than it returns, the fuller list of options, including how to buy rows through an API instead of paying for seats, is on our cheaper alternatives to Semrush page.

Questions people ask

Is Moz cheaper than Semrush?

At every comparable tier, yes. Moz Pro Standard is $99 a month against $139 for the Semrush SEO plan. Moz Medium is $179 against $299 for Semrush Pro+, and both track 1,500 keywords. The gap widens with team size, because Moz Medium includes two seats and every published Semrush plan includes one.

How much does Moz Pro cost for a team of three?

Moz Medium is $179 a month and includes two seats, so a third seat at $49 brings it to $228 a month. That buys 1,500 tracked keywords across 10 sites. The same three people on the $139 Semrush SEO plan pay $229 with two extra seats at $45 each, and get 500 tracked keywords.

Does Semrush include more than one user?

No. Every published Semrush plan is priced for a single login, and additional seats are $45 a month each. That is the line that decides this comparison for most small teams, because it turns a headline price into a per-person one and it does not appear until you are already comparing feature grids.

What is the cheapest Moz plan?

Moz sells an entry plan at $49 a month for individuals managing a single website. It is not shown as a card on the pricing grid, only in a line of text below it, so most buyers never see it and start at $99. If you run one site and work alone, ask for it by name.

Should a small in-house team buy Moz or Semrush?

Buy Moz if the team does SEO and the budget is the constraint, because the keyword allowance per dollar is roughly three times better once seats are counted. Buy Semrush if the same people also run paid search, social or PR, because it replaces several subscriptions and the comparison stops being about SEO alone.

Does paying yearly change the answer?

It changes the size of the gap, not its direction. Moz bills $950, $1,719 and $2,868 for the first year of Standard, Medium and Large, which is a genuine 20 percent off the monthly rate. Check the renewal rate before signing, because Moz words those totals as the first year rather than the standing price.

Last updated August 2026. Moz prices and plan limits read off moz.com/products/pro/pricing on 30 August 2026. Semrush prices read off semrush.com/pricing on 25 August 2026.