Free. No account, no card.

Audit my page

01 / COMPARISON

Semrush vs Searchmetrics, SEO PowerSuite, MarketMuse, SEOptimer and SEOquake: every Semrush competitor compared

Ten tools people put next to Semrush, checked one by one in August 2026. Two of them are not what the comparison posts still say they are. While you read, point the audit at a page you actually care about.

02 / The short answer

Which Semrush competitor you should actually be comparing

Ahrefs is the only true like for like Semrush competitor, at $129 a month against Semrush's $139. Moz Pro is the cheapest full suite at $99. SEO PowerSuite is the cheapest serious option overall at $349 a year, because it runs on your desktop instead of in a data center. Two names that still appear in comparison posts are misleading: Searchmetrics no longer exists as a product and its domain now redirects to Conductor, and SEOquake is not a Semrush rival at all, it is a free browser extension in the Semrush family.

The reason those two keep showing up is that comparison content ages badly and almost nobody re-checks it. Searchmetrics was a serious European platform with a widely cited SEO Visibility metric, so it earned thousands of links and mentions that are still sitting there pointing at a brand that was absorbed three years ago. SEOquake has always been free, which means every listicle that needed a tenth entry reached for it.

Strip those out and the real decision is smaller than it looks. You are choosing between a research index (Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz), a desktop license that trades convenience for price (SEO PowerSuite), a content optimizer (Surfer, MarketMuse), a client reporting tool (SEOptimer), or an automation layer that changes pages for you (Search Atlas). Those are five different purchases and only the first group is genuinely competing with Semrush.

Last updated August 2026. Redirect behavior for searchmetrics.com and seoquake.com checked directly on 3 August 2026. SEO PowerSuite and SEOptimer prices read off their own pages the same day. Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, Surfer and Search Atlas prices read 31 July 2026.

03 / Every Semrush competitor

Ten tools compared, including the two that are not what they were

Cheapest paid tier shown, monthly unless stated. The status column is the one most comparison tables leave out, and it is the one that changes.

Tool	What it actually is	Entry price	Status in 2026	Best for
Ahrefs	Research suite with the strongest backlink index	$29 Starter, $129 Lite	Active	Link and keyword research at scale
Moz Pro	Full suite, cheapest complete one	$49 entry, $99 Standard	Active	Small teams wanting everything in one place
Conductor	Enterprise organic marketing platform	No list price, demo only	Active, absorbed Searchmetrics	Large in-house marketing organizations
Searchmetrics	Former European SEO visibility platform	Not sold separately	Retired, domain 301s to Conductor	Nobody, it no longer exists
SEO PowerSuite	Four desktop apps, annual license	$349 a year Professional	Active	Consultants who want no per seat cloud bill
Surfer	Content optimization and briefs	EUR 49 Discovery, EUR 99 Standard	Active	Writers optimizing drafts against a SERP
MarketMuse	Content strategy and topic modeling	No public prices	Active inside Siteimprove	Content teams planning at topic level
SEOptimer	Audits and white label client reports	$29 to $59	Active	Agencies producing branded audit PDFs
Search Atlas / OTTO	Automation agent that applies fixes	$99 Starter, $199 Growth	Active	Teams wanting changes deployed for them
SEOquake	Free browser extension for SERP metrics	Free	Active, a Semrush family product	Everyone, alongside whatever else you buy

Semrush itself, for reference, lists SEO at $139, Starter at $199, Pro+ at $299 and Advanced at $549 a month as of 31 July 2026. The older Pro, Guru and Business plan names have been retired. Surfer is quoted in euros because surferseo.com geolocates and displayed euros to our request rather than dollars.

04 / Semrush vs Searchmetrics

There is no Semrush vs Searchmetrics decision left to make

Searchmetrics cannot be bought. Conductor acquired the company in a transaction that closed on 2 February 2023, folded the two platforms together, and retired the brand. Visit searchmetrics.com today and you get a 301 redirect to conductor.com. Conductor's own pricing page does not mention Searchmetrics anywhere.

The acquisition brought Searchmetrics' development team, more than ten years of data indexes, around 500 customers and roughly 70 staff into Conductor, with a stated plan to combine both products into a single platform over about 18 months. That timeline has long since passed. What is left is a redirect and a lot of comparison content that nobody updated.

If you arrived here because you used Searchmetrics and want the closest thing to it, the honest answer depends on what you used it for. If it was the SEO Visibility index and enterprise reporting, Conductor is the direct continuation and you should talk to them, accepting that they publish no list prices at all: the three tiers are Essentials, Growth and Enterprise, and each one routes you to a trial, a demo request or a sales conversation. If you used it as a research tool for a normal sized site, you were paying enterprise prices for something Ahrefs or Semrush does for $129 to $139 a month.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Searchmetrics customers lost a metric, not just a login. The SEO Visibility score was a proprietary index, which means historical trend lines built on it cannot be reconstructed anywhere else. That is the real cost of a platform being absorbed, and it is worth thinking about before you commit years of reporting to any single vendor's invented number. We walked through the full timeline and the replacement options in what happened to Searchmetrics.

05 / Semrush vs SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is a quarter of the price because it runs on your machine

SEO PowerSuite Professional costs $349 a year, about $29 a month, against roughly $1,668 a year for Semrush SEO. The reason is architectural rather than commercial: SEO PowerSuite is four desktop applications that crawl using your own computer and your own connection, so the vendor is not paying to run the crawl.

The four apps are Rank Tracker, WebSite Auditor, SEO SpyGlass and LinkAssistant, and they are sold as a bundle or individually. Buying them separately is often the smarter move: Rank Tracker Professional alone is $179 a year and WebSite Auditor Professional is $149, so if you only need two of the four you can be under $330 rather than paying for a bundle you use half of.

Plan	Price	Projects	Limits	Reporting
Free	$0	1 project, cannot be saved	500 URL crawls, 1,100 backlinks, 1 competitor	No report saving or export
Professional	$349 a year	Unlimited projects and keywords	Unlimited crawls and backlinks, 5 competitors	No export, no white label, no scheduling
Enterprise	$599 a year	Unlimited	40 competitors	White label, PDF and HTML export, scheduled delivery
Max +	$899 a year	Unlimited	Everything in Enterprise	Onboarding, success manager, partner directory

Read off link-assistant.com on 3 August 2026. All tiers are billed annually; there is no monthly option. The vendor advertises further discounts for two and three year prepayment.

What the price gap actually costs you

Three things, and you should decide whether you care about any of them. First, nothing runs while your laptop is shut, so scheduled overnight crawls and Monday morning reports are not really a thing unless you leave a machine on. Second, there is no shared cloud dashboard, so a colleague cannot open the same project without a copy of the software and the project file. Third, big crawls take as long as your hardware and your connection take, where a cloud crawler parallelizes across a fleet.

For one consultant working on client sites, none of those are real problems and the saving is around $1,300 a year. For a marketing team of four who need a shared view, all three are dealbreakers and the seat math never arrives to rescue you, because there are no seats to buy. That is the whole trade, and it is a cleaner one than most comparisons make it sound.

06 / The other three people search for

MarketMuse, SEOptimer and SEOquake are not competing for the same budget

All three get typed into search boxes next to Semrush, and all three are solving a different problem. Treating them as substitutes is how people end up paying twice for one job and nothing for another.

MarketMuse

A content strategy and topic modeling platform, now owned by Siteimprove. The deal was announced on 8 October 2024 and completed on 31 October 2024, and MarketMuse continues as a product inside the Siteimprove suite rather than being retired.

Its pricing page lists Free, Optimize, Research and Strategy but publishes no dollar figures against any of them, so budget for a sales conversation. It answers "what should we write about and in what order", which Semrush does more shallowly and neither does instead of the other.

SEOptimer

An audit tool built around white label client reporting. DIY SEO is $29 a month, White Label is $39, and White Label and Embedding is $59, with 25 percent off annually, so $261, $351 and $531 a year.

The top tier's embeddable audit form is the actual product for most buyers: it turns an agency site into a lead capture page. Keyword tracking tops out at 250, so it is a reporting tool with SEO features, not a research suite.

SEOquake

A free browser extension for Chrome, Firefox and Opera that overlays SEO metrics on any page or SERP. It is documented in Semrush's own knowledge base and pulls extra data when you connect a Semrush account.

Its own domain, seoquake.com, now issues a 301 to backlinko.com, another Semrush group property. So "Semrush vs SEOquake" has no answer: install it regardless of what else you buy, because it costs nothing.

07 / The rivals worth a real comparison

The four that genuinely compete for the same money

Once the retired and the free are set aside, four tools are actually in the running against a Semrush subscription. Each has a dedicated comparison rather than a paragraph.

Ahrefs, from $129

The closest match and the better backlink index. Cheaper at every comparable tier, with more tracked keywords per dollar, but fewer tools bundled in. The full head to head, including seat costs and AI prompt allowances, is on Semrush vs Ahrefs.

Moz Pro, from $99

The cheapest complete suite, and the cheapest place to get AI visibility tracking bundled inside one. Smaller index than either leader, which matters more in competitive niches than easy ones. Detail on the Moz alternative comparison.

Surfer, from EUR 49

Not a suite at all. It optimizes a draft against what is already ranking, which is one slice of what Semrush does and a better slice than Semrush's version. Priced and assessed on the Surfer SEO alternative page.

Search Atlas and OTTO, from $99

Competes on automation rather than data: OTTO applies fixes to your live site through a pixel. Worth understanding the cancellation behavior before you commit, which we cover on the OTTO SEO alternative page.

If the question underneath all of this is budget rather than features, the full price ladder for every tool named on this page sits on our SEO software pricing comparison, including cost per tracked keyword and per tracked AI prompt. If you have decided to leave Semrush specifically, the replacement case is on the Semrush alternative page.

08 / Where we fit

We are not on that list, and it is worth saying why

Seomake does not run a web index. There is no backlink database here, no global keyword volume corpus and no competitor traffic estimates. That makes us a poor Semrush replacement and a straightforward thing to explain: if the reason you are on this page is that you need competitor data, buy Ahrefs or Semrush, and the comparisons above exist to help you buy the right one.

What we do is the part every tool above treats as the follow up. You give us a URL and the query it should rank for, and you get the score, the specific reasons behind it, and the corrected title, meta description, headings and body copy written and ready to paste. Starter is $49 a month for one site with unlimited audits, no credits and 100 tracked keywords. Growth is $149 for five sites, three seats, 1,000 keywords, whole site crawling and weekly scheduled re-audits.

The pairing most of our customers land on is a research suite plus us, and it is the one we would recommend to ourselves. Research tells you where to point. Execution changes the page. Buying two research products, which is what happens when someone shortlists Semrush against Ahrefs against Moz and then buys two of them, is the most common way an SEO budget gets spent on the same answer twice.

09 / Asked and answered

Semrush competitors, question by question

Who are Semrush's main competitors?

Ahrefs is the closest like for like rival and the one most shortlists come down to. Moz Pro competes below it on price, Surfer and MarketMuse compete only on content optimization, Search Atlas competes on automation, and Conductor competes at enterprise level. SEO PowerSuite is the desktop outsider.

Is Searchmetrics still available?

No. Searchmetrics is no longer sold as its own product. Conductor acquired the company in a deal that closed on 2 February 2023 and merged the platforms. As of 3 August 2026, searchmetrics.com issues a 301 redirect to conductor.com, and Conductor's pricing page does not mention the Searchmetrics name at all.

What happened to Searchmetrics?

Conductor bought it. The acquisition closed on 2 February 2023, bringing Searchmetrics' European team, its data indexes and around 500 customers into Conductor, with the two platforms to be combined into one over roughly 18 months. The brand has since been retired and the domain redirects.

Is SEO PowerSuite better than Semrush?

It is cheaper and structured differently, not better. SEO PowerSuite runs on your desktop and costs $349 a year for Professional against Semrush at $139 a month, so roughly $1,668 a year. You give up cloud access, shared dashboards and scheduled cloud crawls in exchange for that gap.

Is SEOquake the same as Semrush?

They are not rivals. SEOquake is a free browser extension that sits in the Semrush family, documented in Semrush's own knowledge base, and it pulls extra data when you connect a Semrush account. Comparing them is like comparing a dashboard light to the engine, so run both.

Is SEOquake free?

Yes, completely. SEOquake is free for Chrome, Firefox and Opera with no subscription and no account required for its core metrics. Connecting a Semrush login unlocks additional data layers. Its own domain, seoquake.com, now redirects to backlinko.com, another property in the Semrush group.

Is MarketMuse still in business?

Yes, as part of Siteimprove. Siteimprove announced the acquisition on 8 October 2024 and completed it on 31 October 2024, and MarketMuse continues as a product inside the Siteimprove suite. Its pricing page lists four tiers, Free, Optimize, Research and Strategy, but publishes no prices.

How much does SEOptimer cost?

SEOptimer lists three plans: DIY SEO at $29 a month, White Label at $39 and White Label and Embedding at $59. Annual billing takes 25 percent off, making them $261, $351 and $531 a year. Every plan includes audits, and the two upper plans add white label PDF reporting.

Which Semrush competitor is cheapest?

For a full suite, Moz Pro Standard at $99 a month. For a one time style annual license, SEO PowerSuite Professional at $349 a year works out at about $29 a month. For audits and client reports only, SEOptimer at $29 a month. For browser level metrics, SEOquake costs nothing.

Do I need Semrush if I already have Google Search Console?

Search Console tells you about your own site with data no paid tool can match, and it is free. What it cannot do is tell you what competitors rank for or who links to them. If your decisions depend on that blind spot, you need an index. If they do not, you may not.

Whether any of these is worth the money at all is a separate question with its own arithmetic, worked through in are SEO tools worth it, and the Semrush specific version is in is Semrush worth it.

10 / Run it

Audit a page before you subscribe to any of them

Paste any URL and the query it should rank for. Seomake reads the live page, scores it, and writes the corrected title, meta description and copy. No account, no card, and it answers the question a feature comparison cannot: whether the tool is your bottleneck or the page is.

Audit my page No account for the first audit, no card

We do not train on your content and we do not sell your data. Read the security page.

Keep exploring