Best Ahrefs Alternatives in 2026 for Backlinks and Rank Tracking
Ahrefs Lite costs $129 a month, refreshes rankings once a week and has no free trial. Below: what other suites give for the same money or less, plus free tools for the basics.
Short answer: SE Ranking Core is the closest swap. For the same $129 a month it tracks 2,000 keywords daily instead of 750 weekly, with a 14-day trial and no card. On a tight budget, Mangools‘ SEO-only Basic costs $29.90 a month billed annually. Stay with Ahrefs if you rely on Content Explorer (Standard plan, $249).
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On this page: Pricing · Cons · Comparison table · Tool by tool · Daily tracking · Free tools · Backlink index · Which to pick · Method · FAQ.
What Ahrefs costs in 2026 and what Lite includes
The pricing page lists four main plans: Lite at $129 a month, Standard at $249, Advanced at $449, and Enterprise from $1,499 a month with an annual commitment. A year costs the same as ten monthly payments, so Lite works out to $1,290 a year, or $107.50 a month.
Lite includes the following.
- 5 projects and 6 months of historical data;
- 750 tracked keywords in Rank Tracker;
- 100,000 Site Audit crawl credits a month, with up to 25,000 pages per project;
- 1,000 report credits per user and 2,500 rows per report;
- 5 tracked AI prompts, plus API and MCP access;
- one user, with up to two more at $40 a month each.
Content Explorer, Portfolios and Batch Analysis are missing from Lite; they start on Standard. AI extras are priced on their own: the Brand Radar index of AI answers costs from $199 a month, and AI Content Helper costs $99 a month for 50 documents.
The cheaper door is Starter at $29 a month. It is credit-based, with 200 credits a month for reports in tools such as Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer, while Site Audit and Rank Tracker run on their own limits. Starter renews monthly only and takes no extra users or add-ons.
Its terms also warn: “Features and limits on this plan may be changed without prior notice”. If you already pay for Lite, read one more line before planning a cheaper month: “You cannot downgrade from a Lite or higher plan to a Starter plan”.
Cons of Ahrefs people actually hit
Sources: the vendor’s pricing FAQ and terms, plus customer reviews read on 7 October 2026.
- No trial and no discounts. The pricing FAQ is blunt: “We never run discounts”. The only way in without paying is the free account, which covers sites you verify as your own.
- Refunds are the exception. The FAQ says the company “does not issue refunds in general”. A monthly subscriber who has not used the service can ask, but the request may be declined if there is “material activity” in the account.
- Weekly rankings on every plan. The pricing page shows weekly Rank Tracker updates on all plans and lists no daily option. Its plan configuration does list a daily add-on ($100 a month on Lite, $150 on Standard, $200 on Advanced) that the page does not advertise (checked 7 October 2026).
- Usage charges run on autopilot. Extra users who are not prepaid are billed pay-as-you-go. Once pay-as-you-go credits are switched on, “you’ll be automatically charged when consumption exceeds your plan’s limits”. Section 7.5 of the terms adds that charges continue “for any accrued pay-as-you-go usage even after the cessation” of the plan.
- Seats get expensive for teams. Lite includes one user. In March 2026 a Capterra reviewer wrote that sharing seats across a marketing department would be very costly.
Trustpilot reviews lean negative: the company scored 2.2 out of 5 from 323 reviews on 7 October 2026, and half of those reviews give one star. Of the eight newest reviews that day, two one-star reviews describe restrictions on paid accounts.
In May 2026 a buyer wrote that the plan worked for about ten days before repeated restrictions for suspicious activity began. In September another reviewer said two of the five paid accounts in one workspace were blocked by an automated system. A third one-star review from September argues that the traffic estimates look more precise than they are and differ widely from the reviewer’s own analytics.
On Capterra the tool holds 4.7 out of 5 from about 585 reviews, and an April 2026 reviewer wrote that keyword, backlink and competitor insights of this quality are hard to find elsewhere. Switching can mean a step down in data.
The alternatives compared: prices and limits
| Tool and entry plan | Price | Rank tracking | Backlink data | Trial and refunds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ahrefs Lite | $129 / $107.50 | 750 keywords, weekly | 2,500 rows per report | No trial; no refunds in general |
| SE Ranking Core | $129 / $103.20 | 2,000 keywords, daily | Included; 50,000 export rows | 14 days, no card; non-refundable |
| Mangools Basic | $49 / $29.90 SEO only; $61 / $37.70 with AI (shown first) | 200 keywords, weekly | 100,000 rows a month | Free plan; refund within 48 hours |
| Semrush SEO | $139.95 / $117.33 | 500 keywords, daily | Included; 10,000 results per report | 7 days, card needed; refunds on annual only |
| Moz Pro Standard | $99 / $79 (first year) | 300 keywords, weekly | 5,000 queries a month | Trial on Medium only; no refunds |
| SpyFu Basic | $39 / $29 | 5,000 keywords, weekly | 10,000-row searches | No trial; 30-day money-back |
| Serpstat Individual | $69 / $50 | 10,000 checks a month, daily | Included | 7 days; card and $1 check, auto-renews |
| Ubersuggest Individual | $29 / €16 (euros) | 125 keywords, weekly | 2,000 backlinks | 7 days on monthly plans |
| Similarweb with SEO | $399 / $333 | Included | Included | 7 days |
Ubersuggest showed us euro prices on 7 October 2026: Individual costs US$29 a month or €16 a month billed annually (€192 a year). SpyFu’s live pricing page blocked our check, and its prices come from an archived copy dated 27 September 2026.
The best alternatives, tool by tool
Each Ahrefs alternative below is judged on what you gain and lose against Lite, the price, how trials and refunds work, and the main catch.
SE Ranking: the same price, more tracking
SE Ranking Core costs $129 a month or $103.20 a month billed annually. It includes 10 projects, 2,000 keywords and 100 AI prompts tracked daily, a site audit of 250,000 pages a month and 25,000 API credits with MCP access. Local marketing is part of the plan: three locations and a local and map rank tracker for 1,500 keywords.
The 14-day trial needs no card, though it is capped at 750 keywords and 20 AI prompts a day. The AI tracking covers ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, AI Mode, Perplexity and Gemini.
The catches: payments are “non-refundable, except in cases where the service wasn’t delivered as promised”, historical data on Core is listed as “6/mo” against “All time” on Growth, and one login allows one active session.
The entry price doubled this year: in January 2026 the cheapest plan was Essential at $65 a month for 500 keywords; by late February it was Core at $129 for 2,000. On Trustpilot SE Ranking scores 4.2 from 712 reviews; a June 2026 one-star review complains that the account was moved to a significantly more expensive plan without the customer’s consent.
Mangools: keywords and links under $50
Mangools sells one bundle of KWFinder, SERPChecker, SERPWatcher, LinkMiner and SiteProfiler; the tools are not sold separately. The SEO-only Basic plan costs $49 a month or $358.80 a year. It gives 100 keyword lookups per 24 hours, 200 tracked keywords and 100,000 backlink rows a month. LinkMiner runs on Majestic data, which Mangools puts at 9.5 trillion backlinks across fresh and historic indexes.
Check three limits before you switch. Rankings update weekly, with daily updates only on the Agency plan. Tracking one keyword on desktop and mobile counts as two. And no site audit tool appears in the bundle’s tool list.
The pricing page opens on the SEO + AI version of Basic, at $61 a month ($37.70 billed annually), which raises AI Search Watcher from 5 to 500 prompts a week across eight AI systems. Refunds are possible within 48 hours of payment. Trustpilot: 4.5 from 167 reviews.
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Semrush: daily tracking, but not a cheaper bill
Semrush’s entry plan is now called SEO: $139.95 a month or $117.33 billed annually, for 5 websites and 500 keywords tracked daily. AI visibility is not in it. That starts with the Starter plan at $199 a month, or with the separate AI Visibility Toolkit at $99 a month, which has no trial.
The 7-day trial on the main plans needs a card. Refunds cover only a first annual purchase, within 7 days, and “refunds are not available for month-to-month subscriptions”. Semrush has been part of Adobe since 28 April 2026 and holds 1.7 on Trustpilot from 1,411 reviews.
Moz Pro: Domain Authority and weekly ranks
Moz Pro Standard costs $99 a month, or $79 a month on a yearly plan for the first year; the pricing page does not state the renewal price. It covers 3 sites, 300 keywords tracked weekly, 400,000 crawled pages a month and 5,000 backlink queries, but only 150 keyword queries a month.
A $49 Starter plan is aimed at people managing a single website. Moz says it does not offer “refunds of any kind”. Its free trial is limited to the Medium plan on monthly billing, and Moz does not state the length on its pricing page. Trustpilot: 2.4 from 242 reviews.
SpyFu: competitors’ Google Ads history
SpyFu Basic costs $39 a month or $29 billed annually and tracks 5,000 keywords weekly. Its signature data is paid search: the vendor says you can “See the results of every ad split test they’ve ever run” for a competitor’s Google Ads. Basic has no historical data and no API, and its searches stop at 10,000 rows.
Instead of a trial there is a 30-day money-back guarantee, but cancelling in your account does not refund you; you have to ask support. Watch the Pro + AI price: $59 for the first month, then $119. Trustpilot: 3.4 from 152 reviews.
Serpstat: daily rank checks on a small budget
Serpstat Individual costs $69 a month or $50 billed annually. It includes 5 projects, 100 searches a day, 10,000 rank checks a month with daily updates, a 30,000-page site audit and backlink analysis. API access, AI tools and JavaScript rendering start on the $129 Team plan.
The 7-day trial takes a card and a $1 verification charge, returned within 5–30 minutes. Auto-renewal is on from the start, so the full price is charged after 7 days unless you cancel. Trustpilot shows only 19 reviews (3.0), too few to read much into.
Ubersuggest: a lifetime deal with weekly data
Ubersuggest’s Individual plan costs US$29 a month, or €16 a month billed annually. It covers one website with 150 reports a day, 125 tracked keywords updated weekly, 2,000 backlinks and a 1,000-page weekly audit. There is no API. The pricing page pushes a one-time lifetime payment under a “Save 90% off with lifetime access” banner.
Read the terms first: lifetime purchases are “final and non-refundable”, and switching to lifetime “keeps only your oldest project”. Trustpilot (ubersuggest.com): 4.2 from 576 reviews.
Similarweb: traffic data, not a budget swap
Similarweb’s entry plan, Competitive Intelligence ($199 a month, $125 billed annually), has no SEO data. Keywords, rank tracking, audit and backlinks start at $399 ($333 billed annually), with 150 AI prompts and a 7-day trial. Trustpilot: 4.4 from 790 reviews.
Cheaper alternatives to Ahrefs for daily rank tracking
If Rank Tracker is the main reason you pay, weekly updates are Lite’s weak spot. With the daily add-on from its plan configuration, which the pricing page does not advertise, Lite would cost $229 a month for 750 keywords.
- SE Ranking Core: $129 for 2,000 keywords, the most keywords per dollar in this group.
- Mangools Agency (SEO only): $129 for 1,500 keywords; the cheaper Mangools plans update weekly.
- Semrush SEO: $139.95 for 500 keywords.
- Serpstat Individual: $69 for a budget of 10,000 position checks a month rather than a fixed keyword list.
Annual billing does not close the gap: the configuration prices that add-on at $1,000 a year on top of $1,290 for Lite, while a year of SE Ranking Core costs $1,238.40 with 2,000 daily keywords included.
Free alternatives to Ahrefs
No free tool replaces a paid link index for competitor research, but for your own site these cover a lot.
- Ahrefs Free (the renamed Webmaster Tools): no card and no time limit. Site Explorer, Site Audit and Web Analytics work for websites you verify, with 5,000 crawl credits per project a month and 1,000 backlinks and keywords visible at once. Keywords Explorer and Rank Tracker are not included.
- Google Search Console: clicks, impressions and indexing data from Google itself. Traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode is counted inside the “Web” search type rather than shown separately.
- Bing Webmaster Tools: its AI Performance report, launched in public preview in February 2026, counts how often Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries cite your pages.
- Mangools free plan: 5 lookups per 24 hours, with 15 related and 5 competitor keywords per lookup, and no card.
- Semrush Free: 10 reports a day, one demo project and 10 tracked keywords for one site.
- Moz free account: 10 Link Explorer queries a month.
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: free for crawls of up to 500 URLs; a licence costs $279 a year.
Backlink index: what you actually need
Each of these vendors publishes an index size, and each counts something different, so treat the figures below as claims, not a ranking.
- Ahrefs: 35 trillion records of external backlink history, and a live index “updated with fresh data every 15–30 minutes”.
- Semrush: a database “of over 43 trillion backlinks”, fed by a crawler that covers about 10 billion pages a day.
- Moz: 45.5 trillion links on the Link Explorer page, while menus in its own Help Hub say “over 44 trillion” and “over 40 trillion”.
- Mangools (LinkMiner): 9.5 trillion backlinks from Majestic’s fresh and historic indexes.
- SE Ranking: 2.7 trillion backlinks across 420 million indexed domains on its data page, but 2.9 trillion backlinks and 411 million referring domains on its backlink checker page.
Three practical questions matter more than the headline number: does the tool show the links your competitors earned this year, how fast do new links appear, and how many rows does your plan show? Moz says new links show up “within about 3 days of being found”.
The cheapest test is to look up your own site or a competitor whose links you already know, in a trial or free account, and count how many of them each tool finds. DR and DA are each vendor’s own 100-point score, and Moz states that Domain Authority “is not a Google ranking factor”.
Which one to pick
- Same budget, more tracking: SE Ranking Core. History is six months, as on Lite, and payments are non-refundable; all-time history starts on the $279 Growth plan.
- $50 a month or less on annual billing: Mangools Basic ($29.90) for keyword research and links; Serpstat Individual ($50, or $69 month to month) if daily rank checks matter more.
- Paid search research: SpyFu, for competitors’ Google Ads history.
- Local business: SE Ranking includes three locations in Core; Moz Local is a separate product from $20 a month per location.
- AI visibility instead of Brand Radar: SE Ranking Core includes 100 prompts a day across four engines (AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT and Gemini as of 21 October 2026; Perplexity is tracked in SE Visible, a separate product); the Mangools SEO + AI bundle tracks 500 a week in eight. For a dedicated platform, see our Writesonic review: Starter costs $79 a month billed annually and tracks ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews.
- Stay where you are: if your work depends on link data that Ahrefs says refreshes every 15–30 minutes, or on Content Explorer, which starts on Standard. If you only need data on your own site, the free account may be enough.
How we compared these tools
We compared plans, limits and terms from each vendor’s pricing page, help center and terms of service on 7 October 2026. We did not run these suites side by side in our own accounts, so we make no claims about their data accuracy. Ratings come from Trustpilot and Capterra on the same day; review comments are paraphrased and dated by month.
Several pricing pages show euros to visitors in Europe. For SE Ranking, Semrush and Mangools, the dollar prices come from archived copies of the same pages dated 2–6 October 2026. The list covers the main Ahrefs competitors for keywords, links and rank tracking. Not included this time: Majestic, SEO PowerSuite and enterprise suites such as seoClarity, whose current prices we have not checked.
Ahrefs runs no affiliate program, so recommending it or not earns us nothing. Links to SE Ranking and Mangools may earn us a commission. Our rules are in How we test and the editorial and transparency policy.
FAQ
Neither wins across the board. Semrush’s SEO plan costs $139.95 a month and tracks 500 keywords daily, while Ahrefs Lite costs $129 and tracks 750 keywords weekly. Semrush lets you test for 7 days with a card; its rival offers no trial. Both rate poorly on Trustpilot, at 1.7 and 2.2. Choose by the reports you open every week.
Yes, within limits. Ahrefs Free needs no card and has no end date. Site Explorer, Site Audit and Web Analytics work only on websites you verify, Site Explorer shows 1,000 backlinks and keywords at a time, and Keywords Explorer and Rank Tracker are left out. Researching a competitor’s links therefore needs Starter ($29) or a higher plan.
Cost and terms. One Lite seat costs $129 a month and extra users cost $40 each. Rank Tracker refreshes weekly on every plan, and the pricing page lists no daily option. Refunds are rare, and pay-as-you-go usage is billed automatically once enabled. Its Trustpilot score was 2.2 on 7 October 2026, with complaints about account restrictions and traffic estimates.
For a small site we would start with five. Google Search Console covers clicks, impressions and indexing. Bing Webmaster Tools now reports AI citations in Copilot. The free Ahrefs account audits your own site and shows its links. Mangools’ free plan gives 5 lookups every 24 hours, and Screaming Frog crawls up to 500 URLs for free.
On vendors’ own claims, Moz cites 45.5 trillion links, Semrush over 43 trillion backlinks and Ahrefs 35 trillion records of link history; Mangools cites 9.5 trillion from Majestic. The counts measure different things, so test each tool on your own site or a competitor whose links you already know.
Serpstat Individual, at $69 a month or $50 billed annually, is the cheapest plan here with daily updates, but it counts 10,000 position checks a month, not keywords. For a fixed list, SE Ranking Core tracks 2,000 keywords daily for $129.
No. The Starter plan’s terms rule out a downgrade from Lite or any higher plan. Starter is also billed monthly only, comes with 200 credits a month and cannot take extra users or add-ons. If Lite feels too expensive, the realistic options are the free account for your own sites or a cheaper suite from this list.