Ahrefs vs Semrush: Plans, Prices and Limits Side by Side, and Who Should Buy Neither

The verdict first, for readers with a renewal date

Ahrefs and Semrush are both complete SEO suites. Each researches keywords, maps a competitor's backlinks, crawls your site for faults and tracks rankings. A business that buys either one and uses it every week will be well served. A business that buys either one and opens it twice will have paid about $1,600 a year for a login. Choose on the habits you actually have, and on the two or three reports you will open most.

And a third column belongs on every comparison like this one: buy neither. A local business with forty pages and five competitors can run its SEO on Google's free tools for a long time. We come back to that case near the end, because it is the most common one we see. If the vocabulary on this page is new, the SEO tools hub lays out the whole stack by budget first.

Ahrefs and Semrush compared row by row, October 2026

Every figure below comes from the vendors' own pricing pages, help centers and FAQs, checked in October 2026. Where a vendor did not publish a number, the cell says so rather than guessing. The plans most small businesses compare are Ahrefs Lite and the Semrush SEO plan, so the table leans on those two.

Two cautions about reading it. Semrush's help center still describes the entry tier under its older SEO Toolkit name, so per-report figures come from that page. And both vendors reserve the right to change limits without notice, which they use. Confirm the plan page on the day you pay. Our separate Semrush pricing breakdown and Ahrefs review go deeper into each vendor's tiers.

Credits, rows and history: where the cheap plans pinch

The sticker prices sit $10 apart. The experience of using the two entry plans does not. Ahrefs runs Starter and Lite on credits. Its FAQ says each report you open costs one credit, and applying filters or changing dates can cost another. Reopening the same report with the same filters within 30 minutes is free, as are sorting and paging. Credits reset each billing cycle and do not roll over. Standard and above drop the meter and give each active user unlimited fair use.

Starter is the plan that tempts owners, and its help page is frank. It gets 200 credits a month, one month of history, 250 rows per report on unverified sites, no exports, 50 tracked keywords and no way to buy more credits or users. That is enough to check a list of twenty service phrases. It is not enough to study a competitor.

Semrush caps by count instead. The entry tier allows 10,000 results per report, so a rival's keyword list arrives far less trimmed, but historical data only starts at Pro+. If you want to see what a competitor ranked for three months ago, that is a $299 question at Semrush and a $129 question at Ahrefs, inside Lite's six-month window.

Two databases that count different things

Every comparison eventually asks whose data is better. The vendors' own disclosures make that question harder to answer than their ads suggest, because they measure different things in different ways.

The practical test is cheaper than any argument. Look up your own site in both, since you know the truth about it, and see which tool's list of your linking domains and ranking keywords comes closer to Search Console. Our guide to domain authority explains why the two suites' authority scores never agree, and why neither is a Google number.

Rank tracking for a business with a service area

For a local business this row decides more than any other. Rankings for "roof repair" differ from one side of San Antonio to the other, and they move during the week. Semrush's Position Tracking checks daily and lets you set the location down to a postal code, on mobile or desktop, keeping daily results for 60 days before thinning to weekly points. Ahrefs' Rank Tracker supports locations down to ZIP code too, but its help center says the default update frequency on every plan is weekly.

Weekly is fine for watching a trend. It is too slow for a business that just changed its title tags and wants to know by Friday. Neither suite shows the map pack the way a grid tracker does, square by square across a service area. Our guide to rank trackers covers grid tools, and the free local visibility check shows where you appear in Google search and maps for your customers' terms today, with no signup.

Ads research is the other local tiebreaker. Semrush sells separate Advertising, Local and Traffic and Market toolkits beside its SEO plans, priced on their own pages. If you buy Google Ads in a crowded market, that is worth a look. Our Google Ads guides cover what you can learn about rivals' ads for free first.

AI answers: both vendors now sell a second dashboard

Both companies have added tracking for whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Google's AI features mention a brand, and both price it as an upgrade. Ahrefs includes 5 tracked AI prompts on Lite and sells Brand Radar AI from $199 a month, with custom prompt packs from $50 a month for 2,500 checks. Semrush lists no prompt tracking on its $139 SEO plan; its $199 Starter plan tracks 50 prompts daily, and a standalone AI Visibility Toolkit costs $99 a month per domain, billed annually.

1. 1.Ask whether the tool records the answer text or only a yes or no for your brand.
2. 2.Ask which engines it queries and whether it uses the consumer apps or their APIs, since answers can differ.
3. 3.Ask how many prompts you can track daily for the price, and whether those prompts are yours or drawn from the vendor's library.
4. 4.Ask what the report shows for a competitor who was named and you were not.

For a one-off look, our free AI visibility check puts a customer's question to ChatGPT and other engines through their APIs and shows who gets named. We compare the paid trackers, including these two, in GEO tools compared.

The business that should buy neither

Here is the column vendors leave off. If you run one location, compete with a handful of local rivals and have a site under a few hundred pages, Google already gives you better data about yourself than either suite can. Search Console shows the real queries, clicks and indexing problems. Bing Webmaster Tools includes a free backlink report that covers competitors. Keyword Planner shows advertiser demand. Our free SEO tools guide maps where each one stops.

• You open an SEO tool less than once a week.
• Nobody on staff will act on what it finds within a month.
• Your main competitors are other local firms, not national publishers.
• Your site has unresolved indexing errors in Search Console, which no paid suite will fix for you.
• You were about to buy it because a webinar said you should.

Three or more of those, and the $1,600 is better spent on pages, reviews or a few months of help. When competitor research is the real gap, a one-time competitor analysis answers it without a subscription, and keyword research tools lists cheaper ways to find what customers type.

A fourteen-day trial plan that ends in a decision

1. 1

   Day 1: start the free tiers

   Verify your site in Ahrefs Free and open a Semrush free account. Note what each shows about your own domain before you pay a dollar.

2. 2

   Day 2: write your five weekly questions

   Which keywords do we rank for, who outranks us in town, who links to rivals, what broke on the site, how did last month go. Every later test answers one of these.

3. 3

   Days 3 to 9: run Semrush's trial

   Use the seven-day trial on the SEO plan. Set up rank tracking for your ZIP codes and run your five questions. Cancel before the first charge if it does not earn its place.

4. 4

   Days 10 to 13: one month of Ahrefs Lite

   Run the same five questions and watch how fast the 1,000 credits go. If you need one look at a rival's links, Starter at $29 may be enough.

5. 5

   Day 14: decide by habit

   Keep the tool you opened without being reminded. If you opened neither, keep neither.

Or skip the subscription altogether. DataCram's SEO programs run on tools we already pay for, start at $625 a month and are priced on our SEO pricing page. Most local businesses land between $625 and $2,250 a month there. Ahrefs and Semrush are not partners of ours; we are customers of the same pricing pages you are reading.