The Top 15 Best Free Alternatives to Semrush (Updated List)

Semrush is an incredible tool and platform. I use it constantly, and it’s one of my favorite marketing platforms for pretty much any purpose. It does a little bit of everything, and everything I’ve used it for, it does well.

There are, however, a few drawbacks to Semrush. Because of the sheer number of features and the options it gives you, it can be confusing to use, and you pretty much always feel like you aren’t getting the most out of the platform, no matter how deep into using it you are.

It also has a few quirks you need to work around, like changing data displays that aren’t always the way you might want to display your data, a semi-tedious keyword import function that requires more than just uploading a CSV, and a few metrics that can be a little off-base or inaccurate. Raw traffic numbers are one of the worst for this and tend to be very inflated, though when you’re comparing apples to apples (as in, your traffic on Semrush vs. a competitor’s on Semrush, rather than Semrush traffic for your competition versus your traffic on your own analytics), it’s not too bad to work around.

The biggest drawback most people point out about Semrush, though, is that it’s just plain expensive. Their most basic plan starts at $130 a month, and that’s a tall ask for a lot of small businesses. Even with my agency, I end up needing more than the basic plan provides, and I’ve had a few moments I’ve considered canceling to avoid breaking the bank.

All of this is to say that I understand why you might want a Semrush alternative. Trust me, I’ve looked around too. While I still believe Semrush is one of the best SEO and marketing tools you can use, you can put together a roster of other tools to handle pretty much everything you need for an overall cheaper price, if you don’t mind having to tab between different apps for different features.

So, I’ve put together my list of 15 Semrush alternatives you can try out for your marketing today. Let’s get started!

#15: Answer the Public

Answer the Public was, for a while, one of the best apps you could use for topic research. It uses a handful of data sources to pull specific questions and queries that real users are making related to your topic. Back in an era when every similar app was just scraping Google-suggested keywords, it was a welcome breath of fresh air.

Unfortunately, two things have happened since then that makes it a much less useful tool. The first is that many other tools wised up to the need for actual customer queries rather than blind keywords and made their tools handle it. That means a big part of its unique selling point is lost. The second is that Neil Patel bought it. I have nothing against Neil, but he definitely stripped some of what made the site unique and slapped his own face on it, and sorry Neil, but I don’t need to see your face in all of my marketing tools.

On the plus side, ATP does now search Google, Bing, YouTube, Amazon, and TikTok, so it’s a little broader than a lot of other tools that only search Google. You also get pretty much full access (with just a cap of 100 searches per day) on their cheapest plan, for only $11 per month, which is hard to beat.

#14: SpyFu

SpyFu was designed as a competitive analysis tool to help you figure out what keywords your competition is using and ranking for and how you can take their strategies and use them for yourself, ideally undercutting or overwhelming them with your quality so that you steal their traffic. For $39 per month, it’s fairly decent, giving you thousands of tracked keyword rankings and search results. It’s a very focused tool; it does a couple of things and does them pretty well, but if you want any data or information beyond those few things, you need to use other tools.

Rather than go through the whole deal here, I’ll direct you this way: SpyFu vs. Semrush: Which is Better? I did a whole comparison between SpyFu and Semrush with a lot more detail than I can fit in this post, so check it out.

#13: Open Link Profiler

Semrush does a lot of different things. One of their tools is a backlink profiler, so a lot of the alternatives I look at tend to be focused on backlink analysis. Open Link Profiler is exactly that. As the name implies, it’s a free tool you can use to check and monitor the backlinks pointing at your site or a competitor’s site so you can use that information in your marketing.

The biggest benefit of Open Link Profiler is that it’s free. That is, unfortunately, just about it. It’s good for some quick link profile checks, but if you want more detailed analysis, keyword information, or other benefits, you’ll probably need to look elsewhere. In fact, several other tools on this list are the same thing but better, though they all cost money, so if you’re on a very tight budget and need link information, this is one of your better choices.

#12: SEOptimer

Remember the tool named Monitor Backlinks? Found at monitorbacklinks.com, it was a pretty good option for tracking and monitoring the backlink profile for your site and those of your closest competitors. Well, that tool has been purchased and rolled into the SEOptimer platform, which is both good and bad. It’s good because now you can access a lot more data, and they have more computing power and a larger index to throw around. It’s bad because now it costs $60 per month to get 50 tracked backlinks, which really isn’t much – especially if you compare to #13 up there and the colossal price of free.

When Monitor Backlinks was standalone, my biggest gripe with it was how small and slow it was. I could get a new backlink, and it would take them weeks or even months to find it, whereas other tools could often find it much faster. I’ll admit, I’m not sure if they’ve improved this since SEOptimer bought them; if you know, let me know in the comments!

#11: Screaming Frog

I’ve written a lot recently about Screaming Frog. The TL;DR is this: it’s probably the single best SEO scraping, auditing, and data collection tool you can find as a downloadable program. This has many benefits, including a one-time purchase price, the ability to deeply configure it to work however you want, and an immense amount of flexibility. It also has drawbacks, including the need to deal with Cloudflare and rate limiters, rotate through proxy servers, and limit how much the program takes up in your system resources so you don’t crash your computer trying to run it.

My current recommendation is actually one of the modern Screaming Frog alternatives, Greenflare. It’s basically the same as Screaming Frog but web-based, so you remove a few of the limitations of the DIY program option. You can read more about it and my other comparison options in my post on Screaming Frog alternatives here.

#10: BuzzSumo

A number of years ago, BuzzSumo was a pretty powerful tool for marketing, with an emphasis pushing towards social media and promotion – generating buzz, as it were. These days, it has changed a lot, so if you haven’t looked into what the tool can do in four or five years, it can be worth giving it a look.

To me, it’s a pretty interesting tool you can use to brainstorm content ideas and get a pretty good idea of what the brands around you and in your industry are talking about. It’s fine for competitive intelligence, it’s good at content discovery, and it’s alright at some data and analysis reporting. The downside is that a lot of the data it pulls just comes from free sources you already have access to, like Google Trends and the RSS feeds of the competitors you want to follow. There’s a lot more besides that, but it’s sometimes questionable how valuable it is and how much you need to pay for access to it.

That’s a pretty load-bearing downside, though, since BuzzSumo costs a whopping $200 per month for their cheapest plan. That’s a tough sell, IMO.

#9: Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest used to be a pretty great and unique tool for quick content ideas. It was very limited, but it was free, so there wasn’t much downside to plugging in a keyword, getting some ideas, and heading off to other tools to see what you could do with that information.

Neil Patel bought it, and now it’s completely different. It gives you a lot more information now than it used to, kind of like the Google Keyword Planner, but pumped up. On the other hand, the view it gives you into a keyword’s data or a competitor’s information is somewhat limited in scope, and you often don’t get the full story of a competitor when you’re digging in. It’s not a bad tool now. It’s more like it presents itself as a more comprehensive picture than it actually gives you, so it’s easier to misuse the data you get.

#8: Serpstat

Serpstat: It exists!

That’s kind of where I’m at with Serpstat. It’s there. It does what it says it does. It’s not exceptional about any of its features and is kind of just adding things as other tools add them, like their AI content generator recently, which is probably yet another ChatGPT shell, if I had to guess.

If you want a tool that’s “fine,” Serpstat is your tool. It’s not the cheapest or the most expensive. It’s not aimed at SMBs and growth hackers, nor is it firmly an enterprise tool. It’s not top-of-the-line with data, index size, or analysis, but it’s not bad at any of them. It’s kind of just the most average possible SEO tool, which can make it very useful if you just want something good enough, but it will leave you hanging once you’re pushing for the top 5% of your industry.

#7: Majestic SEO

Majestic is a fairly old platform, and it’s showing some of its age. The thing is, it has lasted this long without being bought out, merged, or consumed by some other platform, and it still keeps trucking along with good data and useful insights. The biggest benefit, arguably, is that they still offer a couple of proprietary metrics – the flow metrics, TrustFlow and CitationFlow – that are quite useful.

I don’t know that Majestic is a top-tier platform anymore, or that you should choose it as your one tool to use, but if you don’t mind a bit of old-school platform usage in your marketing flow, it’s still fine.

#6: Moz

You know what Moz is by now, right? Truthfully, though, I find their blog a lot more useful than their platform. The platform itself has a surprisingly small index for a tool with as big a name as Moz’s, and while they have good data, it’s not the most comprehensive. I think, to an extent, they’ve been riding on their name recognition and decades of built-up trust. That’s fine, but it does leave you feeling like you’re missing something when you use them.

Really, though, their blog is top of the line and their case studies and research are great, even if their tool lags behind a few of the better options out there.

#5: SE Ranking

SE Ranking is a tool that surprised me. The basic plan is $52 per month and gives you access to rank tracking, site auditing, and backlink checking. Other plans give you historical data, analytics, API access, and more; also, they have optional add-ons for things like content and local marketing.

For the price, I expected either something terrible that was laundering white-label tools and data sources with little unique information, or something just kind of mediocre and overpriced. What I got was something that was actually worth the price. They aren’t the best tool – that’s why they’re #5 on the list – but they’re still number five. It’s better than you might think, so check them out if you’re in the market.

#4: Mangools

Mangools is one of the more memorable tools if only because of their name. They have a bunch of individually useful tools, including keyword research, link analysis, and SEO benchmarking. They also have free tools you can use to get a feel for the kinds of data they offer and how they present it.

Their individual tools aren’t top-tier, but they are priced appropriately. Their top-tier agency plan is cheaper than the cheapest Semrush plan and gives you access to pretty much everything you could want, with no limits or limits so high as to be nonexistent for most businesses.

#3: SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb is a name you might not have even thought of in years, and yet here it is. Why? Well, two reasons.

The first is that as a comparative traffic tool, it’s nearly unmatched. They have incredibly good traffic tracking. The second is that their historical data is incredible since they’ve been around for a very long time. If you haven’t given them a look in a while, maybe check it out and see if you can get some value out of their data.

#2: Ahrefs

Ahrefs is Ahrefs. They’re the go-to name in link tracking and analysis, with probably the biggest index this side of Google themselves. Their data is incredible, their presentation is top-notch, they do a little bit of everything but they only implement the tool if they can do it well.

The only downside to Ahrefs is the pricing. Since Ahrefs is a tool on par with Semrush, well, they’re also on par with Semrush in pricing, too. Their Lite plan starts at $130 a month – the same as Semrush – though it’s occasionally on sale. The choice between Ahrefs and Semrush is a very real one, and it often comes down to a few small details, such as how easy you find one to use over the other.

#1: Topicfinder

That’s right, friends, I’m number one!

Alright, so, I don’t actually consider Topicfinder a direct competitor to Semrush, Ahrefs, or the other top-tier tools. At least, not yet. I’m working on it.

What you can really use Topicfinder for is just what the name implies: finding topics. With a couple of clicks, you can scrape up a huge list of topics used by your top competitors, filter them down into useful results, and be left with a spreadsheet of relevant and usable topic information in a matter of minutes. Maybe you aren’t seeing all the backlinks pointing at those domains or arbitrary estimates of ranking difficulty, but how often do you find those metrics truly useful anyway?

Sign up for a free trial and see if Topicfinder can do what you need; I bet you’ll be pleasantly surprised. It won’t be your only tool, but it may be one of your best.

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