Ahrefs vs Semrush (2022) — Which is the Best SEO Tool?

We have a strict honest reviews policy. To fund our research and testing, this post contains affiliate ad links.

In this Ahrefs vs Semrush comparison review, I’m going to put these two leading SEO tools head to head — and help you find out which of them best meets your needs.

I’m going to discuss how these products compare in terms of:

• Domain analysis
• Keyword research features
• Backlink analysis
• Site auditing
• Broken link analysis
• Ease of use
• Pricing and value for money
• Support

…and more!

Let’s start with a key question…

What are Ahrefs and Semrush?

Ahrefs and Semrush are two platforms that help you optimize your website for search engines.

Ahrefs

They do this in lots of different ways, but the main thing they give you is information — information that you can use to:

• find out what people are searching for in your business’ niche
• create new content that is likely to attract organic search traffic
• identify opportunities for building links from other sites to yours
• change technical aspects of your website in ways that help it perform better in search results.

Both tools, for example, provide you with keyword suggestions (based on phrases that you enter) that can be used to inspire blog posts that are likely to perform well in search results.

They’ll also tell you how difficult it will be to rank for specific phrases.

They’ll help you identify websites that it might be worth approaching for backlinks.

And they allow you to perform an “SEO audit” on your website to find out if there are any technical improvements you can make to it that will help you achieve better search results.

Semrush

Ahrefs and Semrush can be used with any website building platform or CMS — so it doesn’t matter if you’re using WordPress, Squarespace, Wix or Shopify; the insights provided by both tools can help improve your search rankings.

Now, in addition to what I’ve outlined above, there are many other features provided by Ahrefs and Semrush that are designed to help you climb up the search rankings.

I’ll go through these in depth as we progress through the comparison — beginning with something called domain analysis.

Semrush and the war in Ukraine

Semrush is technically a US-based, publicly-traded company with 23 offices around the world. In the context of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia however, some in the SEO community have understandably voiced concerns about the company’s Russian roots (both its founders are Russian and it has a lot of employees in Russia).

At Style Factory, we are committed to a fully honest, transparent and ethical approach when it comes to product reviews. We are also 100% against the war (and are supporting child victims of the violence in Ukraine). So we wanted clarity on this issue too — for both us and our readers.

We are pleased to note that Semrush has publicly announced its firm opposition to the invasion (which we feel is a brave thing for a Russian-founded organization to do) — and we are still comfortable with continuing featuring Semrush on our site, as we believe the company is ultimately an international organization that has taken as ethical an approach as it can in this situation.

Domain analysis

One of the most useful things you can do with Ahrefs and Semrush is basic domain analysis.

This simply means getting a general overview of how a website is performing from an SEO point of view.

You typically perform domain analysis either on your own website — to see where SEO improvements could be made to it — or on a competitor’s, to see how hard it will be to outrank them in search results.

(And to find ways to do so).

Domain analysis in Ahrefs using its ‘Site Explorer’ feature

Carrying out domain analysis is very straightforward in both Ahrefs and Semrush — you simply enter a domain and key metrics are returned quickly for you, in a dashboard format.

With both tools, these key metrics include:

• An ‘authority score’ (Semrush) or ‘domain rating‘ (Ahrefs) that gives you an at-a-glance indication of how well a website is likely to perform in search results.
• An estimate of the total number of visitors to the website per month.
• The total number of external links — ‘backlinks’ — pointing to the website (the more of these the better from an SEO point of view).
• The total number of keywords the website ranks for.
• Anchor text commonly used in links to the website.
• A list of competing domains.

Although the quality of the domain analysis in Ahrefs and Semrush is similar, I’d argue that Ahrefs has a slight edge when it comes to ease-of-access to the key stats — more of them are displayed at once.

With Semrush, by contrast, it feels like there’s a little bit more clicking around the place to do to get at a couple of key metrics.

For example, Ahrefs lets you see the traffic value of a domain immediately (the amount of money that you’d need to pay each month to buy ads that would deliver an equivalent number of hits to a site). This is a pretty important piece of data.

In Ahrefs, the domain traffic value is displayed as part of a domain overview report

In Semrush, you need to pull a separate report (‘Organic Research’) to view this data. This isn’t the end of the world, but it would be nice to see this figure immediately on Semrush’s domain overview page (pictured below).

Domain analysis in Semrush

As part of their domain analysis overviews, both Ahrefs and Semrush give you reports detailing the monthly traffic to the domain you’re analysing — but it’s important to note that the figures provided here are estimates.

An organic traffic estimate graph in Ahrefs

Based on my own (small-scale) testing and research — using sites for which I have access to visitor data — I’ve found that the Semrush estimates tend to be closer to the actual traffic; and furthermore, Semrush contextualises its figures a bit by giving you an indication of how accurate its estimates are likely to be (high, medium or low — see screenshot below).

Information provided by Semrush about the accuracy of its traffic estimates

The important thing to remember with either set of traffic stats is that they should be used to identify trends (i.e., is site A more popular than sites B and C?) — rather than taken as absolute gospel.

To this end, there is a nice feature in Semrush’s domain analysis that you won’t find a direct equivalent for in Ahrefs: its ‘competitive positioning map’ (pictured below).

Semrush’s competitive positioning map feature.

This gives a really good ‘at-a-glance’ indication of how a site is performing against key competitors, based on how many keywords it ranks for and monthly traffic estimates.

Another Semrush visual that I like — for which there isn’t a direct equivalent in Ahrefs — is its graph of the number of keywords a site ranks for plotted against Google algorithmic activity (pictured below). This lets you understand how a domain’s rakings has been affected by Google updates over time.

Semrush’s graph of organic keywords plotted against Google algorithmic activity

That said, with the rollout of its new ‘Overview 2.0’ feature, Ahrefs now gives you a similar tool, but with traffic plotted against Google algorithm updates.

Ahrefs’ graph of traffic plotted against Google algorithm updates

Although Ahrefs has been gradually introducing more graphs like the above to complement the data it provides, it’s probably fair that Semrush currently places a greater emphasis on data visualization — a lot of the domain analysis metrics you encounter in Semrush are immediately graphed.

Although Ahrefs now gives you access to an increasing number of graphs, depending on the report you’re pulling, you may find yourself eyeballing more ‘hard data’ than in Semrush (which isn’t always a bad thing, of course — it depends on the context).

Both products’ domain overview pages make it easy to see country-level data for a domain thanks to their simple ‘worldwide’ and ‘country’ view switchers.

Semrush’s “country switcher” options

Overall, both products do well in the domain analysis department, with Ahrefs probably getting the points for ease-of-use and Semrush getting the points for contextualising its data more obviously via graphs and other data visualizations.

Now, let’s take a look at keyword research features — a very important aspect of both Ahrefs and Semrush.

Keyword research features

Keyword research is generally about four things: 

• Establishing how many people are searching for a particular keyword
• Establishing how difficult it is to rank for that keyword
• Finding out who is already ranking for that keyword
• Getting suggestions for other ones.

Both Ahrefs and Semrush make it very easy for you to find out all the above information.

You just enter a keyword into their respective keyword research tools (‘Keyword Explorer’ in Ahrefs, and ‘Keyword Overview’ in Semrush), and you’ll get the info you need straight away — search volume, a keyword difficulty score, the sites that are currently ranking for it, and a list of related keywords.

Performing keyword research in Semrush

Both platforms use percentage scores to indicate keyword difficulty — with a higher percentage indicating higher difficulty.

Identifying keyword intent

Semrush gives you a bit more context about why users perform particular searches than Ahrefs, thanks to its useful ‘keyword intent’ feature. As part of the metrics returned for a particular keyword, you’ll see an ‘intent’ box highlighting the context in which a particular search is made:

Keyword intent data in Semrush

In the example above, you can see that for the ‘chocolate cake’ search phrase, the intent behind the user’s search is likely to be ‘informational.’

Semrush also automatically highlights when the intent is likely to be ‘transactional’,’navigational’ or ‘commercial’ — as things stand, there isn’t a similar feature available from Ahrefs.

Keywords by intent data in Semrush

Now, Semrush’s keyword intent feature comes into its own when you’re filtering keyword suggestions.

When you enter a phrase into Semrush’s ‘Keyword Magic’ tool, you’ll often end up with a very long list of suggested phrases — and this can be a bit overwhelming.

But the ‘keyword intent’ dropdown menu helps massively here, because it lets you exclude a lot of irrelevant stuff really easily and focus on the phrases that are most likely to be revenue-generating for your business.

Filtering keyword suggestions by intent

As a simple example of this, you could simply filter keyword suggestions by ‘commercial’ intent to view those that are most likely to lead to purchases.

Tip: there is a workaround for establishing keyword intent using Ahrefs — but it involves a clunky process where you ‘infer’ it by looking at the ‘modifiers’ in a search query (words like ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘comparison,’ ‘review’ etc.).

For example, words like ‘what’ in a search phrase generally indicate that it’s an informational term; words like ‘review’ in a phrase often signal commercial investigation. You can filter your keyword results — as per screenshot below — to only include specific modifiers (what, how, why etc.) in your keyword research results. This does get you the data you need, but it’s a much more manual and time-consuming process than the Semrush way of doing things.

Identifying ‘informational intent’ keywords in Ahrefs

Keyword lists

Semrush and Ahrefs both allow you to create lists of keywords that you can refer to any time you like (using their “Keyword manager” and “Keyword list” features respectively) and view evolving keyword difficulty scores.

Creating a keyword list in Ahrefs

The functionality on offer here is pretty similar.

Using backlink data in keyword research

One thing I’ve always really liked about Ahrefs’ approach to keyword difficulty scores is that not only does it tell you how hard it will be to rank for a given keyword, it also tells you roughly how many backlinks you’ll need in order to rank in the top ten search results.

Ahrefs’ keyword difficulty score is accompanied by an estimate of how many links you’ll need to rank in the top 10.

There wasn’t an equivalent feature in Semrush until fairly recently, but they’ve now introduced a similar one (pictured below).

Backlink target data in Semrush

However, whereas Ahrefs will always give you data on the number of backlinks it thinks you’ll need to rank for a particular phrase, Semrush currently only returns this for some keywords.

In certain cases, you’ll get a slightly vague message along the lines of “it will take a lot of on-page SEO and link building efforts to rank for this.”

Unlike Ahrefs, you don’t always get a ‘backlink-building’ estimate from Semrush, especially where ‘hard’ or ‘very hard’ keyword difficulty scores are concerned.

For most queries that I tried out however, the tool works fine and returns the number of backlinks you’ll need.

There are a couple of other areas where Ahrefs has an edge over Semrush in keyword research.

First, Ahrefs shows not only the volumes of searches but the number of clicks they’ll be likely to generate (not all users click on organic results — some click on ads etc.). This isn’t provided by Semrush.

It also shows you a really useful traffic potential figure — an estimate of the total number of organic visits that you could expect if you ranked #1 for a particular keyword. This is different from a simple search volume figure, because it includes traffic generated by searches which involve variations of that keyword.

Below is an example of Ahrefs’ ‘traffic potential’ statistic in action. You can see that although the ‘online store builder’ keyword has a search volume of 1,000 per month, when keyword variations are accounted for, it has the potential to generate 4,000 visits per month to a site that ranks number one for it.

The ‘traffic potential’ figure

In certain contexts, this can data be extremely useful in helping you identify less ‘obvious’ keywords to target — search phrases that don’t in themselves generate much traffic, but which have a lot of minor variations that will.

Ahrefs’ ‘content gap’ tool is also a bit better than the Semrush ‘keyword gap’ equivalent too. Both let you enter your domain and those of some competitors, and show you a list of keywords that your competitor ranks for which yours doesn’t — but Ahrefs’ ‘content gap’ tool lets you evaluate your site against more competing domains (10 to Semrush’s 4).

Ahrefs’ ‘Content Gap’ tool

Search engines you can perform research for

The biggest advantage Ahrefs has over Semrush in keyword research involves the search engines you can actually perform research for.

Whereas Semrush only provides data for Google searches, Ahrefs lets you perform keyword research for 10 search engines, including big hitters like YouTube and Amazon.

Unlike Semrush, Ahrefs lets you get data for a large number of search engines (Semrush only provides data from Google).

PPC research

If you’re looking for a research tool to cover both organic search and PPC, you may find Semrush to be the more suitable tool. This is because it returns a larger amount of Google Ads data, including:

• keywords
• ad positions
• competitors
• adverts displayed
• ad campaign history
• landing pages
• subdomains used in ad campaigns.

You get to see this data when you enter a domain into Semrush’s ‘Advertising Research’ tool.

Semrush is the better platform where PPC data is concerned

Ahrefs does show some PPC related info, but it’s a bit more limited — you get to see the keywords used to advertise a domain, headlines for the ads displayed for that domain and the landing pages used in PPC campaigns. This data is displayed when you perform domain analysis (you simply enter a domain name into the ‘Site Explorer’ tool to access the PPC data).

Overall I’d probably give Ahrefs the win when it comes to keyword research, simply because it lets you perform research for a considerably wider variety of search engines than Semrush.

Semrush’s keyword intent tool — for which there’s no Ahrefs equivalent — is extremely useful though, and if PPC data is important to you however, then the better tool is Semrush too.

Content marketing in Semrush and Ahrefs

In addition to providing keyword research tools, Semrush and Ahrefs also provide you with some content marketing features.

With Semrush, these comes in the form of a ‘content marketing platform’, which contains a suite of tools that allow you to:

• identify new topics to write about
• audit your existing content from an SEO point of view
• identify keywords that your comeptitors are using in their posts
• monitor mentions of your brand
• monitor any plagiarism of your content.

These features are definitely helpful in quite a few contexts. However, you do have to be on a more expensive plan — the $229.95 ‘Guru’ plan or higher — to gain access to them.

Ahrefs’ content marketing features are less extensive, but still useful — you can enter a topic into its “Content Explorer” tool and view information about its overall popularity; the sites that are currently dominating the searches for that topic; and top authors writing about it.

Let’s take a look now at a very important aspect of SEO, backlink analysis.

Backlink analysis

How well a site performs in search results very much depends on how many backlinks — external sites linking to it — exist for the site in question.

With both Ahrefs and Semrush, you can enter a domain name and see a list of all the backlinks to it that each tool can find.

Backlink database size

Based on the figures published by Ahrefs and Semrush, Semrush’s database of domains is considerably bigger than Ahrefs’, containing 808 million domains to Ahrefs’ 213 million (figures correct at time of writing).

This means that in theory, Semrush should be able to provide more comprehensive domain and backlink analysis.

Semrush backlink database statistics (correct at time of writing)

Interestingly however, in my own testing, how many backlinks each tool found seemed to vary quite a bit depending on the domain I was looking at.

For example, whilst doing some simple backlink research for our online store builder reviews, I observed that Ahrefs found more backlinks to the Shopify, Wix, Big Cartel, Ecwid and Squarespace domains than Semrush did.

And Semrush identified more links for BigCommerce, GoDaddy, Webflow and Volusion.

Ahrefs database statistics (correct at time of writing)

As I analysed more domains, this pattern continued — sometimes Ahrefs provided a more exhaustive set of results, sometimes Semrush did.

But on paper at least, it would appear that the product with the larger database is Semrush.

In terms of the backlink analysis itself, both Ahrefs and Semrush give you LOTS of useful information about the backlinks that point to a domain, including breakdowns of:

• the number of ‘dofollow’ links vs ‘nofollow’ ones
• the country of origins of backlinks
• anchor text used
• new vs lost domains
• linking domain types (government, education etc.)

I generally prefer the way that Semrush presents this information — simple but attractive graphs spell out the key stats in a way that helps you digest them easily.

Additionally, Ahrefs and Semrush both provide you with ‘link intersect’ tools. These allow you to compare a URL from your website against corresponding ones from competitor websites, and give you an exportable list of websites that are currently linking to your competitors, but not to you.

Semrush’s ‘backlink gap’ tool

Ahrefs’ link intersect tool gives you more fine grain information than Semrush’s, because it allows you to compare a URL against 10 others, whereas Semrush limits the comparison to 4 other websites.

And I find Ahrefs’ tool a bit easier to use, too.

Ahrefs’ ‘link intersect’ feature.

Backlink auditing and building

Semrush offers a couple of backlink-related features for which there’s no direct equivalent in Ahrefs.

First, there’s a ‘backlink auditing’ tool which identifies potentially ‘toxic’ links (spammy links that can lead to you being penalised in search results). You can output a list of these links, which you can then upload to Google as a ‘disavow’ file (this asks Google to ignore them).

However, not all SEO professionals think that these sort of link spam identification tools are actually that helpful, and that a more manual approach to identifying poor-quality links works better. In fact, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller is not a fan of the concept of toxic links at all, or tools that identify them!

So although some users may find Semrush’s toxic link tool useful in highlighting particularly awful backlinks, I wouldn’t view Ahrefs’ omission of a similar tool as a major disadvantage.

Semrush’s toxic link report.

Second, there’s a ‘link building’ tool which analyses your domain or URL and gives you a list of websites to target with a request for a new backlink.

What’s interesting about this feature is that you’re not dealing with a spreadsheet of URLs — you’re dealing with a more ‘CRM-style’ interface, with each domain listed as a ‘domain prospect.’ 

‘Domain prospects’ in Semrush.

You can click on a button beside each domain prospect to move it into different stages of a link-building pipeline, and send outreach emails directly within the Semrush interface (by connecting a mailbox — Gmail, Yahoo etc.).

This is a lovely feature, and there’s nothing similar within Ahrefs. 

Overall, it’s fair to say that both Ahrefs and Semrush give you great backlink analysis functionality — but for me, because of its excellent CRM-style backlink building tool, the winner in this area is probably Semrush.

Trying out Ahrefs and Semrush before you buy

Ahrefs doesn’t offer a free trial, but you can access a free cut-down version of its ‘Site Explorer’ and ‘Site Audit’ tools here.

Semrush, by contrast, offers an entirely free trial. Normally speaking, this trial lasts just 7 days — but for a limited time, there’s a 30-day free trial available which you can access using this link.

Learn more >

Site auditing

Both Ahrefs and Semrush provide ‘site auditing’ features that allow you to evaluate how well your site is performing from a technical SEO and on-page SEO perspective.

Ahrefs site audit results

During a site audit, both tools will look out for issues which might be having a negative effect on your search ranking, including:

• Slow-loading content
• Duplicate content
• SSL problems
• Crawl errors
• Missing headers
• Overuse of keywords
• Broken links

Both tools provide you with a a wide range of really useful technical SEO suggestions.

They also give you really good contextual help on what each suggestion means, and tips on how to address any problems found.

Example of site audit results in Semrush — note the helpful ‘Why and how to fix it’ links.

I particularly like Semrush’s on-page SEO checker, which goes through your whole site and gives you actionable tips for improvement for each page (in order of priority).

These can include suggestions on:

• which keywords to add
• steps you can take to make a page appear as a Google ‘featured snippet’
• how to improve your body copy and meta descriptions
• which websites to approach for backlinks
• length of content
• internal linking strategies…

…and much more.

Semrush on-page SEO suggestions

Ahrefs also provides you with a decent on-page SEO checker, but the suggestions provided are more of a technical nature — i.e., you won’t get the ideas for improving your content or link profile that Semrush also provides.

One particularly neat touch that you’ll find in Semrush’s site audit that isn’t present in Ahref’s is the ability to send SEO tasks that the system has identified as needing attention to the widely-used project management tool, Trello.

(If you don’t use Trello, a Zapier connection lets you send technical SEO tasks to other project management apps — including a simple CRM tool that’s bundled with Semrush).

Finally, both Ahrefs and Semrush’s site audit reports now includes an assessment of your site from a ‘Core Web Vitals‘ point of view.

Core Web Vitals are a set of targets relating to the speed, responsiveness and visual stability of a website; sites that meet them can receive preferential treatment in Google search results.

Core Web Vitals data in Semrush

Ahrefs and Semrush both pull data from Lighthouse (Google’s free site auditing tool) to give you these Core Web Vitals metrics; so you’re not getting data here that you’d otherwise have to pay for. That said it is useful to be able to view it in the dashboard of an SEO platform.

In Ahrefs you get two different types of Core Web Vitals data: ‘field data‘ which is based on real user experience of your website (this comes from Chrome users) and ‘lab data’ (performance data collected within a controlled environment). Semrush only gives you access to lab data, so Ahrefs has an edge here.

One thing I found a bit frustrating while trying to access this data in Ahrefs is that in order to view it, you have to locate and enter a Google API key — this isn’t particularly hard to do, but I’d prefer not to!

Enabling the Core Web Vitals feature in Ahrefs requires you to enter a Google API key

Overall, although I think that both Ahrefs and Semrush give you a wealth of useful information for improving the technical SEO of your website, I’d give a slight win to Semrush here, mainly because of the options it gives you for sending your site auditing issues to project management tools.

But there isn’t a huge amount in it.

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Broken link analysis

Broken link building in Ahrefs and Semrush

Broken link building is an important SEO tactic.

It involves finding a broken link (i.e., one that no longer leads anywhere), recreating the ‘dead’ content that it used to point to, then asking anybody who used to link to the dead content to link to yours instead.

This approach allows you to build up new backlinks to your content — and the more backlinks that point to your website, the better your content can perform in search.

In order to make this tactic work, you need to be able to identify broken links, and both Ahrefs and Semrush provide features to do so.

Ahrefs makes it extremely easy to find broken links. You simply enter a domain name into its ‘Site Explorer’ section and click Backlink profile > Broken backlinks. This then gives you a list of all that domain’s broken inbound links (and the sites where these links feature).

Finding broken backlinks in Ahrefs

Semrush’s broken link building feature is less easy to get at — you need to run a backlink analytics report, navigate to an ‘indexed pages’ section, click a ‘broken pages’ option and then export the results to an Excel or CSV file. You can then sort or filter this file to identify the 404 errors (broken links).

This is a bit of an unwieldy process, but on the plus side you can reimport this file to Semrush and do your broken link outreach directly within the platform, using a connected mailbox and the CRM ‘pipeline’ approach referred to earlier.

But overall, I prefer the Ahrefs approach here.

It’s important to ensure that your web pages don’t contain broken links to other sites, as these can be interpreted as a sign of poor quality content by Google and other search engines (with negative implications for rankings).

Ahrefs and Semrush both provide you with a means to spot broken outbound links — but as with identifying broken inbound links, things are more straightforward with Ahrefs.

In Ahrefs, you just enter a domain into its ‘Site Explorer’, go to the ‘outgoing links’ section and hit a ‘broken links’ option to view results.

Accessing Ahrefs broken outgoing links report

In Semrush however, you have to run a site audit on your website in Semrush to spot them easily. You run an audit, go to the ‘broken external links’ section of your site audit report and see a full list of problem links.

Using Semrush’s ‘Site Audit’ feature to identify broken links

However, using this method of identifying broken links will involve using one of your ‘project slots’, which isn’t ideal. (More on why in a moment!)

Interface and ease of use

For me, there’s really not a huge amount in it, but my feeling is that, Ahrefs is — in general — slightly easier to use than Semrush.

Its interface is cleaner than Semrush’s; its menus are laid out in a slightly more logical fashion; and its dashboards seem to group pieces of information together in a more relevant, coherent way.

(Semrush’s data seems to load faster, however).

The Ahrefs interface.

With Ahrefs, you get a really good ‘at-a-glance’ understanding of SEO information — whereas with Semrush, you often have to do slightly more digging, or clicking around the place, to get at the data you need.

That’s not to say that Semrush is particularly hard to use, and to be fair to the product, perhaps part of the reason for the increased complexity in Semrush is because it often makes more information available to you than Ahrefs (in terms of graphs, PPC data and pipelines).

And if you like data visualization, the Semrush approach will definitely appeal.

Semrush places a big emphasis on data visualisation.

There is one area where Semrush definitely wins hands down in the ease-of-use stakes: outreach tools.

Its CRM-style approach to link building means that a lot of the time you can identify and contact prospects ‘in the box,’ whereas with Ahrefs, it’s more a case of exporting data to Excel which you then reimport into other apps (contact finders, email marketing tools etc.) for outreach purposes.

Ultimately, if you want to dive in and get easily-digestible data, Ahrefs is arguably the better bet.

For project-based work and link building outreach, Semrush is the better option.

Pricing and value for money

Compared to other types of ‘SaaS’ (software as a service) apps, Ahrefs and Semrush are expensive.

That’s understandable however, as you’re not just paying for functionality, you’re paying for access to a lot of data, including intelligence on your competitors.

Semrush offers 3 main pricing plans:

• Pro: $119.95 per month
• Guru: $229.95 per month
• Business: $449.95 per month

Corporate users can also create a bespoke ‘Enterprise’ plan — fees for this are negotiable, as are features.

A 17% discount is available if you pay upfront for a year, and there’s also a free trial.

Semrush pricing plans

Ahrefs comes in 4 varieties:

• Lite: $99 per month
• Standard: $179 per month
• Advanced: $399 per month
• Enterprise: $999 per month

If you pay upfront for a year, Ahrefs give you two months’ extra access for free.

Ahrefs pricing plans

In terms of which product is better value, this will depend in no small part on your business requirements (and budget).

That said, there are a few key things to zoom in on when trying to work out which offers the most bang for the buck for your particular organisation.

Access to key features

Semrush gives you access to all its important features on its entry level plan — the main limitations of its cheapest offering are mainly to do with how many projects you can work on, and how much data you can pull each month.

Ahrefs is less generous here — on its entry-level ‘Lite’ plan, you miss out on quite a lot of key tools, including its content gap, link intersect and broken link building tools. This will effectively nudge anybody who’s serious about SEO onto the more expensive ‘Standard’ plan.

Number of users

By default, all Semrush and Ahrefs plans only come with one user account.

With Semrush, you have to pay an additional monthly fee to add additional users to a plan ($45 per month per ‘Pro’ user, $80 per month per ‘Guru’ user and $100 per month per ‘Business’ user).

With Ahrefs, there are two different types of additional user accounts you can buy: a ‘power user’ account (this costs an extra $50 per month) and a ‘casual user’ account (an extra $20 per month). The difference between the two types of accounts involves how many reports a user can pull each month: 500 in the case of a power user, and 100 in the case of a casual one.

I’d say that certainly on the entry level plans, this makes Semrush better value when you add more users — simply because the number of reports that Semrush users can pull far exceeds the Ahrefs limit (more on this in just a moment).

Projects

Ahrefs and Semrush both let you create 5 projects on their entry-level plans (‘Lite’ and ‘Pro’ respectively).

As you move up the pricing ladder, and compare Semrush’s ‘Guru’ plan to Ahrefs’ ‘Standard’ plan, Semrush’s offering becomes the more generous of the two — you can create 15 projects to Ahrefs’ 10.

But Ahrefs has the edge again when you compare its’ ‘Advanced’ plan’s project limits to Semrush’s more expensive ‘Business’ plan — the project cap is 50 to 40 respectively.

And it needs to be said that Ahrefs has a general edge when it comes to project limits.

This is because you can work with an unlimited number of ‘verified’ projects in Ahrefs.

Verified projects are sites for which you can prove ownership — this can be done via DNS records, HTML files/tags or Google Search Console. This is extremely useful if you manage a lot of domains and are in a position to verify them in the ways described above.

Verifying domain ownership in Ahrefs

A key thing I discovered when testing these two tools is that an important piece of functionality, site auditing, is only available in both if you are working within a project.

So, for users needing to perform a site audit on a bunch of different websites, this could become a headache — although the project limits doesn’t render this impossible, it makes things more fiddly than you’d like, and you’d effectively have to keep a project slot free for any ‘ad hoc’ work.

So in all, when it comes to project limits, it’s a win for Ahrefs.

Semrush add-ons

There are quite a few Semrush features that are not available without purchasing an add-on.

First up there’s the ‘Semrush .Trends‘ add-on. For an additional $200 per month (irrespective of your plan) this gives you access to more detailed information on your competitors’ traffic and demographics.

There is also a local SEO add-on available ($20 / $40 depending on the features you need). The main functionality this gives you is the ability to:

• distribute business information to directories
• suppress duplicate listings
• track local rankings
• manage Google My Business and Facebook listings
• monitor reviews and user suggestions.

Semrush’s local SEO add-on

And finally there’s the ‘Agency Growth Kit‘ add-on — this is for agencies who want to ‘white label’ Semrush data.

This lets you produce custom PDFs reports that have no Semrush branding on them; it also helps you list your business in a directory of Semrush certified agencies (probably the most valuable aspect of the add-on) and access client management tools.

The agency growth kit costs an additional $150 per month, irrespective of what plan you’re on.

Apps / integrations

In addition to purchasing one of the the Semrush add-ons discussed above, you can also add functionality to your Semrush account by investing in a third-party app from the Semrush app center.

15 third-party apps / integrations are currently available, with a focus that’s mainly on analytics and data; they range in cost from $15 to $169 per user.

Ahrefs doesn’t yet provide a similar ‘app store’, but depending on your needs, you can use its API to integrate it with other applications.

Reporting

Semrush is much more generous when it comes to the number of reporting requests you can make every month: for example, even on its entry-level plan, you can pull 3,000 domain analysis reports per day — this is considerably more generous than Ahrefs’ 500 per month limit.

This comparative generosity continues as you go up the pricing ladder: while the Semrush limits increase significantly, letting you pull 10,000 reports a day if you need to on its Business plan, all the Ahrefs plans cap you at 500 per month (and that’s the limit that applies to ‘power users’; as discussed above, the limit is just 100 for ‘casual’ ones).

PPC 

If you’re working on a mix of SEO and PPC projects, you may find that Semrush represents better value — as discussed above, you get considerably more data on Google ad campaigns that are associated with a particular domain (or have been in the past).

Customer support

When it comes to customer support for Ahrefs and Semrush, I’ll have to admit to not having much experience of either company’s support teams.

This is probably a good thing, as I’ve not really needed much support for either tool!

You could however argue that Semrush has a slight edge in the support department, because it offers three channels of support: phone, chat, and email.

Ahrefs provides two: chat and email.

Both Semrush and Ahrefs make it really easy to contact support — there’s a clearly visible chat window icon present at the bottom right corner of each interface; and Semrush’s phone number is clearly listed at the bottom of the screen too.

An easy-to-access live chat option is available at the bottom of both the Ahrefs and Semrush interfaces.

But because of the fact that the company offers phone support and Ahrefs doesn’t, it’s probably an overall win in this area for Semrush.

Free trials

With Ahrefs, no free trial is available, but you can use its suite of free webmaster tools to get some cut-down access to its ‘Site Explorer’ and ‘Site Audit’ features.

Semrush, by contrast, allows you to try the product out entirely free via a free trial. Normally speaking, this lasts just 7 days — but for a limited time, the company has made a 30-day free trial available — you can access this via this link.

Ahrefs vs Semrush: conclusion

So which is better, Ahrefs or Semrush? Well, I would be very happy to use either of these tools for an SEO-related project — they’re both absolutely brilliant sources of SEO data. However I do feel that, depending on the context in question, one of these tools might prove a better ‘fit’ for your business than the other.

Ahrefs is definitely a better option for users who need data from multiple search engines. It’s a bit more generous when it comes to project limits, and the option it gives you to work with an unlimited number of verified domains is potentially very useful to certain business types too.

However, Semrush is the more feature-rich tool, offering quite a few things that are not available in Ahrefs, including detailed PPC data, CRM-style link outreach features, more customer support options and, significantly, much more generous reporting limits.

Taking everything into account, here are the reasons why you might wish to use one of these products over the other.

Advantages of Ahrefs over Semrush

• You can use Ahrefs to perform keyword research for a wide variety of different search engines — Semrush only works with Google.
• Ahrefs is arguably a bit easier to use than Semrush, and gives you more digestible, ‘at-a-glance’ information.
• It’s much easier to do broken link analysis with Ahrefs.
• Its project limits are more generous.
• Its ‘traffic potential’ metric gives you a really useful way to spot juicy keywords that you might have overlooked.
• So long as you can verify ownership of a domain, Ahrefs lets you work with an unlimited number of websites.
• It’s cheaper to add additional user accounts with Ahrefs.

Advantages of Semrush over Ahrefs

• Semrush is MUCH more generous when it comes to the number of reports you can pull per day. If you envisage doing a LOT of backlink or keyword research every day, then Semrush is considerably better value than Ahrefs.
• Semrush provides a lot of data relating not just to SEO, but PPC too — if you want a tool that covers both areas, it’s a better option than Ahrefs.
• The Semrush ‘keyword intent’ tool is great for identifying the most relevant keywords for your business (or those most likely to lead to purchases).
• Its site auditing features are more comprehensive and easier to use.
• Based on figures published by both products, the Semrush domain database is the larger of the two.
• Its entry-level plan is more feature rich.
• Semrush’s CRM-style approach to outreach means that you can create really great link building campaigns without ever leaving the app. With Ahrefs, you’ll need to use more third-party tools to do so.
• Phone support is available for Semrush — but not for Ahrefs.
• Our research suggests that Semrush’s traffic estimates are more accurate than Ahrefs (note however that our tests were based on relatively small data samples).
• A totally free and fully-functional trial is available — Ahrefs only free gives you access to some limited features.

Try Semrush >

Alternatives to Semrush and Ahrefs

Semrush and Ahrefs are not the only options when it comes to SEO platforms. Alternatives include:

• GrowthBar

• SE Ranking

• Moz

• Serpstat

• Mangools

• SEO Power Suite

• Majestic

For more information about how Ahrefs and Semrush compares to Moz, do check out our Moz versus Semrush comparison and our Moz vs Ahrefs shootout.

To learn even more about Ahrefs and Semrush, you can check out our full Ahrefs review here, or our full Semrush review here.

Finally, if you’re on a budget, you might want to check out a new tool called GrowthBar, which is available at a lower cost than most of the products listed above. A five day free trial of GrowthBar can be accessed here, or you can read our GrowthBar review here.

If you’ve got any questions about Ahrefs or Semrush, do leave a comment below — I’ll do my best to answer them.

Similarly, feel free to share your feedback on this comparison in the comments section — this helps us improve our content.

Ahrefs vs Semrush FAQ

What do Ahrefs and Semrush do?

Ahrefs and Semrush are tools that help you optimize your website for search engines. They do this by giving you information that lets you establish what people are searching for in your niche; create new content that is likely to generate organic traffic; identify opportunities for building links from other sites to yours; and tweak technical aspects of your website in ways that help it perform better in search.

Can I use Ahrefs and Semrush for free?

Ahrefs lets you try the platform out via a 7 day paid-for trial that costs $7. Semrush provides an entirely free trial, however.

Who are the main competitors to Ahrefs and Semrush?

The main competitor to Semrush and Ahrefs is probably Moz Pro. Other popular SEO platforms include Majestic, Serpstat and Ubersuggest.

Which is cheaper, Ahrefs or Semrush?

Technically speaking, the three Ahrefs plans available are all cheaper than the Semrush equivalents. However, the feature sets and limitations of both products are quite different, and should be factored in when deciding which platform is actually best value for you.