Ahrefs vs Semrush — Which Should You Use?

Our content is impartial, but funded in part by affiliate commissions (at no extra cost to our readers). Learn more.

Ahrefs vs Semrush: which is better? I’ve tested both extensively, and in this comparison I share my findings and help you work out which one is the right fit for your SEO project.

I’ll show you how both products compare in terms of:

…and more. But first…

What are Ahrefs and Semrush?

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

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

Both tools, for example, provide you with keyword ideas (based on phrases that you enter) that can be used to create compelling blog posts that are more likely to rank highly.

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 rankings.

I’ll go through all these features in depth as I progress through the comparison — starting with domain analysis.

Domain analysis

One of the most useful things you can do with Ahrefs and Semrush is domain analysis. This 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 it in organic search results.

(And to find ways to do so).

Domain analysis is relatively easy to do in both Ahrefs and Semrush. You just enter a domain name (into Ahrefs’ ‘Site Explorer’ and Semrush’s ‘Domain Overview’ tools respectively) to access key metrics for it. With both tools, these include:

Overall, I felt that the quality of the domain analysis in Ahrefs and Semrush is similar; but I noticed that Semrush surfaced a couple more metrics in its domain overview relating to branded traffic levels (searches where a site’s brand name is included in the query) and search intent (more on which later).

However, Ahrefs let me see the traffic value of a domain immediately — i.e., the amount of money that I’d need to pay each month to buy ads that would deliver an equivalent number of hits to a site. This is an important piece of information.

In Semrush, users 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).

The difference between Ahrefs’ Domain Rating score and Semrush’s Authority Score

Both Ahrefs and Semrush assign scores to websites to indicate how much ‘authority’ they have — a ‘Domain Rating’ or ‘Authority Score’ respectively. In both cases, a scale from 0 to 100 is used.

These authority scores give you an indication of how likely it will be that content published on a particular domain will rank highly, or how valuable a backlink from it might be — the higher the score, the better that domain’s prospects on both counts.

The two products’ scores are calculated in very different ways, however. With Ahrefs, the score is calculated entirely on the basis of backlinks, but Semrush factors in backlinks, site traffic estimates and ‘spam factors’ when calculating it.

This theoretically makes the Semrush authority score more accurate than the Ahrefs equivalent. Despite this however, the Ahrefs domain rating score is typically used as the industry standard benchmark for evaluating the ‘quality’ of domains.

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.

Now, during my own testing and research — using sites for which I have access to visitor data — I didn’t find either platform’s traffic estimates madly accurate! As you can see from the table below, both tools were way out with their guesses.

Unlike Ahrefs, however, Semrush gives you an indication of how accurate the estimates are likely to be — high, medium or low.

(Note that you’ll need to navigate to a separate ‘traffic analytics’ section to access this data however — it’s not displayed on the domain overview).

Ahrefs gives you a bit more immediate context about traffic though, by plotting visitor numbers against a list of all known Google updates; this gives you a sense of how a site’s organic traffic has been affected by them over time.

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

To this end, both Ahrefs and Semrush provide you with ‘competitive positioning maps.’

These give helpful ‘at-a-glance’ indications of how a site is performing against key competitors, based on how many keywords it ranks for and monthly traffic estimates.

On the subjects of graphs, although Ahrefs has been gradually introducing more of them to complement the data it provides, it’s fair to say that Semrush currently places a greater emphasis on data visualization than its rival — a lot of the domain analysis metrics you encounter in Semrush are immediately graphed.

In Ahrefs, you may find yourself eyeballing data tables slightly more often than in Semrush (which isn’t always a bad thing, of course — it very much depends on 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.

But Semrush has the edge when it comes to historical data: so long as you are on a $249.95 ‘Guru’ plan or higher, you’ll get access to a simple dropdown menu that provides a domain overview for any month between January 2012 and the present day.

Although Ahrefs does provide access to historical data too, I noticed that it doesn’t go back quite as far — information from 2015 to the present day is provided. And significantly, you’ll need to be on a ‘Custom Pricing’ Ahrefs plan to access this data (this involves negotiable — but high — pricing).

Overall, both products do well in the domain analysis department, with Ahrefs getting the points for making financial data more immediately accessible and Semrush winning when it comes to data visualization and affordable access to historical data.

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: 

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

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

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

How do Ahrefs and Semrush calculate keyword difficulty scores?

The way that Semrush and Ahrefs calculate keyword difficulty is quite different.

Semrush factors in quite a lot of different parameters when calculating it — including the number of backlinks pointing to top ranking sites; country; the word count of a keyword; whether or not a keyword is branded; and search volume.

Ahrefs, by contrast, focuses solely on the number of backlinks pointing to sites ranking highly for keywords.

Semrush claims that their approach makes their difficulty scores more accurate; Ahrefs counters this by arguing that “backlinks are probably the only easily measurable confirmed ranking factor.”

For the record, I’ve found that generally speaking, Ahrefs tends to flag more keywords as easy to rank for than Semrush — an Ahrefs ‘easy’ score will often often equate to a ‘medium difficulty’ one in Semrush.

Keyword suggestions

In addition to giving you a snapshot of data relating to a particular keyword, Ahrefs and Semrush both give you comprehensive lists of related keywords that you could consider using, along with keyword difficulty score, serch volume, CPC data and other metrics.

And both give you a wide range of filters to identify ones that are likely to work best for you — broad match, phrase match, exact match etc.

Both tools have a couple of advantages over each other in the keyword suggestion department, however.

With Ahrefs, this comes in the form of the provision of worldwide search volumes in the keyword suggestion list. While Semrush only shows you keyword suggestions on a per-country basis, Ahrefs lets you sort and filter keywords based on a global basis.

This, in my view, is a much better way of going about things, because it lets you see the overall interest in a particular phrase.

Semrush has a keyword suggestion trick up its sleeve too, and a very good one at that. This comes in the shape of its AI-powered ‘personalized keyword difficulty score.’ When performing keyword research with Semrush, you can ask it to tell you how difficult it will be to rank for keywords based on the authority of your own domain.

To get this information, you simply enter your domain name into Semrush’s ‘Keyword Magic’ tool, and Semrush will show you an additional set of difficulty scores — your personal ones will be shown alongside the ‘general’ ones (see screenshot below).

This is a really nifty little feature.

SERP analysis

When it comes to giving you an overview of the sites that are currently ranking highly for a given keyword in search results, I’d argue that Ahrefs does this better. This is because when it lists the top-ranking sites, it accompanies them with more data.

Semrush gives you five bits of ‘ancilliary’ data beside each top-ranking page, namely:

There’s a screenshot of these metrics below:

By contrast, Ahrefs gives you 10 pieces of data beside each search result — in addition to the metrics provided by Semrush, you also get the following information from Ahrefs:

Identifying search intent

Semrush and Ahrefs both give you context about why users perform particular searches, thanks to useful ‘search intent’ categorization. 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:

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

Both tools automatically highlight when the search intent is likely to be ‘transactional’,’navigational’ or ‘commercial.’

These types of keyword search intent are defined by both platforms as follows:

Now, these keyword intent features really comes in handy when you’re filtering keyword suggestions.

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

But the ‘search intent’ dropdown menu helps enormously 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.

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.

Ahrefs goes one further here, however, by giving you two extra types of intent: ‘branded’ and ‘local.’ As you might expect, these let you spot keywords involving brand names, and keywords that are associated with local searches. So a bit of an edge here for Ahrefs.

Semrush handles search intent data provision a little better in the context of domain overviews, however. When you’re performing domain analysis, Semrush will give you a breakdown of how many of that domain’s keywords are informational, navigational, commercial or transactional (see my screenshot below for an example).

Keyword lists and topic clustering

Semrush and Ahrefs both allow you to create lists of keywords that you can refer to any time you like — using their “Keyword Strategy Builder” and “Keyword List” features respectively — and view evolving keyword difficulty scores.

The functionality on offer from both tools is pretty similar here.

Both services recently introduced ‘topic clustering’ features, too. The aim of these is to help you identify keywords that can help you build up topical authority on a subject (search engines can reward sites that cover all aspects of a particular topic in depth).

Of the two topic clustering tools, I slightly prefer Ahrefs’ — it lets you cluster keywords more easily and into more logical groupings. It lets you group phrases that involve the actual keyword you entered, while Semrush seems to give you a bunch of clusters that are related to it.

Additionally, when testing the Semrush keyword clustering tool, I found that some of the the topic suggestions and keywords surfaced were not always as relevant as I’d like; I had to study the output carefully to ensure that the suggestions were a good fit for my cluster content.

Overall the Ahrefs topic clustering tool is simply more intuitive, and it’s easier to make sense of its output.

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 for it in the top ten search results.

Semrush introduced this feature considerably later than Ahrefs, but it does now take a similar approach to this:

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 some 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.”

For most queries that I tried out in Semrush however, the feature worked fine and returned an estimate of backlinks needed to rank.

Clickthrough estimations

When you enter keywords into Semrush and Ahrefs, both tools tell you how many searches per month they generate on Google.

However, Ahrefs goes one further here, because unlike Semrush it shows not only the volumes of searches but the number of clicks they’ll be likely to generate.

(This is important, because not all users click on organic results — some click on ads).

Ahrefs also shows you an extremely 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.

In many contexts, this data can be invaluable for identifying 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.

For me, the traffic potential data provided by Ahrefs is one of the strongest reasons for using it over Semrush.

Content gap tools

Ahrefs’ ‘Content Gap’ feature is more flexible than the equivalent Semrush ‘Keyword Gap’ equivalent. 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 a lot more competing domains (10 to Semrush’s four).

Pay-per-click (PPC) research

If you’re looking for a research tool that gives you data on both organic search results and PPC, you’ll find Semrush to be the better option.

This is because it returns a larger amount of Google Ads data, including:

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

Ahrefs does show some PPC related info, but it’s more limited — you get to see the ‘paid keywords’ used to advertise a domain, headlines for the ads displayed and the landing pages used in PPC campaigns.

This data is displayed when you enter a domain name into the ‘Site Explorer’ tool and go to the ‘Paid search’ section.

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 come in the form of a ‘content marketing platform,’ a suite of tools that allows you to:

• identify new topics to write about
• use an ‘SEO writing assistant’ tool to help you craft search-friendly content
• audit your existing content from an SEO point of view
• identify keywords that your competitors are using in their posts

These features are definitely helpful in quite a few contexts, especially the ‘writing assistant,’ which gives you a host of useful insights regarding the kind of keywords you should be using in your copy, its length and its readability. However, you do have to be on a more expensive plan — the $249.95 ‘Guru’ plan or higher — to gain access to them.

💡 Tip: Style Factory readers can try these content marketing features out for free, thanks to an exclusive free Guru trial not available elsewhere. Learn more about this Semrush Guru trial here.

Ahrefs’ content marketing features are a bit 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.

And recently, Ahrefs has added a new tool that assesses your content from an SEO point of view — its ‘AI Content Helper‘ feature. Similar in nature to Semrush’s Writing Assistant, it is currently in BETA format and free to all users (when the final version is ready, you’ll need to pay an add-on fee to access it).

In light of the increasing use of ChatGPT as a means to create web content automatically, you might be wondering whether Semrush or Ahrefs provide any AI-powered writing tools.

Semrush provides an AI copywriting feature in the form of its ‘ContentShake’ app. This writes paragraphs based on prompts or headings you give it.

In my tests I found that this worked pretty well, especially when I was prompting it to create factual — rather than subjective or review-based — content.

However, accessing this feature involves extra costs — you’re looking at a $60-per month fee to access the app.

As for Ahrefs, it doesn’t yet provide an AI writing tool.

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’ 182 million (figures correct at time of writing).

This means that in theory, Semrush should be able to provide more comprehensive data for analyzing backlinks.

I was curious to see how this played out in practice, however, so I conducted some simple tests on both tools’ ability to surface referring domains. These involved running some of the websites for ecommerce and design tools that we review through both Ahrefs and Semrush.

Here’s the number of referring domains found for each site by both tools:

So in my tests, there was a fairly clear win for Semrush — its backlink analysis tool won 7 out of the 10 contests.

Of course, it’s important to note that my test was a small-scale one — so you shouldn’t read too much into the results. However Semrush did seem to have a consistent edge when it came to the number of referring domains surfaced, suggesting that its bigger database may indeed translate into ‘bigger’ data.

Backlink reports and tools

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:

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, Semrush and Ahrefs both provide you with ‘link intersect’ tools (with the Semrush tool being called ‘Backlink Gap’ and Ahrefs’ being labelled as its ‘Competitive Analysis’ feature).

These allow you to compare a URL from your website against corresponding ones from competitor websites, and give you an expo.rtable list of websites that are currently linking to your competitors, but not to you.

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

When testing the Ahrefs’ link intersect tool, I found it a bit easier to use, too — the way it works is more self-explanatory (see screenshot above).

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 Semrush thinks might 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.

(The Ahrefs team take this view).

And interestingly, Google’s Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller is not a fan of the concept of toxic links at all, or the tools that identify them! In fact, Mueller has gone so far as to say that disavowing links based on third-party metrics is a ‘terrible idea.’

Furthermore Google has suggested that the disavow tool itself may soon to be removed — if that happens, it will make the surfacing toxic links fairly redundant.

So, although some users may find Semrush’s toxic link tool useful in highlighting particularly awful backlinks, I definitely wouldn’t view Ahrefs’ omission of a similar tool as a key reason to choose Semrush instead.

The link building tool in Semrush is more useful, however. This analyzes 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.’ 

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 available from Ahrefs. 

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

Broken link analysis and building

Broken link building is an important SEO tactic.

It involves…

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 may perform in search.

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

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

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 a fiddly 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.

Identifying broken outbound links in Ahrefs and Semrush

It’s also 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.

In Semrush however, you have to run a site audit on your website to spot them. Once done, you go to the ‘warnings’ section of your site audit report, where you’ll be able to access a full list of problem outbound links.

However, using this method of identifying broken external links will involve using one of your ‘project slots’, which isn’t ideal.

(More on project slots — what they are and why they matter — shortly).

Site auditing

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

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

Both tools provide you with an overall SEO health score along with 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.

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:

…and much more.

There isn’t really an equivalent feature in Ahrefs — any suggestions provided regarding how to improve pages are of a more technical nature — i.e., you won’t get the ideas for improving your content or link profile that Semrush also provides.

Another neat touch that you’ll find in Semrush’s site audit tool 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 — or alternatively, you can use a simple CRM tool that’s bundled with Semrush to manage them).

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, and sites that meet them can receive preferential treatment in Google search results.

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.

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 broader range of content improvement suggestions it makes, and the options it gives you for sending your site auditing issues to project management tools.

But there isn’t a huge amount in it.

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.

(However, during my tests I noticed that Semrush’s data loads considerably faster — Ahrefs can be a bit sluggish at times, especially when you’re conducting domain analysis on big websites.)

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, search intent data, PPC data and pipelines).

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

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, I’d say that Ahrefs is probably 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 some pretty serious intelligence on your competitors.

Semrush offers 3 main pricing plans:

There’s also the option of creating a ‘custom’ Semrush plan — fees for this are negotiable, as are features.

A discount of up to 17% is available if you pay on an annual basis, and there’s also a free trial available (tip: you can get an extended version of this here).

Ahrefs comes in 4 main varieties:

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

(Recently, Ahrefs also introduced a $29 per month ‘Starter’ plan — this gives you limited access to its ‘Site Explorer’, ‘Keywords Explorer’, and ‘Site Audit’ tools.)

There isn’t a free trial available for Ahrefs, but you can make use of a free cut-down version of the tool, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. This gives you limited access to Ahrefs’ domain analysis and site auditing features.

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 considerably less generous here — on its entry-level ‘Lite’ plan, you miss out on a lot of key features, including search intent data, broken link building tools, keyword clusters, SERP updates and more.

This will effectively nudge anyone who’s serious about SEO onto the more expensive ‘Standard’ plan (which is $110 per month more than the price of the Semrush entry-level one).

Number of users

By default, all Semrush and Ahrefs plans aimed at SMEs only come with one user account (the seat count for Semrush’s ‘Enterprise’ plan is negotiable, and three seats are bundled with Ahrefs’ equivalent plan).

With Semrush, it costs $45 per month per additional ‘Pro’ user, $80 per month per ‘Guru’ user and $100 per month per ‘Business’ user.

With Ahrefs, adding seats is a bit more complicated, because each plan restricts the number of user accounts you can add to it. The situation is as follows:

And it’s worth noting that Ahrefs caps the total number of users you can have on a non-enterprise plan at 10. This will make Semrush a potentially more affordable option for some businesses that need access to the platform for a large team.

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, Ahrefs’ offering becomes the more generous of the two — it lets you can create 20 projects to Semrush’s 15.

And Ahrefs has the edge again when you compare its ‘Advanced’ plan’s project limits to Semrush’s more expensive ‘Business’ plan — its project cap is 50, 10 more than Semrush’s.

And that’s not the only way that Ahrefs is more generous 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.

Significantly, 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 don’t render this impossible, it makes things more fiddly than you’d like — and you’ll effectively have to keep a project slot free for any ‘ad hoc’ work.

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

Rank tracking

Rank tracking (also known as position tracking or SERP tracking) lets you track a website’s daily rankings for a custom set of target keywords.

And Ahrefs’ rank tracker is a bit more generous. On its entry level plan you can track 750 target keywords, while Semrush’s equivalent plan limits you to 500.

It’s a similar story as you further go up the pricing ladder, with Ahrefs’ rank tracking tools letting you keep tabs on 2,000 keywords and 5,000 on its $249 and $449 plan respectively; the equivalent Semrush limits on its $249.95 and $499.95 plan are 1,500 and 5,000.

However, by default Ahrefs only sends you weekly notifications on your tracked keywords, while Semrush’s position tracking tool lets you receive them on a daily basis. If you want daily updates from Ahrefs, you’ll have to pay an additional fee of between $100 and $250 per month (depending on plan).

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 $289 per user per month (irrespective of 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 or $40, depending on the features you need). The main functionality this gives you is the ability to:

Recently, a content analytics tool, ‘Impact Hero,’ was added to the selection of add-ons. At $200 per user per month, Semrush describe this as “an AI-powered tool that breaks down your content by customer journey stages, detects the most impactful pieces, and provides recommendations for content that can perform better.”

(In many ways, Impact Hero resembles Google Analytics — my feeling is that users who have set up Google Analytics correctly and are using goals to track content performance and lead generation probably won’t need this 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 $69 to $249 per month, depending on the plan you’re on and what precise features you need (the more expensive version gives you higher visibility on the Agency Partners platform, unlimited access to the Semrush CRM tool and access to a ‘bid finding’ tool that helps you identify contract opportunities).

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.

Around 40 third-party apps / integrations are currently available, with a focus that’s mainly on analytics and data; they range in cost from $10 to $169 per month, per user.

Key apps in here include Influencer Analytics, an app that’s designed to make finding influencer/content creator partners for your site easier, and AdClarity, an app that gives you a holistic view of your competitors’ advertising activity across lots of different advertising channels (display, social, video etc.)

(Eight free apps are also available; examples of these include a website speed testing app, a local listings checker app and a plagiarism checking tool).

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 manages to be both more generous and less generous when it comes to reporting limits.

It’s more generous because its entry-level ‘Pro’ plan lets you run a whopping 3,000 reports per day while Ahrefs’ similarly-priced ‘Lite’ plan caps you at 500 per month (this 500-query limit comes in the form of credits, which can be topped up if necessary — an additional 500 credits costs $50).

After that, Ahrefs takes the win, because all its other plans come with unlimited reporting (with a ‘fair use’ policy applying). By contrast Semrush applies daily report limits of 5,000 and 10,000 per day to its ‘Guru’ and ‘Business’ plans.

It’s worth pointing out however that these daily limits are extremely high — and unless you have a huge team working constantly in your Semrush account, you’re very unlikely to breach them.

The bottom line is that both products are very generous when it comes to reporting limits, certainly by comparison to competing tools. But if you’re comparing entry-level plans, you should note that you’ll be able to do a lot more data pulling with Semrush.

PPC 

If you’re working on a mix of SEO and PPC projects, you’ll probably 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).

Social media

You can use Semrush to gain insights on social media activity related to your brand or a competitor’s. The platform connects to several popular social networks and gives you access to a dashboard that provides insights on followers, post reach and post engagements. You can also use these social media tools to schedule posts.

These features are fundamentally online marketing tools rather than SEO ones, and will be a ‘nice to have’ option rather than an essential piece of functionality for most users. But if you feel that a social media tracker or post scheduler is important to you, then you should note that there’s nothing really comparable in Ahrefs.

Customer support

Semrush has a clear edge in the support department, because it offers three channels of support: phone, chat, and email.

Ahrefs, by contrast, provides chat and email support.

Both Semrush and Ahrefs make it really easy to contact support — there’s a clearly support window icon present at the bottom right corner of each interface.

Ultimately, because Semrush offers phone support while Ahrefs doesn’t, it’s a win in this area for Semrush.

Free trials

As discussed above, 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 double-length 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 more generous when it comes to project and reporting limits, has easier-to-use broken link building tools, and the option it gives you to work with an unlimited number of verified domains is potentially very useful to certain business types too. If you can verify your domains, and you’re on a ‘Standard’ plan or higher, you’ll be able to do an incredible amount of SEO work (thanks to the unlimited reporting features that this plan comes with).

However, Semrush is the more feature-rich tool, offering quite a lot of things that are not available in Ahrefs, including detailed PPC data, CRM-style link outreach features, AI writing tools (albeit via an add-on) and more customer support options.

I’ll leave you with a summary of the reasons why you might wish to use one of these products over the other — and if you have any questions, please do leave a comment below!

Pros and cons summary

Alternatives to Semrush and Ahrefs

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

For more information about how Ahrefs and Semrush compares to Moz, do check out our Ahrefs vs Moz vs Semrush comparison (you may also find our Moz versus Semrush comparison and our Moz vs Ahrefs shootout helpful).

We also have a SE Ranking vs Semrush comparison available; a Semrush vs Similarweb shootout; and a ‘quick guide’ version of our Ahrefs vs Semrush shootout that can be accessed on LinkedIn.

Recently, we published a review of Ubersuggest and an Ubersuggest vs Semrush comparison.

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

If you’re curious about SpyFu, check out our SpyFu vs Semrush blog post here (we also have a YouTube comparison of the two tools available).