Ahrefs alternatives for backlinks and keyword research

The right Ahrefs alternative depends on which part of Ahrefs you pay for. For a competitor's backlinks, Semrush and Majestic both sell link data for any domain, and for links to a site you own, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools cost nothing. For keyword research and occasional competitor reports, Google's own data plus a per-run tool covers most needs. Ahrefs is still worth $129 a month or more if you open it most working days.

Most people looking for a cheaper alternative to Ahrefs use it for one report, a competitor's backlinks, a few times a month. That is where switching saves real money. If you also track rankings for a dozen client sites, it probably won't.

Ahrefs pricing in October 2026

Ahrefs costs $29 a month for Starter, $129 for Lite, $249 for Standard and $449 for Advanced, as of October 2026, according to its pricing page. Enterprise is $1,499 a month on an annual commitment, and paying yearly on the other plans saves up to 17%.

Credits are the limit you feel. Opening a report costs 1 credit, and applying a filter, changing the dates or opening the SERP viewer costs 1 more, per Ahrefs' help article on credits. Reopening the same report within 30 minutes, paging and sorting cost nothing. So opening a competitor's backlinks, filtering them, then opening its referring domains spends 3 credits.

Starter is tighter than the price suggests. Reports on sites you haven't verified stop at 250 rows, the Top pages report at 25, and there are no exports. It renews monthly only, and you can't buy extra credits or add users on it, per Ahrefs' Starter plan article. Lite raises the cap to 2,500 rows per report and lets you buy more credits.

What Ahrefs gives verified site owners at no cost

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools gives you Site Explorer, Site Audit and Web Analytics for every site you verify, at no charge and with no cap on the number of verified sites.

Ahrefs accepts four ways to prove ownership. You can connect Google Search Console, which it recommends, or add a DNS record, an HTML file or an HTML meta tag. Sites already verified in Search Console are verified automatically when you connect it.

Here is what you get for a verified site:

• Site Explorer with your organic keywords, top pages and backlinks, showing up to 1,000 backlinks and 1,000 keywords at once.
• Site Audit, which checks more than 170 technical and on-page issues with 5,000 crawl credits per project a month. Only HTML pages that return 200 use credits, so redirects and broken URLs don't eat the allowance.
• Web Analytics for up to 1 million events per project.

You don't get competitor data, and Keywords Explorer needs Starter or a higher plan.

If you mainly want to see your own backlinks and fix your own site, set this up before you pay anyone, us included. It is Ahrefs' own link data for your domain.

The best Ahrefs alternative for backlink data

For a competitor's backlinks, Semrush is the closest like-for-like suite and Majestic is the link specialist. For links to your own site, Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools cost nothing.

Semrush

Semrush's plans start at $139 a month for the SEO plan as of October 2026. Its Backlinks tool shows the links pointing at any domain, and Semrush lists Backlink Gap and Backlink Audit tools alongside it. The pricing page doesn't say which plan includes which backlink tool, so ask Semrush before you buy a plan for links alone.

Pick Semrush if you want keyword research, position tracking and backlinks in one login. Our guide to Semrush alternatives compares the full suites.

Majestic

Majestic calls itself a specialist in backlink analysis, and its plans are priced around link data. Majestic Lite costs $49.99 a month, or $499.99 a year, as of October 2026, and covers its Fresh Index with 5,000 Site Explorer rows. Pro costs $99.99 a month, or $999.99 a year, and adds the Historic Index and 30,000 rows. Prices exclude VAT, and new customers get a 7-day money-back guarantee on both.

Its two headline metrics are Trust Flow, which Majestic describes as a measure of link quality, and Citation Flow, a measure of link quantity. Treat it as a link tool and keep something else for keywords and audits.

Moz

Moz Link Explorer is the other link tool people often compare with Ahrefs. It comes with Moz Pro, whose Standard plan costs $99 a month, or $79 a month paid yearly, as of October 2026. A no-cost Moz Community account gives limited access to Link Explorer, enough to judge the data before you pay.

Links to your own site from the search engines

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools both show links to sites you have verified, at no cost. Search Console's Links report lists top linking sites, top linked pages and top linking text. On-screen tables stop at 1,000 rows, and the export holds up to 100,000 rows. Google says it isn't a complete list of every link.

Bing goes further for competitor work. Its Backlinks report has a similar sites view where you enter other domains and compare the sites linking to them with the sites linking to you, along with the anchor text each gets.

Ahrefs alternatives for keyword research

For keyword research, Google Keyword Planner and Search Console give you Google's own numbers, and Ahrefs Starter is the cheapest way to keep Keywords Explorer.

Keyword Planner lives inside Google Ads. It shows average monthly searches and cost estimates for each keyword, and Google asks you to finish account setup with billing details before you can use it.

Search Console's Performance report lists the queries your site already appears for, with clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position. For a site with some traffic, that is the best keyword list you will get, because every query is real.

Ahrefs Starter includes Keywords Explorer with 1 month of history and 5 keyword lists of up to 100 keywords each.

A competitor's keywords always come from a third-party estimate, whichever tool you use. Our Keyword Gap tool lists the keywords a competitor ranks for in Google's top 20 that your site doesn't rank for at all, up to the 300 most searched, for 85 credits a run. If you are building a full comparison, the competitor analysis template shows where each of these numbers belongs.

Alternatives for auditing your own site

For auditing your own site, start with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, because Site Audit is included for verified sites, and read Search Console for the queries and links Google itself records.

The 5,000 monthly crawl credits run out on a site much past 5,000 HTML pages, so a bigger site needs a paid crawl. Ahrefs Lite gives 100,000 crawl credits a month.

Our website check covers crawling and indexing, on-page SEO, structured data and content on the pages you choose. It can add a separate crawl of up to 150 pages for internal links and sitemap coverage, so it suits small sites, not a 50,000-page store. A quick check of your home page costs no credits.

Ahrefs alternatives compared

This table compares the entry point of each option, with prices as of October 2026.

When is Ahrefs worth the price?

Ahrefs is worth the price when you work in Site Explorer most days. If you open it twice a month, it isn't.

Standard removes the per-user credit cap, keeps 2 years of history and adds Content Explorer and Batch Analysis, so a team can filter and compare without rationing clicks. History matters too. Link growth over two or five years shows whether a competitor's links came from one campaign or built up slowly, and a one-off lookup can't show that. Rank tracking is another. Ahrefs tracks 750 keywords on Lite and 2,000 on Standard, and we don't track rankings at all.

If you log in twice a month to look at one competitor, most of Lite's 1,000 credits go unused. That is the case for switching.

Check a competitor's backlinks per run

Our Backlink Finder is a pay-per-run backlink checker. It looks up any domain and lists the 100 strongest sites that link to it. Each comes with a link rank from 0 to 1,000, a spam score, the share of its linking pages that are followed and the date its first link was seen. The report adds the 50 link texts those sites use, grouped as brand name, web address, generic words, no text or other words, and the total number of sites linking in. A run costs 70 credits.

We don't run our own link index. The data comes from a third-party link data provider, and the lookup covers a whole domain, not one page. For a large site, 100 linking sites is a small share of the total, so you see who matters most rather than everyone.

The same credits pay for Domain Overview at 50 credits, Competitor Keywords at 35, Keyword Research at 34 and Keyword Metrics at 33. Plans start at $29 a month for 2,000 credits, which puts a backlink lookup at about $1, and monthly credits don't roll over. There is no rank tracking and no history of how a link profile changed, so this fits occasional reports, not daily monitoring.