There are so many SEO tools available in the market. It becomes difficult to choose the best SEO tool that is both feature efficient and budget-friendly. Hence, a good comparison of Ahrefs vs SEMrush vs Ubersuggest is essential.
SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Ubersuggest are the top three SEO tools that most digital marketers use. All three tools offer highly-valuable features to strengthen your website’s SEO and improve your rankings. However, each software has its own set of specialties and drawbacks.
Let’s take a look at a comparison between Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Ubersuggest.
A Quick Overview
Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Ubersuggest are all-in-one SEO tools that allow you to find the best keywords for your website, conduct a site audit, perform backlink analysis, and study your competitors.
Started as a link checker, Ahrefs has added tons of new SEO-related features over the last few years. From finding keywords for different search engines to estimating the traffic value, you can better optimize your SEO strategy using Ahrefs.
SEMrush is more of a marketing tool. With SEMrush, you can analyze your SEO performance, improve PPC campaigns, spy on your competitors, and manage your social accounts.
Ubersuggest, on the other hand, provides a 360-degree view of your website’s SEO. From complete traffic analysis (of the past 12 months) to keyword research and identifying your top pages, Ubersuggest allows you to monitor and improve your SEO performance easily.
Out of these three tools, Ubersuggest is my favorite because it allows checking essential SEO data for free (without credit card information).
Ease of Use: Ahrefs Vs SEMrush Vs Ubersuggest
First, have a look at the ease of use comparison of Ahrefs vs SEMrush vs Ubersuggest.
Ahrefs and SEMrush have a little learning curve, and it might take a few days before you can start to use them to the fullest. Ubersuggest, on the other side, doesn’t require you to spend any time learning the tool.
How to use Ubersuggest?
Unlike Ahrefs or SEMrush, Ubersuggest doesn’t require you to sign in to get the information you need. However, you can register with your Google account to see additional data (about the keywords or the domain you want to analyze).
Here’s a step by step process to research keywords in Ubersuggest:
Step 1: Visit Ubersuggest.
Step 2: Enter your desired keyword, select your location, and click on search.
Step 3: Ubersuggest will provide you with an overview of the keywords that include monthly search volume (for the past one year), SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, and CPC. It also shows related keywords and content ideas.
Similarly, you can analyze your or your competitor’s website.
Step 1: Visit Ubersuggest.
Step 2: Enter your desired URL, select the location for which you want to analyze the website, and click on search.
Step 3: Ubersuggest will show you an overview of the domain, including the number of organic keywords, average monthly traffic, domain score, and total backlinks.
Step 4: As you scroll down, you can see more information about the URL like the top SEO pages and keywords by country.
Related: Ubersuggest Keyword Tool Review
How to use SEMrush?
The first step to use SEMrush is to sign up for a free trial. Just like Ubersuggest, SEMrush is a freemium tool. However, it limits you with one project, meaning you can analyze and track changes only for one website.
Here’s how you can use SEMrush for keyword research:
Step 1: Sign up for SEMrush.
Step 2: Choose the keyword overview tool.
Step 3: Enter your seed keyword, choose a location, and click on “analyze.”
Step 4: SEMrush will show you details like volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, featured snippet for that term, and related phrases.
Follow these steps to analyze your domain.
Step 1: Go to “Traffic Analyzer” in SEMrush.
Step 2: Enter your or your competitor’s website URL and click on search.
Step 3: SEMrush will show you total visits, unique visitors, pages/visit, average visit duration, bounce rate, and devices.
Related: SEMrush Review + Top Features
How to use Ahrefs?
The primary tools of Ahrefs, i.e., site explorer, keywords explorer, site audit, rank tracker, and content explorer, require you to sign up. Unlike other tools in this list, Ahrefs doesn’t have a free trial. You’ll need to pay $7 for a 7-day trial.
However, other Ahrefs tools like backlink checker, broken link checker, and keyword generator are free to try.
Here’s how you can use Ahrefs for keyword research:
Step 1: Visit Keyword Generator in Ahrefs.
Step 2: Enter your seed keyword, choose the search engine you want to target (Google, Bing, YouTube, or Amazon), select a location, and click on “Find Keywords.”
Step 3: Ahrefs will then show you 100 keyword ideas, keyword difficulty, and volume. However, it only displays the KD for the first ten terms. To find KD for all the keywords, you will need to sign up with Ahrefs.
Winner: After using all three SEO tools, I can confidently say Ubersuggest is the easiest to use. It’s as simple as entering a word.
Features Comparison: Ahrefs vs SEMrush vs Ubersuggest
As mentioned above, each tool has a set of features that makes it unique. Let’s have a look at what differentiates Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Ubersuggest from each other.
Ahrefs Top Features
Ahrefs allows you to find keywords for ten search engines. The list includes:
- YouTube
- Amazon
- Bing
- Yahoo
- Yandex
- Baidu
- Daum
- Naver
- Seznam
So if you are looking to dominate SERPs on other search engines, then Ahrefs might be an ideal choice for you.
Ahrefs provides estimated monthly organic search traffic of the current top-ranking pages for your target keywords. This gives an idea of how much visitors you can get if you rank on the top of search results for your desired keyword.
SEMrush Top Features
SEMrush can help you improve your content marketing game. The Content Analyzer tool monitors your website and informs which posts need to be removed, updated, or has poor content.
SEMrush has an integrated social media marketing tool. You can schedule posts, find the best time for posting content, create new content while surfing the web, edit images, and use UTM for accurate tracking.
Ubersuggest Top Features
For each keyword, Ubersuggest shows you the number of mobile and desktop searches. It also displays the age range of people searching for it. This is extremely helpful for marketers looking to target customers of a specific age group or a device.
Ubersuggest also shows the top-performing content based on social shares, enabling you to create the best possible articles for your website.
Winner: I feel Ubersuggest is the winner in this section because it helps you find what age group is searching for your desired keywords, enabling you to create content that pleases them. It also shows top-performing content as per social shares, further strengthening your content marketing game.
Pricing Comparison
Wondering how many bucks you need to spend each month to get access to these tools? Let’s do a pricing comparison between Ahrefs vs SEMrush vs Ubersuggest.
Ahrefs Pricing
As mentioned above, Ahrefs trial starts at $7 (for its two plans: Lite and Standard). Ahrefs pricing starts at $99 and goes as high as $999.
The biggest limitation in the lower plans in Ahrefs is that you can view only ten results in each link intersection and content gap report.
SEMrush Pricing
SEMrush offers a free version of its tool. But that comes with very limited features. First, you can add only one website. Second, you can generate only ten reports each day (including keyword research, competitor analysis, and social media analytics).
SEMrush has three pricing plans starting from $99.95. The most expensive plan is priced at $399.95 a month.
The biggest limitation in SEMrush pricing is that you will have to pay an additional $200 a month for competitive intelligence. Also, the lowest tier user doesn’t get the ability to gather rank tracking for multiple devices and locations (e.g., mobile vs. desktop).
Ubersuggest Pricing
The core product is 100% free. You can find keyword and content ideas, analyze a domain, conduct a site audit, and examine backlinks for free.
When it comes to pricing, Ubersuggest has three plans, starting at $29. The uppermost plan is priced at $99 a month.
You get access to all the Ubersuggest features irrespective of the plan you pick. The only difference is the number of reports you can generate, keywords you can track, number of keyword suggestions, and content ideas.
Here is a tabular comparison of the different pricing options offered by Ahrefs vs SEMrush vs Ubersuggest:
| Ideal For | Ahrefs | SEMrush | Ubersuggest |
| Individuals | $99 | $0 | $0 |
| Freelancers and startups | $179 | $99.95 | $29 |
| SMB and growing marketing agencies | $399 | $199.95 | $49 |
| Large businesses | $999 | $399.95 | $99 |
Winner: In my opinion, Ubersuggest is the clear winner because it has affordable plans and provides all the data you need for SEO.
The Verdict: Who’s the Winner?
As you can see, Ubersuggest is a clear winner in the comparison between Ahrefs vs SEMrush vs Ubersuggest. It is a free tool, and even the price of the premium version is reasonable compared to the other two.
Have you used any of the three tools? If yes, which one? How was your experience? If not, which of the three are you going to try, and why? Let me know in the comments!
