The short version
- Rank Math has the best free tier and the cheapest paid tiers. Yoast has the best support and the safest defaults. AIOSEO has the best local SEO and site-count licensing.
- For one site the cheapest sensible paid option is Rank Math PRO at €95.88/year; Yoast Premium at $118.80/year ex VAT is close and bundles more.
- All three do the core job — titles, meta, sitemaps, schema, canonicals — competently. Nobody is choosing wrong here.
- The plugin is roughly 20% of WordPress SEO. The other 80% is content, templates and internal linking, and no plugin touches it.
The decision is far lower-stakes than the volume of argument around it suggests. Any of the three, configured once and left alone, handles the technical fundamentals. The differences are real, but they are differences of price, licensing and temperament — not capability. Nobody has ever failed to rank because they picked the wrong one of these.
Pricing, all three
Rank Math prices in EUR, the others in USD. Yoast is ex VAT. AIOSEO anchors against a "regular" price roughly double the selling price. All read from vendor pages on the date shown.
Free tiers compared
Free-tier scope shifts between releases on all three. Confirm on the vendor pages before deciding on any single row.
Rank Math includes more of the listed features in its free tier. If your budget is zero, check whether those features meet your site’s requirements.
Capability rubric
The scores are close because the products are close. Where a rubric cannot separate three tools, the decision belongs to price, licensing and support — which is exactly the case here.
Pick by situation
The 80% none of them cover
Once your chosen plugin is configured — an afternoon, once — it has done its job. What remains is everything that actually decides whether a WordPress site earns traffic: whether your pages answer real questions better than the ones currently ranking, whether your templates produce clean semantic HTML, whether your internal linking tells a crawler what your site is about, and whether you have nine thin pages competing where you should have one strong one.
None of that is plugin work. It is content strategy and code. The sites that plateau with perfect plugin configuration are plateauing on the other 80%.
Switching between them
All three ship importers and they work well, but a migration is a real operation rather than a toggle. Settings, focus keywords, meta descriptions, redirects and schema configuration all have to transfer, and something usually does not — most often redirects, which are the most expensive thing to lose.
The safe sequence: take a full backup, run the import on a staging copy, then check a sample of pages across every template in the Rich Results Test and compare rendered titles and meta descriptions against the originals. Deactivate the old plugin properly rather than leaving it installed, since two plugins emitting tags simultaneously produces duplicates. Given that the three produce broadly equivalent output, the honest question is whether the switch is worth the risk at all — see Rank Math vs Yoast.
Where we sit relative to all three
We build an MCP server that works in a codebase, not a WordPress plugin. It does not generate sitemaps, manage redirects or emit schema from wp-admin — so it does not replace any of these three. On WordPress, install one of them first. We are relevant to the theme, template and content layer that sits above them.