The short version
- Ahrefs for link data. Semrush for breadth. Moz for approachability and local. That is genuinely the whole decision.
- Cheapest real entry point is Moz Starter at $49/mo, but its 50 tracked keywords on one site is a hobby allowance. The first serious tier in each is Moz Standard $99, Ahrefs Lite $129, Semrush SEO $139.
- All three include one seat. Seats are where a $129/mo decision becomes a $369/mo decision.
- None of the three implements anything. Budget for the person or process that will act on the output, or the subscription is decoration.
These three are established options in SEO software procurement, and the shortlist almost always contains all three because nobody wants to be the person who picked wrong. The good news is that the decision is more clear-cut than the marketing suggests, because the three products are genuinely different rather than three versions of the same thing.
Everything below is scored on one rubric and priced from figures read off the vendors’ own pages, with the one exception noted in the table.
The one-line answer for each
Pricing, all three
Semrush and Ahrefs figures were read directly from their pricing pages. Moz blocks automated retrieval, so those figures came from independent trackers and are marked accordingly. Confirm any price before purchase — all three change pricing without notice.
Reading a table like this by the headline number is the most common mistake in SEO tool buying. The three plans at roughly $100–$140 are not equivalent: Moz Standard tracks 300 keywords across 3 sites, Ahrefs Lite tracks 750 across 5 projects, and the Semrush SEO plan tracks 500 daily across 5 websites while also opening the door to the paid-media side of the platform. Decide which limit binds for you first, then compare prices at that limit.
The real number is plan price plus seats
One user is included on every standard plan across all three. Extra seats run from $45/mo on Semrush, $40–$80/mo on Ahrefs depending on tier, and roughly $25/mo and up on Moz. A three-person team on Ahrefs Standard is $249 + $120 = $369/mo. Price your actual headcount before you compare anything else — and look at SE Ranking, whose extra seats start around $16/mo.
Capability rubric
We make the tool in the fourth column and have put it on the same scale rather than a flattering one. Read the rest of this page with that bias in mind.
The pattern in that table is the whole story. The three suites are near-identical in shape — they all research, all track, all audit, all report — and differ in depth per cell rather than in kind. Ours is a different shape: weaker where a licensed dataset is the product, and the only column with anything in the last two rows.
Which workflow each one suits
Ahrefs: the index
If you are going to tell a client to disavow a link, or argue in a meeting that a competitor’s growth came from links rather than content, you want the number you are quoting to survive scrutiny. Ahrefs is the index most practitioners trust for that. It is also the fastest of the three to use, which compounds over a year of daily work.
Semrush: the surface area
Semrush replaces tools. If you are currently paying for an SEO suite plus a paid-search research tool plus a social scheduler plus a PR monitoring tool, Semrush Pro+ at $299/mo is genuinely cheaper than that stack. If you are not, you are buying a platform to use a tenth of it.
Moz: the on-ramp
Moz is the one you can hand to a founder or a generalist marketer and expect useful output within a day. Domain Authority — not a Google metric, and we pull that apart in domain authority vs actual rankings — remains the authority number that stakeholders already understand. Moz Local, sold separately from around $20/mo, is a stronger local product than what Semrush and Ahrefs bundle.
How to choose in an afternoon
- Write down the one question you need this tool to answer every week. Not five. One.
- Count your seats honestly, including the people who will only ever look at a report.
- If your one question involves links → Ahrefs. Involves paid or social → Semrush. Involves a local map pack → Moz plus Moz Local.
- Buy monthly, not annually, for the first three months. Annual billing on a tool you abandon in week six is the most expensive form of optimism in marketing.
- At month three, count the fixes that actually shipped. If the answer is zero, your constraint is implementation and no upgrade will help.
The obvious conflict of interest
We sell an SEO MCP server, so of course we would like you to conclude that shipping is the bottleneck. Two things keep that honest. We sit on the same rubric above, including the backlink-index zero we are never going to fill. And the free path below genuinely costs nothing and does not involve us — your own assistant, your own repo, the plays in this article.