The short version
- Semrush does far more. Moz is far easier. Almost every real decision between them reduces to that sentence.
- Moz Standard ($99/mo) undercuts the Semrush SEO plan ($139/mo) — but Semrush at that tier covers paid search, social and PR reporting that Moz simply does not have.
- For local SEO, Moz has the stronger dedicated product in Moz Local, sold separately from around $20/mo.
- Feature breadth you do not use is not a benefit. Most Semrush buyers use a small fraction of the platform.
Semrush and Moz sit at opposite ends of the same category. Semrush is trying to be the operating system for a marketing department. Moz is trying to be the tool a marketer can open on a Monday and get an answer from before the coffee goes cold. Neither ambition is wrong; they just suit different buyers.
The short answer
Fit for your workflow
Semrush if SEO is one of several channels you own. Moz if it is a side of the desk.
If you are accountable for organic, paid, social and the monthly report that ties them together, Semrush earns its price by replacing three tools. If SEO is one responsibility among many and nobody on the team is a specialist, Moz Pro gets you to competent faster and cheaper.
- Multi-channel marketing team
- Semrush — the breadth is the point.
- Small business, generalist marketer
- Moz Standard at $99/mo.
- Local or multi-location business
- Moz Pro plus Moz Local. Also look at the small-business shortlist.
- Agency managing many sites
- Semrush Pro+ (15 sites) or Advanced (40 sites) — or compare SE Ranking on cost per seat.
Pricing
Semrush figures read directly from the vendor pricing page. Moz figures are third-party sourced because moz.com blocks automated retrieval — confirm before purchase.
Moz is cheaper at every tier. The honest way to read that is not "Moz is better value" but "Moz is selling less". Semrush Pro+ at $299/mo covers 15 websites with 1,500 daily tracked keywords plus the entire paid-media and social side of the platform. Moz Medium at $179/mo covers 10 sites and 1,500 tracked keywords with no paid-media tooling at all. If you need the paid-media side, Semrush is cheaper than Moz plus a second tool. If you do not, you are paying for cargo.
Capability comparison
Both score well across the board — the difference is depth per cell, and how much of it you will use.
Semrush covers more capabilities in this rubric. In practice, the rows you never open score zero for you regardless of what the vendor built. Before you buy on feature count, write down the five things you will actually do in the tool each month. If Moz covers all five, the comparison is over.
When Moz may be a good fit
- Local SEO. Moz Local is a stronger dedicated product than the local module bundled into Semrush, and it starts cheap.
- Onboarding. A non-specialist becomes productive in Moz in an afternoon. Semrush takes considerably longer.
- Stakeholder legibility. Domain Authority is the authority metric non-SEOs already recognise.
- Entry price. $49/mo Starter exists, even if its limits are tight.
When Semrush may be a good fit
- Breadth. Paid search, display, social and PR reporting in the same login.
- Keyword database depth in most large markets.
- AI-visibility tooling, which Semrush has pushed into the core platform harder than most.
- Site count at the agency tiers — 40 websites on Advanced.
The seat-count question nobody asks first
Both vendors price additional users as an add-on, and it is the line item that turns a comfortable budget into an uncomfortable one. Semrush lists extra users from $45/mo. Moz seats are reported around $25/mo and up. On a four-person marketing team that is an extra $135/mo on Semrush before anyone has looked at a keyword.
There is a practical workaround that most teams land on eventually: one licensed seat for whoever does the analysis, and scheduled reports for everyone else. Both platforms do scheduled reporting well. Buying five seats so five people can occasionally look at a dashboard is the most common way SEO software budgets get wasted, and it is worth saying out loud before you sign anything.
The part both of them skip
Whichever you pick, you end the month with a list rather than a changed website. That gap is not a criticism of either vendor — it is the category boundary. Analysis platforms analyse. The title tags, the schema, the internal links and the heading structure still need somebody to open the codebase and write them.
It is worth being precise about why this matters more now than it did five years ago. When a page has to satisfy both a search engine and an AI assistant summarising your category, the things that decide the outcome are structural: unambiguous entity descriptions, valid structured data, headings that actually answer the question, internal links that establish what your site is about. All of those live in your templates and your markup — not in a dashboard. See technical SEO vs content SEO for where the effort usually pays best.
What we do not do
We build an SEO MCP server. Where it differs from both of these is that it runs inside the assistant you already code with, so working out what is wrong and changing it happen in one sitting rather than two. What it does not have is a backlink index or a daily record of your rankings — if either is the reason you are buying, take Semrush or Moz.