The short version
- Yoast Premium is $118.80/year ex VAT per site and now bundles Local, Video and News SEO — features AIOSEO splits across higher tiers.
- AIOSEO Basic is $250/year for one site. Per single site, Yoast is less than half the price with more bundled.
- AIOSEO may fit agencies needing site-count licensing or multi-location local SEO.
- Yoast’s documentation and support are the best in the category. That matters more than it sounds on a plugin this central.
These two have been the establishment options in WordPress SEO for a decade and a half, and the comparison has shifted significantly in the last couple of years. Yoast’s decision to bundle Local, Video and News into Premium rather than sell them separately changed the value calculation substantially, and a lot of the comparison content online has not caught up.
The short answer
Fit for your workflow
Yoast for one site. AIOSEO for many sites or multi-location local.
For a single business website, Yoast Premium at $118.80/year ex VAT is better value than AIOSEO Basic at $250/year, and the bundled Local, Video and News plugins mean fewer separate purchases. AIOSEO becomes the better answer when you need a lot of sites on one licence, or when local SEO with multiple locations is central.
- One business site
- Yoast Premium — cheaper and more bundled.
- Restaurant, clinic or shop with several branches
- AIOSEO Plus at $500/year for 3 sites.
- Agency, 10+ client sites
- AIOSEO Pro or Elite — or Rank Math Business, which is far cheaper.
- No budget at all
- Both have free tiers; Rank Math’s free tier offers additional features to compare.
Pricing
Yoast prices ex VAT, so your actual cost depends on jurisdiction. AIOSEO anchors each tier against a "regular" price roughly double the selling price.
Yoast figures are the per-site price multiplied out, since Premium is licensed per site. The crossover is around ten sites — below that Yoast is cheaper, above it AIOSEO can be cheaper under the listed licences.
That crossover point is the single most useful fact in this comparison. Under ten sites, Yoast. Over ten sites, AIOSEO — or Rank Math Business, which covers 100 client sites for €299.88/year and undercuts both.
Capability comparison
AIOSEO scores higher on rank tracking and reporting because its Elite tier includes keyword rank tracking and client management that Yoast does not attempt. Whether that is an advantage depends on whether you would rather have those features inside WordPress or in a dedicated tool — most practitioners prefer the latter, and a plugin-based rank tracker is rarely as good as a real one.
The things that do not show up in tables
Support and documentation
Yoast’s documentation is genuinely the best in WordPress SEO, and its support is properly staffed. On a plugin that sits in the rendering path of every page you publish, that is insurance rather than a nicety. When something breaks on a Friday afternoon, the quality of the help article you find decides how your weekend goes.
Settings surface
Yoast exposes fewer options, which is a feature. Every additional toggle is a way for a non-specialist to accidentally noindex a section of the site. AIOSEO sits between Yoast and Rank Math on this scale.
The scoring lights
Both plugins grade your content. Both gradings reward keyword repetition and short sentences in ways that do not correlate well with what Google says it wants. Use them to catch omissions, not as a target. More on this in editorial quality vs optimisation score.
What a plugin cannot reach
Neither plugin restructures a template, resolves competing pages, fixes heading hierarchy in a theme, or improves the substance of a page. Those are the things that usually decide whether a WordPress site ranks once the basics are configured — and configuring the basics is an afternoon of work with either plugin.
Install one of these regardless
We build a codebase-level SEO tool, not a plugin, and it does not replace either of these on WordPress. Sitemaps, redirects and admin-level schema are plugin jobs. Pick one, configure it once, then spend your remaining attention on content and templates.