Free Semrush Alternative: 9 Tools I Compared for SEO, Keywords, Backlinks and Audits (2026)
Semrush is difficult to replace because it is not really one SEO tool. It combines keyword research, competitor analysis, backlinks, rank tracking, technical audits, content optimization, PPC research, AI search visibility, and reporting inside one platform. That breadth is also the reason many founders, freelancers, and small teams start looking for a free Semrush alternative: you may be paying for a large marketing platform while regularly using only keyword research, Position Tracking, Site Audit, and a few competitor reports.
Semrush also changed its pricing structure in 2026, so a lot of comparison articles are already outdated. The current lineup starts with the SEO plan at $139/month, followed by Starter at $199, Pro+ at $299, and Advanced at $549. Semrush still has a limited free account, and its paid toolkits can be tested with a 7-day trial.
I researched the alternatives by breaking Semrush into the jobs people actually use it for instead of looking for another product with the longest feature list. I checked current vendor pricing and documentation, used the free access I could open directly, and compared where a smaller tool can replace one part of Semrush without pretending it replaces everything.
The short version: there is no single free Semrush alternative that matches the entire platform. But if SEO is what you actually care about, you can replace a large part of the day-to-day workflow with a much smaller stack.
TL;DR: the best Semrush alternatives by use case
- Best free foundation for your own site: Google Search Console
- Best free option for backlinks and audits on your own site: Ahrefs Free
- Best if you want SEO findings turned into actual work: RankBuddy
- Best budget traditional all-in-one: Ubersuggest
- Best simpler SEO toolkit for keywords and rankings: Mangools
- Best professional alternative for agencies: SE Ranking
- Best for competitor PPC intelligence: SpyFu
- Best for bulk SEO data and API workflows: Serpstat
- Best free technical crawler: Screaming Frog
If I had no budget, I would start with Google Search Console + Ahrefs Free + Screaming Frog. That gives you first-party Google performance data, backlink information for your own site, and a serious technical crawler without another monthly SEO subscription. If my bigger problem was not getting more SEO data but deciding what to do with it, I would use Google Search Console + RankBuddy, adding specialist research tools only when I actually needed them.
Is there a free version of Semrush in 2026?
Yes. Semrush has a limited free account, so before replacing it completely, it is worth understanding what the free version already gives you. A free account currently allows a small number of daily reports across keyword and domain research, so you can use it for occasional keyword checks, basic competitor research, some site-audit functionality, and other limited reports.
The limitation is volume. Semrush's free account is useful for checking something occasionally, but it is not designed to replace a paid SEO workflow if you research keywords or competitors every day. Semrush also offers a 7-day trial for its paid SEO and AI-search plans. I would use that differently from the permanent free account: run the deeper competitor research, keyword-gap analysis, audit, and ranking baseline during the trial, then decide which parts of the platform you actually use often enough to pay for.
That distinction matters because people searching for free Semrush, Semrush free alternative, and free alternative to Semrush often do not need a completely different product. Sometimes the most efficient setup is the free Semrush account combined with specialist tools.
Semrush vs the alternatives at a glance
| Tool | Free option | Keyword research | Competitor research | Rank tracking | Site audit | PPC research | Helps execute the work | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Semrush | Limited free account | Excellent | Excellent | Yes | Excellent | Excellent | Mostly user-led | Broad marketing teams |
| Google Search Console | Yes | Existing queries only | No | First-party performance | Limited | No | No | Your own Google performance |
| Ahrefs Free | Yes, verified sites | Own-site data | Very limited | Limited | Strong | No | No | Your own backlinks and audits |
| RankBuddy | Free to start | Yes | Yes | GSC-based monitoring | Yes | No | Yes | Founders and small teams |
| Ubersuggest | Limited free access | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Limited | Limited | Budget all-in-one |
| Mangools | Permanent free account | Yes | Yes | Yes | Limited | No | No | Simpler SEO workflows |
| SE Ranking | 14-day trial | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Limited | Limited | Agencies and multiple sites |
| SpyFu | Free account | Yes | Excellent for PPC | Yes | Limited | Excellent | No | Competitor PPC research |
| Serpstat | Freemium + trial | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Limited | Bulk data and API workflows |
| Screaming Frog | 500 URLs | No | No | No | Excellent | No | No | Technical SEO crawling |
The important question is not which product has the most checkmarks. Semrush already wins that game. The useful question is which Semrush modules you actually need often enough to replace.
What are you actually trying to replace from Semrush?
"I need a Semrush alternative" can mean several completely different things. Before choosing another tool, I would separate the jobs because replacing Keyword Magic Tool is much easier than replacing the complete competitor, PPC, backlink, audit, and reporting workflow.
Keyword research
Semrush Keyword Magic Tool is one of the main reasons people pay for the platform. It combines keyword ideas, search volume, difficulty, intent, SERP data, and filtering inside a large database. This part is relatively easy to replace because Ahrefs, Mangools, Ubersuggest, SE Ranking, Serpstat, SpyFu, Google Keyword Planner, and many smaller tools can all give you keyword data.
The bigger difference is what happens after you get the keywords. Some products give you a large database to explore manually, while others try to prioritize the opportunities that actually matter for your existing site.
Competitor research
Semrush is particularly strong when you want to enter a competitor domain and explore its ranking keywords, pages, backlinks, PPC activity, and traffic estimates. This is much harder to replace completely for free.
If competitor SEO research is central to your workflow, I would look at Ahrefs, SE Ranking, SpyFu, or Serpstat rather than expecting Google Search Console to replace Semrush. GSC only knows about websites you control.
Rank tracking
Semrush Position Tracking answers a traditional rank-tracking question: where does a selected keyword rank from a particular location and device? Google Search Console answers something different: which queries actually generated impressions for your pages and how their performance changed.
I would not treat those as identical datasets. If you want to understand the distinction, I covered it in more detail in my rank tracking vs SEO monitoring comparison.
Site Audit
Semrush Site Audit continuously crawls a website and groups technical problems into a much easier interface than most raw crawlers. If this is the Semrush module you use most often, Screaming Frog can replace a large part of the technical crawling for free on smaller sites.
The trade-off is guidance. A crawler gives you the evidence, but you still need to understand what matters, what does not, and what should be fixed first. I have a separate technical SEO audit tutorial if technical auditing is the main workflow you are trying to replace.
Backlink research
Semrush gives you both your own backlink profile and competitor-link research. For websites you own, Ahrefs Free is unusually strong because you get access to Ahrefs backlink data on verified projects without paying for a full Ahrefs subscription.
Competitor backlink research is more difficult to replace for free. Once link-gap research becomes a regular part of the job, I would expect to pay for Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic, SE Ranking, or another backlink provider. If backlinks are the main reason you are comparing platforms, see my free Ahrefs alternative comparison and backlink monitoring tools guide.
PPC research
This is an important category because many "Semrush alternatives" articles quietly ignore it. Semrush is not only an SEO product, and its advertising and competitor intelligence are part of the reason the platform costs more than smaller SEO-only products.
If you rely heavily on competitor Google Ads history, ad copy, paid keywords, and PPC research, something like SpyFu is much closer to that job than Google Search Console, Mangools, or RankBuddy.
AI search visibility
This changed significantly in 2026. AI visibility is no longer something I would describe as completely separate from the main Semrush SEO product. The current SEO plan already includes AI-search monitoring features, while higher tiers expand prompt tracking, visibility reports, and related limits.
RankBuddy approaches AI visibility differently. It is part of the same website workspace as your Google Search Console data, audits, content, and competitor work instead of being treated as a separate marketing analytics product.
Prioritization and execution
This is the category that matters most to me as a founder. Semrush can show me hundreds of keywords, dozens of technical issues, backlink gaps, competitor pages, and ranking changes. The amount of data is impressive, but somebody still needs to decide which problem matters first, whether to update an existing page or create a new one, whether position 12 is worth working on, which technical warnings actually matter, and what internal links should be added.
That gap between seeing the data and doing the SEO work is the reason I started building RankBuddy.
Why people look for a cheaper Semrush alternative
Price is an obvious reason, but I do not think it is the only one. The current SEO plan costs $139/month, which can be completely reasonable if SEO is your job and you use Semrush constantly. It feels different when you run one SaaS website and mainly open Keyword Magic Tool twice a week, check a few competitors, and run Site Audit occasionally.
The mistake is comparing $139 with $29 without comparing what the products actually replace. A cheaper tool only saves money if it covers the work you were paying Semrush to do.
Semrush can be more platform than a small site needs
Semrush is designed to serve professional SEOs, agencies, marketers, content teams, PPC teams, and increasingly AI-search workflows. That breadth is valuable, but it also creates complexity.
If you are a founder trying to answer "what should I do for SEO this week?", a platform optimized for hundreds of possible reports can be more software than you need.
Some of your best SEO data is already free
For your own website, Google Search Console gives you actual queries, clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position directly from Google. You do not need to estimate those metrics with a third-party platform.
The same principle applies to technical SEO. A free crawler can often surface many of the same technical problems that appear inside a large paid suite.
More data can create more work
This became obvious while I was reviewing the alternatives. A larger dataset is useful when you know what you are trying to answer, but it becomes less useful when the result of every report is another list of 200 things you could potentially work on.
For an SEO professional, interpreting those reports is part of the job. For a founder, the bottleneck is often not data access. It is attention.
How I compared these Semrush alternatives
I did not treat every product as a complete Semrush replacement because that would be misleading. For this comparison, I checked current official pricing and product documentation rather than copying numbers from older comparison articles. Where I could directly access the product or free tier, I opened it and checked the workflow myself. The screenshots in this article come from those checks. Where a paid feature was not available to me, I used the vendor's current documentation rather than describing it as something I personally tested.
I compared each product around the Semrush jobs people actually use: keyword research, competitor research, backlinks, rank tracking, technical audits, first-party Search Console data, PPC research, and whether the product helps turn findings into work. I also separate free forever from free trial, because a 7-day trial is useful for evaluating a product but it is not a long-term free Semrush alternative.
1. Google Search Console: the free foundation I would start with
Best for: Your own Google visibility | Price: Free | What it replaces: Parts of Position Tracking, query analysis, page analysis, indexing monitoring, and opportunity discovery | Main limitation: No competitor keyword database
If you have a website and do not have Google Search Console connected yet, I would fix that before paying for another SEO product. GSC gives you the queries where Google showed your pages, impressions, clicks, CTR, average position, devices, countries, landing pages, indexing information, and URL-level inspection data.
What I find most useful is that GSC shows opportunities that already exist. A third-party tool might tell you a keyword has good volume, while Search Console can tell you that your page is already getting 2,000 impressions for it around position 11. Those are very different signals because if Google already associates your page with a valuable query, improving that page can be a much cheaper SEO move than starting from zero on a completely new keyword.
The limitation is obvious: you cannot enter a competitor into GSC. There is no Keyword Magic Tool equivalent, no competitor keyword database, and no PPC research. That is why I treat GSC as the free foundation, not the whole stack.
RankBuddy also uses Search Console as one of its core data sources. The Google Search Console integration turns the same clicks, impressions, positions, and query changes into prioritized opportunities rather than another report to inspect manually.
2. Ahrefs Free: the strongest free addition for backlinks and technical data
Best for: Your own backlinks and technical audit | Price: Free for verified sites | What it replaces: Parts of Backlink Analytics and Site Audit | Main limitation: Deep competitor research requires paid access
Ahrefs now has a permanent free account for websites you can verify ownership of, which makes it one of the best complements to Search Console. Google tells you what is happening in search, while Ahrefs Free adds backlink information and technical crawl data from one of the industry's biggest SEO data providers.
For a verified project, Ahrefs Free includes Site Audit with 5,000 crawl credits per project each month. That can be enough for many smaller websites.
Where the free product stops being a Semrush replacement is competitor analysis. If you want to deeply inspect websites you do not own, explore competitor backlinks, or use larger keyword datasets, you quickly move toward Ahrefs Starter or the full paid plans.
I went much deeper into those limits in my free Ahrefs alternative comparison. If you are evaluating links specifically, I also recommend understanding what the authority metrics actually mean rather than treating them as one universal score. My Domain Rating vs Domain Authority guide explains why Ahrefs DR and Moz DA can disagree, and how to check Domain Rating covers the practical side.
3. RankBuddy: when the problem is doing the SEO work, not finding more data
Best for: Founders and small teams who want an AI SEO employee instead of another dashboard | Price: Free to start, paid plans from $29/month | What it replaces: Parts of keyword research, competitor analysis, site auditing, backlink research, content planning, content creation, internal linking, monitoring, and prioritization | Main limitation: It is not a Semrush-scale PPC or proprietary keyword/backlink database
RankBuddy is my own product, so I want to make the comparison carefully. If you are an SEO specialist who wants to spend hours exploring enormous keyword databases, building custom competitor reports, or researching paid-search campaigns, Semrush is a better product for that workflow.
RankBuddy is built for a different problem. I was tired of the workflow where an SEO tool gives me a report and then I still need to figure out what I am supposed to do with it. RankBuddy uses Google Search Console, live SERPs, external SEO data, website crawls, and project context to answer questions and run SEO jobs from one workspace.
For example, instead of only seeing that a query ranks at position 12, I want the system to decide whether the page should be updated, inspect what the current SERP expects, find missing internal links, and turn that into a concrete task. That is why I do not describe RankBuddy as "Semrush, but cheaper." The product philosophy is different.
Semrush gives a professional marketer a large set of research tools. RankBuddy is being built as an AI SEO Employee that shares context across those jobs and helps keep the SEO backlog moving.
The current product covers backlink analysis, SEO strategy, on-page SEO, internal linking, content briefs, AI content writing, technical audits, competitor research, Search Console analysis, AI visibility, and recurring SEO automation.
One limitation is important: RankBuddy does not try to recreate the entire Semrush advertising ecosystem or build another massive proprietary SEO database from scratch. It uses external SEO data where that makes sense and focuses on interpreting and acting on it.
If your biggest problem is competitor PPC research, choose SpyFu or Semrush. If your biggest problem is having 20 SEO reports and not enough time to turn them into work, that is the problem RankBuddy is designed around.
4. Ubersuggest: the budget all-in-one that feels closest to a smaller Semrush
Best for: Solo founders, bloggers, and small businesses that still want a traditional SEO dashboard | Price: From $29/month, with a lifetime option available | What it replaces: Keyword research, basic competitor research, rank tracking, audits, backlinks, and content ideas | Main limitation: Less data depth than Semrush
Ubersuggest is one of the most obvious cheaper Semrush alternatives because the product model is similar. You still get a dashboard where you enter keywords and domains, and you still have keyword research, competitor analysis, rank tracking, backlink reports, and site audits.
That makes Ubersuggest easier to understand as a direct replacement than something like RankBuddy or Search Console. The trade-off is depth. Semrush is built for professional research at a much larger scale, while Ubersuggest intentionally simplifies the experience and the data you get back.
I think that is completely fine if you are a founder or blogger who wants to answer normal SEO questions without paying for a professional platform. If you regularly export huge keyword sets, do sophisticated competitor research, work across PPC and SEO, or need Semrush's broader ecosystem, Ubersuggest is not the same product for less money. But if your use case is keyword research, a few competitors, rank tracking, and occasional audits, it can be enough.
I wrote a full comparison of the free and low-cost options in my free Ubersuggest alternative article.
5. Mangools: better when you want less software, not more
Best for: Keyword research and rank tracking with a simpler interface | Price: Permanent free account, paid plans available | What it replaces: Keyword Magic Tool, SERP research, Position Tracking, basic backlinks, and domain research | Main limitation: Smaller and narrower platform than Semrush
Mangools is the option I would look at if the thing you dislike about Semrush is not only the price but the amount of interface around the work. Instead of one giant marketing platform, Mangools is split into focused tools: KWFinder for keyword research, SERPChecker for SERP analysis, SERPWatcher for rankings, LinkMiner for backlinks, and SiteProfiler for domain metrics. Mangools also has a permanent free account rather than only a short trial.
What stands out to me about the Mangools approach is how obvious the workflow is. If I want keyword ideas, I open KWFinder. If I want rankings, I open SERPWatcher. If I want backlinks, I open LinkMiner. There is less to learn and less temptation to spend half an hour exploring reports that have nothing to do with the task I opened the tool for.
The downside is the same thing that makes it attractive: it does less. There is no equivalent to Semrush's full paid-search ecosystem, broad marketing intelligence, or the same depth of competitor research. If you only need the SEO core, that may be a feature rather than a problem.
6. SE Ranking: the alternative I would consider for an agency
Best for: Agencies, consultants, and teams managing multiple serious SEO projects | Price: Core from $129/month, 14-day free trial | What it replaces: Rank tracking, keyword research, competitor research, backlinks, audits, reporting, and project management | Main limitation: It is still a professional paid suite, not a cheap Semrush replacement
SE Ranking is the option on this list that most directly competes with Semrush as a professional SEO platform. Its Core plan currently starts at $129/month and Growth at $279/month. There is no permanent free plan, but there is a 14-day trial.
If I were managing several client sites, I would care less about finding the absolute cheapest product and more about whether the workflow saves time across every account. That is where SE Ranking becomes more interesting because projects, rank tracking, reporting, audits, competitor research, backlinks, team workflows, client access, and agency features can justify paying for one system rather than stitching together five free products manually.
For one small SaaS website, it may be unnecessary. For an agency sending reports every month, the calculation changes. This is one of the cases where I would not automatically recommend the free-stack approach because free tools become expensive when your team spends hours moving data between them.
7. SpyFu: the better choice when competitor PPC is the reason you use Semrush
Best for: Competitor PPC and historical search marketing research | Price: Free account, Basic from $39/month monthly | What it replaces: Parts of Semrush advertising research, competitor keyword research, and historical competitive intelligence | Main limitation: Not as broad as Semrush for technical SEO and general site management
SpyFu is one of the alternatives that makes much more sense once you stop treating every user as an SEO-only user. If the part of Semrush you care about is competitor paid search, SpyFu is far more relevant than Search Console, Screaming Frog, or an AI content tool.
SpyFu focuses heavily on competitor keywords, paid ads, historical campaigns, SEO rankings, backlink research, and domain comparisons.
The free account allows limited results, while paid access starts with the Basic plan. The main reason I would choose SpyFu over a generic cheap SEO toolkit is specialization.
If your job is asking which keywords a competitor has bought, how long they have been bidding on them, what ad copy they have tested, and which organic and paid terms overlap, SpyFu is built around those questions. It would not be my first choice if technical SEO auditing or content operations were the main job.
That is also why I would not say SpyFu is universally "better than Semrush." It is a more focused replacement for one valuable part of Semrush.
If SpyFu itself is the tool you are thinking of replacing, see my SpyFu alternative comparison, which covers its current pricing and the free ways to research competitor ads.
8. Serpstat: a strong option when data access and automation matter
Best for: SEOs who need keyword research, rank tracking, audits, backlinks, bulk data, and API access | Price: Individual $69/month or $50/month billed annually, plus a limited freemium tier | What it replaces: A broad part of the traditional Semrush SEO toolkit | Main limitation: Less simple for beginners than Mangools or Ubersuggest
Serpstat sits between the budget tools and the large platforms. The current Individual plan costs $69/month, or $50/month billed annually, and includes keyword research, site analysis, rank tracking, site audit, and backlink analysis. Higher plans expand limits and add API and MCP access, scheduled reporting, sharing, and other team features. There is also a permanent freemium tier with 10 searches a day and 10 pages of site audit, which is enough for spot checks but not for regular research.
I would look at Serpstat if I wanted a traditional SEO data platform but Semrush pricing was difficult to justify. It is also more interesting for technical users because the product is built around structured data access and automation rather than only a polished dashboard.
That makes it relevant for workflows where SEO data eventually needs to move into spreadsheets, internal tools, agents, or automated reporting. For a beginner who only wants to find 20 keywords and monitor one site, Mangools or Ubersuggest will probably feel simpler. For someone building repeatable research workflows, Serpstat becomes more interesting.
9. Screaming Frog: the free Semrush alternative for technical crawling
Best for: Technical SEO | Price: Free for up to 500 URLs per crawl | What it replaces: A large part of Semrush Site Audit | Main limitation: It is a crawler, not an all-in-one SEO platform
Screaming Frog is different from every other product on this list because it does not try to replace Semrush. It replaces one job extremely well.
If the reason you open Semrush is mostly Site Audit, the free Screaming Frog SEO Spider may give you more direct technical control than another general SEO suite. It can crawl up to 500 URLs for free and surface broken links, redirects, metadata problems, canonicals, robots directives, hreflang, duplicate pages, structured data issues, and many other technical signals.
The trade-off becomes obvious quickly. Screaming Frog gives you the crawl, but it does not automatically give you a business priority. Seeing 180 warnings is not the same thing as knowing which three changes are actually holding back important pages.
For a technical SEO or developer, that control can be exactly what you want. For a founder, a more guided audit may be easier. If you want a quick audit without installing a crawler, you can also use RankBuddy's free SEO audit tool, and my technical SEO audit tutorial explains how I would work through the findings.
Which Semrush feature should you replace with which tool?
| Semrush job | Alternative I would consider |
|---|---|
| Real performance data for your own site | Google Search Console |
| Free backlink data on your own site | Ahrefs Free |
| Keyword research on a budget | Mangools or Ubersuggest |
| Deep backlink research | Ahrefs paid |
| Competitor PPC research | SpyFu |
| Professional agency workflow | SE Ranking |
| Bulk SEO data and API | Serpstat |
| Technical crawling | Screaming Frog |
| SEO prioritization and execution | RankBuddy |
| Search-volume validation | Google Keyword Planner |
This is a more useful way to think about the problem than asking for one universal "best Semrush alternative." A founder replacing Site Audit has a completely different requirement from an agency replacing client reports or a PPC specialist replacing Advertising Research.
How I would replace Semrush for $0
If I had one small website and wanted to avoid an SEO subscription completely, I would build the stack around free first-party and specialist tools: Google Search Console for real queries, clicks, impressions, CTR, indexing, and page performance; Ahrefs Free for backlinks and another technical view; Screaming Frog for deeper technical crawling; Google Keyword Planner for another keyword-demand signal; and Google Trends for understanding whether changes in traffic are related to changes in search demand.
For a smaller site, this is already a serious SEO stack. The weakness is not data. The weakness is that you become the integration layer. You move between tools, interpret conflicting numbers, prioritize the work yourself, and maintain the backlog manually. That is completely reasonable if you enjoy doing SEO or have enough time for it.
The cheapest Semrush alternative is not always the cheapest workflow
This is the part I think price-comparison articles often miss. Suppose you replace Semrush with five free tools. Your software bill is now $0, but every week you spend two hours exporting data, comparing dashboards, deciding which issues matter, writing briefs, creating content, and checking whether the changes worked.
That time has a cost. The right replacement depends on what is expensive for you. If the expensive part is the subscription, use free specialist tools. If the expensive part is your time, reducing manual decision-making may matter more than reducing the monthly software bill.
That distinction is behind the way I am building RankBuddy.
When I would keep Semrush
I would not replace Semrush just because another tool costs less. If the same team researches organic competitors, paid keywords, advertising history, content, rankings, and technical SEO, splitting that workflow across five products can make things worse.
I would also keep it if competitor research is a major part of the job. Large keyword and competitor datasets become much more valuable when they are part of your actual daily work rather than something you inspect once a month.
The same applies when your team already has established Semrush workflows. Dashboards, reports, tracked projects, historical data, and internal processes have value, and changing tools has an operational cost even when the replacement subscription is cheaper.
Finally, if your business already earns meaningful revenue from organic search, paying for professional SEO data may be completely rational. The useful comparison is not simply "$139 vs $29." It is the subscription cost against the value of the decisions the product helps you make.
Which free or cheaper Semrush alternative should you choose?
If you have zero budget, start with Google Search Console + Ahrefs Free + Screaming Frog and add Google Keyword Planner when you need another keyword source. That is enough to operate a surprisingly serious SEO workflow for one smaller website.
If you mostly need keyword research, try Mangools or Ubersuggest. Mangools feels more focused, while Ubersuggest feels more like a smaller all-in-one SEO platform.
If backlinks are the main job, use Ahrefs Free for websites you own. Once competitor backlinks become a regular part of the workflow, I would move toward paid Ahrefs rather than choosing a general budget tool only because it happens to have a backlink report. My free Ahrefs alternative article goes deeper into that decision.
If technical SEO is the main job, use Screaming Frog. You do not need to buy another large SEO platform simply to crawl a website.
If you manage clients, look closely at SE Ranking because client reporting, multiple projects, rank tracking, and repeatable workflows start to matter much more at agency scale. If competitor PPC research is important, use SpyFu or keep Semrush. If you need bulk data, API, or automation workflows, Serpstat is more interesting.
If you are a founder who does not want to become the SEO analyst, this is where I would use RankBuddy. Not because it has a bigger database than Semrush. It does not. I would use it because I do not want the end result of my SEO software to be another dashboard I have to interpret.
I want the system to read my Google Search Console data, inspect the site, research the market, find the opportunity, prioritize it, and return the next piece of work. That could be a technical fix, an existing page that needs optimization, a content gap, a new article, or a set of internal links that should be added.
For me, that is the more interesting alternative to Semrush: not trying to rebuild every dashboard for less money, but reducing how much time I need to spend operating SEO software in the first place. If you are building a tool stack for a SaaS company, I compare the options stage by stage in best SEO tools for SaaS.