It’s time for Ahrefs vs. SpyFu showdown! 🥊
If you’re on the hunt for the best tool to outsmart competitors, analyze backlinks, and dig up juicy keywords, you’ve probably come across these two. Ahrefs is a powerhouse for deep-dive SEO insights, while SpyFu specializes in competitor PPC and keyword research.
But which one’s right for you? To answer that, we’ll compare their strengths, weaknesses, and pricing in detail.
What is Ahrefs?
Ahrefs is a SEO tool that helps with keyword research, backlink analysis, and competitor insights. It’s known for its large keyword database and useful rank-tracking features.
Marketers trust it for competitive research, as it allows easy access to competitor rankings, backlinks, and strategies, making it a go-to for in-depth market analysis.
Recently, it has improved its AI features, with smarter keyword suggestions and more relevant content recommendations. It’s a good option for marketers looking for detailed SEO data, with a lot of filtering options.
Ahrefs Features
Ahrefs is an SEO toolkit with a variety of features that have made it a staple in the industry:
- Site Explorer: Analyze competitors’ backlinks, top content, historical data, ad copy, bidding history, organic traffic, organic keywords, and site structure.
- Keywords Explorer: Discover popular search terms, generate keyword ideas, cluster them, and choose the best with reliable metrics.
- Rank Tracker: Tracks your Google rankings across desktop and mobile, including competitor data, across 190 countries. Ahrefs also has highly detailed filtering options.
- Web Explorer: Explore all pages and links indexed by Ahrefs’ search engine to analyze websites effectively.
- Site Audit: Identify, prioritize, and resolve 170+ technical and on-page SEO issues with actionable recommendations and visualizations.
- Web Analytics: Gain traffic insights on top pages, audience countries, and devices without tracking cookies or personal data.
- Content Explorer: Find trending content, analyze organic traffic, backlinks, keyword rankings, and link-building opportunities over time.
- Report Builder: Create detailed, customizable reports with advanced features available through Ahrefs’ paid plans for better insights. However, this is a paid add-on.
Ahrefs Pricing
Ahrefs’ pricing is considered higher than some competitors, but its comprehensive features justify the cost for many of its users. Its pricing plans occasionally include add-ons or additional credits that users have to pay for.
- Free (AWT): $0 – 5000 crawl credits and a few basic tools for monitoring your site health, backlinks, and keywords.
- Starter: $29/month – 5,000 crawl credits and access to Site Explorer, Keywords Explorer, and Site Audit
- Lite: $129/month – 5 projects, 6 months of historical data, 750 tracked keywords, 100,000 crawl credits, and more.
- Standard: $249/month – 20 projects, 2 years of historical data, 2,000 tracked keywords, 500,000 crawl credits, and more.
- Advanced: $449/month – 50 projects, 5 years of historical data, 5,000 tracked keywords, 1,500,000 crawl credits, and more.
- Enterprise: $1,499 /month – Advanced features and additional tools, API access, unlimited historical data, and more.
What is SpyFu?
SpyFu is an SEO and PPC tool mainly used for competitor research. It shines when it comes to PPC research, offering insights into your competitors’ ad strategies and keywords. People love it for its ability to uncover which keywords competitors are bidding on, their ad budgets, and which ads are performing best.
It’s popular because it makes this kind of data easy to access, so marketers can create smarter campaigns without starting from scratch. While it has SEO features, its real strength lies in helping businesses improve their paid search performance.
Spyfu Features
While both tools have overlapping capabilities, SpyFu stands out with its PPC research features, offering unique insights for paid search campaigns:
- PPC Competitor Research Tools: Offers tools like PPC Overview and Kombat for analyzing competitors’ paid campaigns, keywords, and strategies.
- Google Ads Tools: Includes Google Ads Spy Tool, Google Ads Advisor, and Google Ads Templates to analyze competitors’ ads and create optimized campaigns.
- SEO Spy Tools: The SEO Competitor Analysis Tool tracks competitors’ rankings and strategies, providing insights into their SEO performance.
- Kombat: Compares two competitor domains, highlighting effective keywords, and eliminating irrelevant ones for streamlined PPC and SEO strategies.
- Keyword Research Tools: Access detailed metrics like search volume, competition, and trends for both SEO and PPC, along with keyword history.
- Backlink Tools: Identifies competitor backlinks, providing insights into link-building opportunities to improve your site’s authority and ranking.
- AI Tools: SpyGPT analyzes 250 million questions to determine where your brand is mentioned; RivalFlow identifies content gaps and generates high-ranking SEO content.
- Business and Domain Lists: Access comprehensive lists of businesses and domains within your industry or niche.
Spyfu Pricing
SpyFu has lower costs than Ahrefs, with two simple plans:
- Basic Plan: $39/month – 10k row search results, 10k row data exports, 100 domain overview PDFs, 6 months historical data, 250 sales leads & domain contacts, 5k weekly tracked keyword rankings.
- Pro Plan: $79/month – Unlimited search results, unlimited data exports, unlimited domain overview PDFs, 10+ years historical data, 500 sales leads & domain contacts, 15k weekly tracked keyword rankings, API access.
Ahrefs vs. SpyFu: Comparing Product Features
Here, we’ll compare the main features of SpyFu and Ahrefs and highlight what each tool excels at for SEO and PPC.
1. Keyword Research
Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer is renowned for its extensive keyword database, offering detailed insights like search volume, difficulty, traffic potential, and search intent.
Also, its keyword difficulty score includes an estimate of how many referring domains you’d need to rank in the top 10, which can help you choose the appropriate keywords and topics for your project.
On the other hand, SpyFu has a simpler keyword difficulty score, but it still lets you see a solid set of metrics, including historical position, volume, and cost. In SpyFu, you can also switch between preset views for SEO or PPC keywords, depending on what you’re looking for.
Mobile vs. desktop views are available on both platforms, but Ahrefs generally has more filtering options and features. One of these is the Content Gap tool which lets you find underutilized keywords, which is another point for Ahrefs.
Winner: Ahrefs
Although SpyFu is an excellent keyword research tool, especially given its affordability compared to Ahrefs, it still loses this battle. Ahrefs provides more detailed data, including AI-generated keyword variations and traffic potential.
At the same time, its advanced filters and topic clusters make it easier to refine your strategy. The keyword difficulty score also estimates how many backlinks you may need to rank, giving SEO professionals a more complete and practical toolset.
2. Backlink Analysis
Having a solid backlink profile and seeing your competitors’ backlinks is a necessity in SEO, so let’s see how the tools compare in this area.
Ahrefs’ has an index of over 15 billion live backlinks, which makes it one of the largest databases on the market, and gives it an instant advantage. It also comes with metrics including Domain Rating (DR) and Ahrefs Rank (AR), using the number of backlinks to estimate your site strength.
With the Backlink Growth Tracker, Organic Traffic Insights from linking pages, Referring Domains, Top Linked Pages, and Outbound Links, you can take an exhaustive look at your backlink profile.
SpyFu offers a different approach, which may suit some marketers more. It shows you the links you need to target directly, filters them by page type (blogs, forums), and gives you the contact information you can use for making a guest posting arrangement.
So while you don’t get as many filters and data, the process itself is simplified with SpyFu.
Winner: Tied
The tools offer two different approaches to link building. SpyFu is more focused on finding opportunities and acquiring and tracking links, while Ahrefs gives you a very detailed insight into the data—but other tools might be necessary if you truly want to know how to generate blog traffic. SpyFu’s approach may be more suitable for freelancers who want to save time.
3. Competitor Analysis Tools
Ahrefs makes competitor research easy with Site Explorer, showing their organic traffic, top pages, and ranking keywords. You can track backlinks, spot content gaps, and analyze their strategy.
Content Explorer helps you see how often they publish and what’s performing best. It also uncovers broken link opportunities, brand mentions, and potential guest post sites in your niche.
When you research keywords, you also get to see ad copy, cost, and history, so Ahrefs has solid PPC tools as well.
SpyFu specializes in competitor research, so it has a bit of an edge in this case. It has plenty of PPC tools, including Kombat, an entire Google Ads toolkit, and the Ad History tool that covers over 18 years of competitor data.
It doesn’t lag in SEO competitor research either. It boasts a SEO Competitor Analysis Tool, comparison tools, Exclusive Wins section with keywords that you rank for but your competitors don’t, and Core Niche keywords, which show you keywords for three competitors.
Winner: Tied
This was exceptionally hard to decide, as both tools offer solid competitor analysis options. However, the winner may depend on the marketer. If you need PPC, SPyFu is the better choice, and if you need more SEO data, go for Ahrefs.
4. Pricing
Ahrefs offers a range of pricing tiers starting from the free plan with limited features. Paid plans tend to come with paid add-ons, which some users may find frustrating.
The cost may be too much for agencies, especially those on the smaller side. For example, Ahrefs has an excellent report builder tool, but it costs an additional $999 per year.
SpyFu is cheaper, but it doesn’t have all the tools that come with Ahrefs, meaning you have to sacrifice something. However, it may be easier to afford if you run a small business or work as a freelancer.
Winner: No clear winner between them
Ahrefs is reliable and comprehensive, but its pricing is gradually increasing, and the add-ons and quotas pile up. SpyFu forces you to compromise, as it has fewer features, but it gives you solid competitor research tools for $39 a month.
But what if there were smarter, more affordable tools designed just for agencies?
If You Don’t Want to Compromise: Search Atlas
If you’re choosing between Ahrefs and SpyFu and you can’t decide between having a full set of tools, excellent competitor research, and affordability, consider Search Atlas.
Search Atlas is quickly becoming a go-to SEO tool, thanks to its time-saving AI SEO features and full suite of competitor research, content, on-page, local, technical, off-page, and outreach tools.
At the same time, it’s more affordable than Ahrefs and suitable for agencies.
Search Atlas Features
Search Atlas is unique in its scope. It covers all your SEO needs, including:
- Always Up-to-date: Search Atlas uses data directly from the Google Search Console, while most of its competitors scrape the SERPs with bots. With the new Javascript-related Google changes, you can expect other tools to become more expensive as their bot budgets become limited. However, this does not affect Search Atlas — allowing the platform to stay accurate and affordable.
- Competitor Research: This includes 8 backlink analysis tools, as well as link gap analysis, keyword gap analysis, and Site Explorer.
- Backlink Analyzer: This tool lets you review all backlinks and referring domains in a website’s backlink profile. Our platform has a database of 100 trillion backlinks.
- SIte Explorer: Get information on backlinks, traffic, PPC spend, keywords, and content.
- Scholar: This tool analyzes your content against your competition’s content for metrics such as freshness, readability, info gain, and more.
- Local Heatmaps: One of the Local SEO Tools that is well known for its accuracy and usefulness. It gives you insight into your competitors within a four-mile radius.
- Link Gap Analysis: Identify the backlink gap between your website and competitors’ and learn how to close it.
- Keyword Researcher: This tool lets you find related keywords, generate keyword ideas, and perform Keyword Gap Analysis.
- Reporting: Build custom reports for your clients, with white-label reporting included in the price.
- Content: This toolkit covers content optimization, AI content creation, and planning.
- Off-Page Tools: Manage link building directly from the dashboard with email templates and filtering options for outreach, as well as press release syndication.
- AI Automation: Automated SEO tools can save you time on almost any task, including instant SEO fixes, one-click publishing, on-page SEO, content recommendations, and more.
- All-in-One SEO Platform: Search Atlas has over 40 tools, including Site Audit Tools, On-Page Tools, the Local Citation Builder, GBP Management, and more.
Keyword Research Tools
Search Atlas offers four powerful keyword research tools: Keyword Researcher, Keyword Magic Tool, Keyword Gap Analysis, and Content Planner. These tools cover everything from finding related keywords, variations, and questions to building keyword lists and generating content plans from a single seed keyword.
You can also analyze competitor keywords to uncover ranking opportunities. Plus, keyword data can be segmented by region or location and compared against competitors in the SERP overview panel for deeper insights.
Competitor Research Tools
Search Atlas makes competitor research simple, giving you everything you need to sharpen your SEO strategy. The Competitor Keyword and Content Research tool reveals which keywords and pages drive the most traffic for your rivals, helping you spot ranking opportunities.
Meanwhile, the Backlink Analyzer and Site Explorer provide insights from 100 trillion backlinks and 500 million domains, showing you where competitors get their links. You can also analyze their PPC spend, ad copy, and compare your content using unique performance metrics.
OTTO SEO
One of the standout tools in Search Atlas is the AI SEO agent OTTO, which takes care of all your SEO tasks automatically. OTTO doesn’t just spot issues; it goes the extra mile by making updates directly to your website, saving you hours of manual work.
And it’s about to get even better! Soon, OTTO will also include OTTO Google Ads, a new addition that will optimize your PPC campaigns the same way, cutting down on time and costs while improving your results.
Outreach Tools
Search Atlas makes outreach effortless with smart automation and user-friendly tools. Instead of wasting time on repetitive tasks, you can streamline your process and focus on what truly drives results.
Craft personalized email pitches using customizable templates, fine-tune your campaigns, and save your top-performing messages for future success. Plus, finding contact details for key publishers, bloggers, and influencers in your niche is a breeze—all from one convenient dashboard. Everything you need for effective outreach, right at your fingertips.
PPC Tools
Search Atlas takes the hassle out of PPC management with simple, powerful tools that give you a real edge over the competition.
The PPC Comparison feature lets you see how your spending and bidding strategies measure up against top competitors, making it easy to adjust your campaigns for better results.
If you need fresh, high-performing ad copy, the AI Ad Copy Creation tool steps in to generate engaging, results-driven ads. It helps boost your Quality Scores and increase engagement—without the heavy lifting.
Content Tools
The SEO Content Assistant guides you through the entire process—researching, writing, editing, and even generating images with AI (like ChatGPT or Claude). It also helps you analyze competitors and can even publish content to your site with just one click.
If you’re feeling a bit stuck with strategy, the Content Planner is here to help by organizing keyword clusters and search volumes. Plus, Topical Maps give you a clear, visual way to see how all your content ideas come together.
We’re also excited about Search Atlas Scholar. It’s a semantic grader that dives deep into your content, showing exactly where you can improve to stay ahead of your competitors. It’s all about making your SEO journey a little easier and a lot more effective.
Usability
We know SEO tools can feel overwhelming, with so much information to sift through. That’s why we’ve created a demo and onboarding process to guide you through everything, with one-on-one support along the way.
And we’re proud to share that Gartner recognized our efforts, ranking us as the top platform for usability and user experience. According to their findings, Search Atlas is the highest-rated SEO platform for both usability and user satisfaction.
Search Atlas Pricing
Search Atlas offers a complete suite of powerful tools at a more budget-friendly price than Ahrefs and Moz. One of the standout features is OTTO activations, which are worth the cost on their own. They automate tasks that would otherwise take days, saving you a significant amount of time and effort.
| Starter plan | Growth plan | Pro plan | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price: | $99 monthly | $199 monthly | $399 monthly | Custom |
| Free OTTO Activation | 1 | 1 | 3 | Custom |
| User Seats | 2 | 3 | 5 | Custom |
| GSC Sites | 5 | 15 | Unlimited | Custom |
| Automated GBP Accounts | 3 | 10 | 25 | Custom |
| Regular AI Quota | 100 | 250 | Unlimited | Custom |
Spy on Competitors, Research, Optimize, and Automate Your SEO
Ahrefs and SpyFu are outstanding tools, but they don’t cover all aspects of PPC and SEO competitor research. Whichever you choose, you may need additional tools to organize your process.
This is where Search Atlas can help. It is an all-in-one SEO platform with over 40 tools, with powerful features in keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink monitoring, and more. Its AI tools like OTTO help you save time, streamline your efforts, and see faster results—all without breaking the bank.
Take advantage of a free trial and see how it can transform your business today.
