Choosing the right SEO tool can feel overwhelming, especially with so many options out there.
SE Ranking vs. Ahrefs is a comparison that often comes up for anyone looking to step up their SEO game. Both platforms boast powerful features, but which one truly delivers the best results for your needs?
With pricing, features, and ease of use all in the mix, it’s essential to know what each platform excels at—and where they fall short.
SE Ranking offers a more affordable entry point with a user-friendly interface, while Ahrefs is renowned for its comprehensive data and advanced SEO audit tools.
Let’s dig deep into their popular features, limitations, and pricing plans.
What Is SE Ranking?
SE Ranking is an SEO platform that helps with various aspects of search engine optimization. It provides tools to track rankings, monitor website performance, and analyze competitors, all in one place.
It’s especially useful for agencies and businesses that need to manage multiple clients or scale their SEO efforts
SE Ranking allows you to track rankings across several search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and YouTube, giving you a broader view of your site’s performance. It also helps identify issues like traffic drops or keyword cannibalization.
The platform’s reporting is customizable, so SEO agencies can easily present data to clients in a way that makes sense.
Beyond SEO, SE Ranking includes features for lead generation and content marketing, making it a more well-rounded tool for digital marketing overall. It’s built to support everything from local SEO to larger-scale campaigns. Overall, it’s a flexible choice, slightly more affordable than Ahrefs.
SE Ranking Features
While SE Ranking and Ahrefs share similar SEO functions, SE Ranking offers unique features tailored to agencies and businesses. This especially includes reporting tools, which are more approachable than those in Ahrefs, which charges a lot for the add-ons.
Here are the main features of SE Ranking:
- Keyword Rank Tracker: Tracks keyword rankings across various search engines to monitor SEO performance.
- Keyword & Competitive Research Tools: Helps identify relevant keywords and analyze competitors’ strategies for better optimization.
- On-Page SEO Checker: Evaluates on-page SEO factors, offering suggestions to improve website optimization and visibility.
- Website Audit Tool: Performs a comprehensive site audit to identify technical SEO issues and improve website performance.
- Backlink Checker and Gap Analyzer: Analyzes backlink profiles and identifies backlink opportunities and gaps compared to competitors.
- Content Editor and AI Writer: Assists with content creation and optimization, using AI to improve quality and SEO performance.
- Local Marketing Module: Enables tracking of local rankings and optimization for location-based SEO strategies.
- SEO Report Builder: Customizes and generates detailed SEO reports, with options for white-labeling and automated delivery to clients.
SE Ranking Pricing
- Essential: $65/month – Designed for individual SEO professionals, this plan includes 1 manager seat, 5 projects, and 500 keywords tracked daily, along with core SEO tools and the option for add-ons.
- Pro: $119/month – Ideal for agencies and small teams, offering 3 manager seats, 30 projects, 2,000 keywords tracked daily, core SEO tools, and additional features with add-ons available.
- Business: $259/month – Tailored for large agencies and enterprises, this plan includes 5 manager seats, unlimited projects, 5,000 keywords tracked daily, core SEO tools, and the option for add-ons.
What Is Ahrefs?
Ahrefs is a powerful SEO tool used to help businesses improve their online presence. It’s packed with features for keyword research, backlink analysis, and competitor tracking, among other things.
Recently, Ahrefs has stepped up its game by rolling out a bunch of new AI tools. One standout is the AI Content Helper, which focuses on making your content topically relevant, not just keyword-heavy.
It also introduced AI-powered translations, making it easier to scale your SEO efforts internationally by quickly translating keywords for different markets.
On top of that, updates to its Site Explorer and Rank Tracker give users deeper insights into how their traffic changes over time and what search intent their audience has. These features help SEO pros keep track of performance and fine-tune their strategies, so the tool remains highly popular.
Ahrefs Features
Ahrefs is a leading SEO and marketing platform that provides a wide range of tools designed to enhance website performance and content strategies. Its key features include:
- Site Explorer: Study your competitors’ websites to gain insights and refine your SEO tactics.
- Keywords Explorer: Discover what your customers are searching for to improve your content and advertising efforts.
- Rank Tracker: Monitor your website’s rankings in search engines to measure progress and performance.
- Web Explorer: Search across all pages and links indexed by Ahrefs to uncover new backlink opportunities.
- Site Audit: Audit and optimize your website by identifying potential issues and improving technical SEO.
- Web Analytics: Gain insights about your website’s traffic and user behavior for better decision-making.
- Content Explorer: Track web mentions and find link-building opportunities to boost your content’s reach.
- AI Content Helper: Use AI to optimize your content and ensure it’s comprehensive and competitive.
Ahrefs Pricing
Ahrefs offers a free account, which can be useful for freelancers and those with a hobby website. However, since free account features are limited, pros usually need paid plans, which doesn’t make it the most cost-effective SEO option.
- Free (AWT): $0 – Includes 5,000 crawl credits and basic tools for monitoring site health, backlinks, and keywords
- Starter: $29/month – 5,000 crawl credits with 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 – API access, unlimited historical data, advanced features, and exclusive enterprise-level perks.
SE Ranking vs. Ahrefs: Comparing Product Features
Let’s take a closer look at SE Ranking and Ahrefs. While both offer similar features, there are key differences that can impact how you use them. We’ll break down their main features to help you decide which one is the better fit.
1. Site Auditing and Tracking Tools
Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool is a powerful solution for crawling and identifying technical SEO issues. It checks for common problems like slow load times, missing meta tags, duplicate content, and broken links.
The tool categorizes issues into errors, warnings, and notices, making it easy to prioritize which problems to address first.
The clear visualizations, such as crawl history and page health scores, provide insights into your site’s performance over time. Plus, the actionable recommendations help users quickly resolve issues, saving time and improving efficiency.
However, due to Google’s rate-limiting measures, Ahrefs faces challenges in crawling more effectively. To work around these limitations, Ahrefs uses residential proxies and browser emulation, which can increase server demands and operational costs.
This may result in slower crawls and could affect the depth of data available, potentially leading to price increases for users.
SE Ranking’s website audit tool provides a thorough assessment of your site’s technical SEO health, covering areas such as page crawlability, HTTP status codes, Core Web Vitals, link attributes, and more.
It offers customizable settings, allowing you to schedule audits, select specific parameters, and even analyze JavaScript-heavy sites, thanks to recent updates like JavaScript rendering.
This enhancement ensures deeper insights into dynamic content. While these updates can slightly slow the process—especially for larger sites—the tool remains fast, able to crawl up to 1,000 pages in under 2 minutes.
With 115+ metrics for in-depth analysis, it’s a robust solution for identifying issues and tracking SEO progress, ensuring your site is optimized for performance and user experience.
Winner: SE Ranking
SE Ranking’s site audit tool excels by automating the audit process as soon as a new project is added, eliminating the need for manual setup. Once the audit is complete, the SEO health score is updated in the Projects section, providing a quick overview.
Compared to Ahrefs, SE Ranking offers more detailed and actionable insights, making it a stronger choice for thorough audits.
2. Backlink Analysis
Ahrefs’ backlink analysis tools are robust, providing an in-depth look at a site’s link profile. The Site Explorer tool offers access to a massive link database, displaying vital metrics like Domain Rating (DR) and URL Rating (UR), which help assess link quality.
The “Backlink Profile” section is invaluable, offering granular filters for tracking new, lost, dofollow, and nofollow links, helping identify gaps in your strategy. The standout “Link Intersect” tool lets you spot high-quality backlink opportunities from domains linking to competitors but not you.
Additionally, the “Referring Domains” feature adds another layer of analysis, allowing you to evaluate the authority of backlink sources.
Overall, Ahrefs provides all the necessary tools for a comprehensive backlink analysis that’s more detailed and actionable than most competitors in the market.
SE Ranking’s backlink analysis tool provides a robust set of features, including access to a vast database of 2.9 trillion backlinks and 411 million domains. Key insights include Domain Trust, toxicity scores, anchor text analysis, and the ability to track new and lost backlinks.
The tool displays dynamic metrics on backlink growth, offering a clear picture of your site’s off-page performance. SE Ranking’s database is updated frequently, ensuring fresh and relevant data for users.
However, it falls slightly behind Ahrefs in terms of database size and link freshness, giving Ahrefs a slight edge in these areas.
Despite this, SE Ranking’s real-time updates, detailed reporting, and user-friendly interface make it an excellent choice for smaller-scale operations looking for actionable insights and solid backlink analysis.
Winner: Ahrefs
Ahrefs takes the lead because of its sheer size and freshness. The database is massive, meaning you get more accurate, up-to-date data, especially when tracking backlinks. The “Link Intersect” tool is a fantastic feature, helping you spot untapped backlink opportunities.
Overall, Ahrefs just feels more powerful and comprehensive for anyone looking to analyze their link profile.
3. Competitor Research
Ahrefs’ Competitor Research tool provides deep insights into competitors’ SEO, content, backlinks, and ads.
Using Site Explorer, you can analyze their rankings, see what content performs well, and discover backlink sources. This data allows you to replicate their strategies or find gaps in their approach.
A standout feature is the content gap analysis. It shows you keywords your competitors rank for, but you don’t. By targeting these gaps, you can boost traffic and potentially outrank them. You can narrow results to focus on top-ranking keywords to prioritize.
Additionally, Ahrefs helps you monitor your share of voice, highlighting changes in traffic compared to competitors. This lets you adjust strategies based on competitor activity and market shifts.
SE Ranking’s Competitor Research tool provides valuable insights into your competition’s SEO and PPC strategies. You can analyze traffic fluctuations, backlinks, keywords, and ads in one place.
The tool allows you to compare your keywords with competitors and identify content gaps—keywords they rank for but you don’t.
SE Ranking also tracks your competitors’ ad performance. You can analyze Google Ads campaigns, uncover the keywords they target, and see their ad history to build better ads. This helps optimize your own PPC efforts by learning from competitors’ successful tactics.
The historical data feature is another plus. You can examine your competitors’ SEO performance over time, including ranking changes and shifts in traffic. Essentially, the tools have different strengths in these aspects, so the winner is the one who better fits your needs.
Winner: Tied
Ahrefs primarily shines in SEO and backlink analysis, with PPC data being more of a secondary feature. While it does provide keyword analysis and ad insights, it’s not as in-depth or focused on paid campaigns as SE Ranking.
SE Ranking, on the other hand, is more robust when it comes to PPC analysis. The platform offers detailed data on competitors’ paid ads, including historical data, ad history, and keyword targeting. It allows you to closely monitor PPC performance, refine your ad strategy, and adapt based on competitors’ successful campaigns.
4. Keyword Research
Ahrefs excels in keyword research with its powerful Keywords Explorer tool. It offers detailed insights into search volume, keyword difficulty, and CPC for over 170 countries.
The tool provides a wide array of keyword suggestions, including related keywords, questions, and click data. Ahrefs also gives you a unique “parent topic” feature to ensure you’re targeting the right keywords based on search intent.
The keyword intent data is fresh and extensive, making it ideal for building a well-rounded content strategy or for identifying profitable opportunities in your niche.
SE Ranking’s keyword research tool offers similar functionality with a focus on ease of use. It provides keyword suggestions based on search volume, difficulty, and CPC across multiple countries.
One standout feature is its ability to track competitors’ keyword rankings and display overlap, giving you insights into which keywords your competitors are targeting. The technical SEO tool also allows you to filter keywords by search intent and analyze trends over time.
Additionally, SE Ranking offers detailed keyword grouping and tracking to help you refine and monitor your SEO efforts more effectively.
Winner: Ahrefs
Based on overall features, Ahrefs is the winner for keyword research. It offers more depth, especially in terms of competitive analysis and clickstream data, making it a more comprehensive tool for building and refining keyword strategies.
5. User Experience
Ahrefs has a well-designed, feature-packed interface, but it can feel a bit complex for beginners. The platform offers detailed reports with multiple filters to customize data views, which is great for advanced users but may overwhelm newcomers.
Tools like Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer are easy to navigate for experienced SEOs, and the tool’s extensive help center provides excellent support.
However, some users may need time to fully understand the depth of data available and how to use it most effectively. Overall, Ahrefs offers power and flexibility, but the learning curve can be steep for some.
SE Ranking’s interface is clean, simple, and designed for efficiency. The dashboard clearly presents your project data without unnecessary clutter, making it easier for users to focus on the important metrics.
Key tools like keyword research, competitor analysis, and ranking tracking are accessible and straightforward, with drag-and-drop features and easy-to-read visualizations.
The platform’s simplicity stands out, making it especially attractive for users who prioritize a smoother experience over a tool with more complex data. Plus, it offers intuitive workflows and a support team that’s highly praised among users.
Winner: SE Ranking
SE Ranking wins for user experience due to its simpler, more intuitive interface. It’s ideal for users who value ease of use and a clear, streamlined experience.
While Ahrefs offers more advanced features, SE Ranking’s design caters better to both beginners and those looking to efficiently manage multiple SEO projects without getting lost in complex data.
6. Pricing
Ahrefs offers a range of pricing plans, with the entry-level plan starting at $99/month, offering limited features like 5 projects, 750 tracked keywords, and 100,000 crawl credits. The higher tiers can go up to $399/month with 50 projects and more extensive data.
While Ahrefs is packed with powerful features, the pricing might be out of reach for smaller businesses or individual users, especially given the relatively restrictive lower-tier limits.
However, for agencies or teams with complex SEO needs, the value is clear due to the depth of data and reporting available.
SE Ranking provides more affordable pricing options, with plans starting at $65/month. The entry-level package offers 50 domain checks per day, 500 keywords for rank tracking, and 100,000 pages for website audits.
The Pro plan at $119/month offers extended limits, and the Business plan starts at $259/month with even more features. Compared to Ahrefs, SE Ranking is more budget-friendly, making it a great option for smaller businesses or users who need essential SEO tools without the premium price tag.
Winner: No clear winner
There is no clear winner here, as there’s an alternative solution that’s even more comprehensive than Ahrefs and more budget-friendly. It combines the best features of both tools, making it particularly beneficial for agencies.
A More Innovative Alternative: Search Atlas
Search Atlas is quickly becoming a go-to SEO tool, known for its comprehensive features that cover everything from crawling and technical SEO to backlinks and competitor research. Its robust toolkit allows agencies to dive deep into backlink analysis, uncover competitor strategies, and optimize internal linking.
With regular updates and new features, it’s evolving into the ultimate all-in-one solution for agencies looking to stay ahead in the SEO game.
Search Atlas Features
Search Atlas is unique in the breadth of its scope. It covers every aspect of SEO, including:
- Site Audit Tools: Provides in-depth reports on site health, technical issues, and automated notifications for 24/7 monitoring.
- Local SEO Tools: Offers local heatmaps, citation building, and automated GBP management to enhance local search visibility.
- On-Page Tools: Analyzes site optimization, content, and keyword usage, and compares competitors to provide actionable improvement suggestions.
- Off-Page Tools: Manages link-building efforts with outreach templates, filtering, and press release syndication for stronger authority.
- Reporting: Customizable reports that allow agencies to tailor insights and track client performance with ease.
- Content: Covers content planning, optimization, and AI-assisted creation to improve search rankings and user engagement.
- Automation: Automates SEO tasks, offering instant fixes, one-click publishing, and AI-driven content recommendations for efficiency.
- Competitor Research: Provides backlink analysis, link gap analysis, keyword gap analysis, and Site Explorer to analyze competitors effectively.
Site Crawling
Search Atlas takes a modern approach to technical SEO by using first-party data directly from Google Search Console. Unlike traditional tools relying on estimates, it ensures accuracy with browser emulation and JavaScript-enabled crawling, capturing the web as Google sees it.
Users get reliable, up-to-date insights with no guesswork. Even with major Google changes, Search Atlas users saw zero disruptions, demonstrating its commitment to accuracy and security, keeping agencies and businesses ahead without slowing down.
Technical SEO Tools
The Search Atlas technical SEO suite offers comprehensive tools, including live issue alerts and a powerful site auditor that scans up to a million pages.
With features like internal link visualization, real-time crawl monitoring, and schema creation, optimizing site structure has never been easier.
Our AI assistant allows you to fix these issues directly from the dashboard, automating tedious SEO tasks so you can focus elsewhere.
Domain Power
We measure site authority a bit differently with something called Domain Power (DP), along with a few other reference scores. DP combines organic traffic and ranking keywords to give a reliable picture of a site’s authority.
Unlike traditional metrics that rely on backlinks or external signals, DP uses real-world performance data straight from Google Search Console.
And the best part? It’s consistent with actual SERP rankings.
Backlink Analysis
Search Atlas provides a powerful set of backlink tools like Link Gap Analysis, Backlink Comparison, and Topical Relevance.
These tools make it easy to dig into your backlinks and explore how they relate to your competitors, giving you a clear view of your link profile and market position.
With Link Gap Analysis, you can spot keywords your competitors rank for but you don’t, showing you content gaps to target. Backlink Comparison lets you compare backlink profiles side-by-side, revealing potential link-building opportunities.
Topical Relevance ensures that the backlinks you gain are relevant to your site’s content and audience.
Keyword Tools
Search Atlas offers a solid range of keyword research, tracking, analysis, and clustering tools that can help you refine your content strategy.
The Keyword Magic Tool is especially useful for digging deep into keyword data, allowing you to find the most relevant terms for your content. The tool also lets you organize and track keywords in various clusters, making it easier to prioritize.
You can seamlessly transfer these keywords into the content planner, where you can create your editorial calendar in just a few minutes.
Plus, you get automation and AI writing tools to speed up the process even further.
OTTO SEO
One of the coolest features of Search Atlas is OTTO, the AI-powered SEO agent that automates your SEO tasks with ease. OTTO not only detects issues but can also apply fixes directly, saving you hours of manual work.
It’s designed to handle everything from technical SEO fixes to content optimization, so you don’t have to.
In the near future, OTTO will expand with OTTO Google Ads, a new feature that takes on the management of your PPC campaigns.
This addition will automate the optimization of your ads, helping you save both time and budget while ensuring better performance.
Usability
SEO platforms can be a lot to handle due to the volume of data they provide. To make it easier, Search Atlas offers a guided demo and personalized onboarding, so users can quickly get the hang of all the tools.
We’re also proud to say Gartner has recognized Search Atlas as the top SEO platform for both usability and user satisfaction.
Search Atlas Pricing
Search Atlas offers a broader range of tools at a more affordable price than Ahrefs, and provides more robust PPC features compared to SE Ranking.
| 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 |
Search Atlas: Even More Comprehensive, Even Better Suited for Agencies
Honestly, our platform is so packed with features that they can’t fit into this article—especially the ones we’re still developing! 😀 We currently have over 40 tools, and thanks to automation, they’re easy to manage.
We recommend checking them all out in our features section. Plus, you’ll get onboarding calls, tutorials, and full support during your free trial (and beyond).
If you’re into SEO and AI innovation, try it out with a 7-day free trial. No risk, just potential rewards. Sign up today and explore!
